Oh what is this some Shepton? Dropping some classic biting English observational criticism and witticism?!

Nah I’m just gonna shit on Fallout 4 for a while. Don’t like spoilers? Hit backspace and peace the fuck out. Also, I took the time to include a shitton of screenshots here and some of them actually look decent so I even went so far as to make them all clickable in full size, if you wanna enlarge any of them for a better look or anything. I played on PC and everything and they’re on ultra settings in 1080p too, so if you want to see how the game looks on PC at max, without mods and stuff, since a lotta people only ever play on console and that’s even WORSE looking. Just figured I’d give you the heads up there because I took the time, you know.

Alright let’s just get the obvious shit outta the way: Yes I’m real damn sorry I ain’t written a damn thing in over a year. I haven’t had the time or the energy, but you can believe me when I say that I do at least always have the intention to write and contribute. But when a dude works a 9-5 and is married he has obligations to attend to and frankly during the reduced free time that leaves me, I usually only have the patience and energy to binge watch Game Grumps and then let the guilt and shame of wasting all my free time wash over me the following day. It’s a bitter cycle of stupidly wasting precious time followed by self-hatred and then further analysis.

Anyway a lot of the time the games I play tend to be the mainstream crap, if only to keep up with the Joneses, and then Renegade always beats and reviews them before I do and I always feel like repeating basically the same feedback would be redundant, and he does it better besides. But fuck you because I pay for the hosting and the domain name so this site wouldn’t exist without my passive and lazy as fuck contribution.

So I’m gonna go ahead and do the thing that I JUST SAID I wouldn’t do, and that is write about Fallout 4 despite the fact that Renegade already did. And his review is great and gets across all the important points. If you’re looking for a review, check it out. But if you’re looking for a relentlessly crushing verbal tear-down of an awful piece of garbage, or you’re a fanboy and you can’t help but take my delicious troll bait because apparently you want to experience negative emotions, come on down to Shepton’s Shitty Videogame Emporium.

See, Renegade is smart – he only played the game for as long as he had to. Well, much longer than he had to, really, because five minutes is more than enough time to deduce exactly what everybody should have expected: Fallout 4 is just Fallout 3. I already played Fallout 3 more than enough and never need to play it again. But apparently I was in phase one of my shame cycle: stupidly wasting precious time. A HUNDRED AND FIFTY FUCKING HOURS OF IT.

That’s why I’m taking the time to write about this regardless of Renegade’s review – because I invested so much of my one and only god damn life on this piece of shit that the least I can do is get something creative out of it, and if even one person reads it and loves it, or reads it and hates it, then I’ve done a thing and that time was not entirely cast into the ether for naught. But I really digress. That was a lot of exposition into what this post is, so hopefully the payoff will be worth it. Here goes!

As I already touched on, my first and strongest impression of Fallout 4 was that it was just a copy/paste of Fallout 3, without even minimal changes or improvements. I came to this impression early on, merely by seeing trailers and promotional material, and then the impression was confirmed and cemented very quickly after purchasing and playing the game. You’re probably baffled that I’m surprised about a sequel being similar to its predecessor – but I want to be clear that I wasn’t surprised in the slightest. I mean, it isn’t rocket science to expect a game to be similar to its predecessor. That’s just… duh. But what I’m trying to express is how Fallout 4 is exactly what I expected to the T. I came in fully expecting NO effort on Bethesda’s part and for the game to be an exact clone of Fallout 3 in terms of how it looks, plays, feels, and how the quests feel both mechanically and in terms of player engagement with the characters and story.

The things I listed above are all areas where Bethesda received huge amounts of criticism for Fallout 3. People hated that it was a lifeless, brown, flat color scheme with excessive repetition of assets and models and structures and terrain, and yet they didn’t improve that for Fallout 4. All they’ve done is turned up the green filter, so now it’s excessively brown and on occasion excessively green. So, the game’s aesthetic? No effort was spent on any improvements there.

Onto that most tangible yet ambiguous of subjects – how the game feels to play. Well, it’s the same fucking basic-ass Bethesda engine, so it feels exactly the same as Fallout 3 and every Elder Scrolls game. You are a clunky, weightless, disembodied camera floating in a big, ugly texture wrapped around a low-poly world. You look at things and press a button and the thing simply disappears and you have it now. I just described almost 100% of Fallout 4 to you in that sentence. I spent a hundred and fifty hours doing exactly that, so yes I can say that with extreme confidence. So, that’s another thing Bethesda failed to improve from their previous installment.

Moving onto things like quests, and plot, and characters. I’m gonna be on this general subject for a while as it’s fairly broad and encompasses a ton of stuff that I want to talk about. Now, here is Fallout 4’s biggest and most glaring flaw. Fallout is a series known for exceptional dialogue, breadth of choice and a depth of plot that can change dramatically based on those choices.

Oh.

