12 Ways Bethesda Should Have Made Fallout 4

Mar 27, 2018 March 27th, 2018

1. It Needed To Be Built From The Ground Up

Here's the crux of the matter. Whenever any game developer releases something buggy or broken, we jump on it. "This should've been fixed", "I can't believe they released it like this", "This has ruined the game for me", etc.

But Bethesda release a buggy game, and the fallback is "Well, they couldn't make it without these rough edges", "They're trying their best", "For Fallout to be this big and this intricate, it has to be like this."

I'm sorry, but it doesn't - or if it does, maybe the overall experience should be trimmed back until it's manageable. For one, Skyrim held together better, and that was back in 2011, then GTA V showcased a humungous world in 2013, still on the same hardware. Third, The Witcher 3 has just as many interlocking components and elements moving in unison, and its map is 10 square miles bigger.

The idea of placing faith in this nebulous, unknown assumption of what Bethesda can or can't do, reinforces the fact they could make a better game, just as much as the opposite.

It comes to something when you can use Fallout 3's hacking cheats to get through the exact same minigames in the sequel, as for me, that went on to personify Fallout 4 entirely. It felt like 'Fallout 3.5', a mostly cobbled-together execution of cool elements that completely lack cohesion as a whole, not the marked jump across generations that it should have been.

There was nothing here you could sell Fallout 4 on, than Fallout 3 or New Vegas didn't already nail, and that's the real issue.