Why I love Fallout 4

Original essay by Xoren 2017-08-22

I started playing games over 20 years ago, and have many fond memories of classic role-playing games. However, I also fully embrace technological advances in game development. I believe if you look at Fallout 4 from a truly honest non-biased standpoint, it is by far a much more complex and carefully crafted interactive entertainment experience than Fallout 1, 2, 3 or New Vegas, and has much higher replay value than the older games if you accept the fact that this game was created with the intent of making it easy to modify as well as the amazing mods that are now available for it.

The main reason I’m writing this article is that I truly love Fallout 4, and believe it has been unfairly attacked by many fans of the earlier games in the series, in what seems to me a biased point of view which doesn’t consider important facts about each of these games.

I love the technological advances in Fallout 4’s game development, admire the great voice acting and mature story, the crafting system, settlement building, the Pip-boy mobile application live second screen interface, traveling in a verti-bird while shooting a mini-gun, seeing the Institute for the first time, and the great combat in either first or third person perspectives. However, this is just scratching the surface of what Fallout 4 has to offer. With single click installation of modifications on all the major platforms now, Fallout 4 can also be extended indefinitely without any modding knowledge.

After 5 full playthroughs (including all DLC) totaling well over 500 hours, and learning how to create my own Fallout 4 modifications, this game continues to amaze me with new story elements or locations I hadn’t noticed before. Actually, on my steam account I have logged over 2,000 hours of Fallout 4 running on my PC, so the 500 hours is just a low estimate because Steam doesn’t distinguish between playing and modding games. This is with a full-time job completely unrelated to gaming; currently, I write business software.

The amount of entertainment value in Fallout 4 has inspired me to begin a personal journey of learning the craft of modern story driven open world RPG development, as well as writing this article. I have a long way to go and bills to pay, so game development is just a hobby for now. But if you asked me what I would do if I won the lottery, my answer wouldn’t be to go on vacation or buy a new car, I would immediately quit my 9 to 5 office job and go full time into game development. One of the main inspirations for this new and challenging hobby of mine is Fallout 4.

Some longtime fans claim that Fallout 1 and 2 are the best games in the series, but to me unlike the older games, Fallout 4 is more like a true diamond in the rough in some ways, while also being highly polished to near perfection in others. Fallout 4 is truly what you make of it. It’s a game that requires an open and creative mind to fully enjoy. The best part about Fallout 4 is that, even without modifications, it allows you to express your creativity with practically no limitations thanks to its great crafting and settlement building systems. The main factors that limit Fallout 4 are your own imagination, resourcefulness, and modding skills (which are only needed if you want maximum control of the game). Keeping in mind that it’s relatively easy for you to customize your Fallout 4 experience in almost any way you can image with just a few mouse clicks (or button presses) now, or if you are more advanced with the free Creation Kit provided by Bethesda you can just create your own modifications to fully customize your Fallout 4 experience.

For all of these reasons, I personally rank Fallout 4 as tied in first place with The Witcher 3 as the best mature RPGs ever created in the entire history of gaming. This conclusion does require that I judge Fallout 4 and The Witcher 3 for the sum of their parts in their current brilliantly polished state on August 2017.

As a game consumer with over 100 games in my Steam account, and hundreds of games across all the major consoles from the Atari 2600 to the PS4 and Xbox One, Fallout 4 is the number one game in my collection in terms of replay value, with the highest value of gameplay hours per US dollar.

If you believe that Fallout 1, 2 or any of the other games in the series are better than Fallout 4, I totally respect that. But if you love RPGs in general and you haven’t played Fallout 4 yet, I honestly believe you’re missing out on a masterpiece. Placing Fallout 4 in the masterpiece category is a conclusion I came to after replaying both The Witcher 3 and Fallout 4 with all DLC again recently. Fallout 4 can definitely be improved upon, but if you are open to modding it can become perfectly suited to your desired play style with a little effort. Bethesda gave us a fully interactive playground and the tools for us to make it our own. I’ll never forget the feeling of experiencing the Fallout 4 world through the eyes of my distinct and fascinating sole survivor primary game characters across multiple playthroughs.