Yeah, Bethesda fucked up. They pure, straight FUCKED this up to an INEXCUSABLE degree. First and most obviously, the dialogue choices for the player character are incredibly weak and limited in scope. 95% of the time your choices come down to: Yes, No, Maybe, Be A Dick. The remaining 5%, all four dialogue choices end up resulting in practically the same thing anyway. I guess the Be A Dick option is a fine choice if you’re roleplaying as an asshole, but I have to assume most people tend toward a general path of politeness and empathy in these games if only because that tends to result in better rewards. But where this simplified choice system fails the hardest is in quests. Fallout is known and loved for having hilarious, scary, meaningful and unforgettable endings to its quests, most quests having all varieties of different outcomes depending on however you chose to complete them. For example, if your character is incredibly stupid but highly agile, he might not be able to hack a computer to disarm a series of traps, but may be able instead to avoid said traps with his agility. That’s just a super basic, fundamental example (but it leads me onto another point I need to discuss, and that’s character builds and stats and why they suck so bad in this game compared to previous installments in the series – we’ll circle back to that in a bit).

Even when the choices appear on the surface to be a little more varied, the reality is that every choice results in the same thing. A prime example can be viewed here, where a mod is installed to display the actual transcript of the dialogue as opposed to the Yes/No/Maybe wheel. This is very common throughout the game, and is lazy as all shit. This was obviously done to save time in writing multiple lines of dialogue and multiple endings to quests. And that’s understandable – there are shitloads of quests in an enormous area, with hundreds of voiced characters. Of course nobody is going to spend the ludicrous amounts of money it would take to pay people to voice every line and write multiple varied endings to ALL of these quests. That’s absurd. But what I’m saying here is that it would have been drastically better to have put less effort and time into voicing every line of dialogue and instead investing the time into fewer, deeper quests, with longer and more involved stories. Yes, there would be far fewer quests, but each quest would have been significantly more rewarding, memorable and important. Fallout 3 was somewhat better in this regard because the main character didn’t have a voice, so all the choices were detailed and listed in plain text – full, descriptive sentences which included obvious tones and intentions. It also meant there could be, and often were, far more than 4 ways to respond to things. So this is an area where Bethesda actively made this game WORSE than Fallout 3. But it continues, because I’m not done talking about this aspect of things yet.

I mentioned the stat system earlier, and this is something that Renegade covered in his review in good detail so I won’t spend a lot of time on it, but it’s taken a huge turn for the worse here. In all previous Fallout games, you create your character and have a limited amount of points to put into your basic stats – that’s RPG 101 stuff. Strength, Agility, Charisma, Intelligence… you get the idea. In Fallout, you only have a set amount of points, so you can’t just max everything out and be good at all of it. You have to choose – is your character smart, but lacking in social skills? Is he strong and agile, but stupid? Or is he silver-tongued and capable of talking his way out of any situation, but too slow to avoid things like traps, or jump from ledge to ledge? It’s fucking ROLEPLAYING. I shouldn’t have to explain it. I’ve already wasted too much of your time here. Thing is, Fallout 4 imposes no such limits. You can just max out any and all stats as you level up. So, after a while, your character is going to have few to no weaknesses and only strengths. That, coupled with the fact that s/he now has their own voice and only vague options displayed to the player when selecting dialogue so you don’t actually know the tone or even the full extent of what the character is going to express, means that the roleplaying element is entirely gone. If you want to roleplay, your only option is to essentially choose not to level up your character. So we have a distinct lack of roleplaying in an RPG, and a gutting of what was the closest thing to a saving grace that Fallout 3 had.

Ugh but god it keeps going. Let’s talk in more detail about the quests themselves, and the actual content therein. Most people are already going to be familiar with the majority of the quests because they’ve sunk further into the typical MMORPG type of questing – specifically, almost every single quest will require you to travel to a place and kill the enemies there. Maybe they’ll mix it up occasionally, and you’ll have to kill the enemies and loot something out of a box there and take it back to somebody. But given that this is a game that encourages you to actively loot every box and cabinet and crate and trash can and corpse, you would have done that anyway, regardless of what the objectives were. Rarely, you will find quests with a little something more to them in terms of a story, but the meat of them is largely going to be the exact same. For example, I stumbled across a location in the game called the Museum of Witchcraft. It was all boarded up with no obvious way in. So you circle the building and find an entrance to the basement. Upon entering, you hear creepy noises and something large is moving around on the floor above you. Wow, an attempt at atmosphere?! In FALLOUT 4?! Unprecedented! I actually really liked it, despite the fact that it was obviously going to be a Deathclaw, because those are the only large and intimidating enemy in the entire game. You make your way upstairs and, yes, it’s a Deathclaw. Alright, my logic and reasoning skills are functioning as expected. That’s reassuring and I guess Alzheimer’s hasn’t found me yet. So, you kill the Deathclaw. That was kinda neat I guess! No other building in this game had scripted spooky noises and a Deathclaw in it! And then you realize just how low your expectations must truly be if a few noises were all it took to make an area appear interesting in comparison to all the other lifeless, empty BULLSHIT that permeates the entire rest of the game. Yeah, that location results in a very simple quest – you find a note on a corpse that says they stole a Deathclaw egg and that’s why the Deathclaw was in there. You can take the egg and put it back to a Deathclaw nest, or take it to a guy. Either way, nothing of import happens. You get a small amount of currency for selling the egg, or the warm and fuzzy feeling that you saved the life of an animal. There’s no fanfare or dialogue or anything. You just press A on the nest and the egg appears in it. A Deathclaw shows up and doesn’t want to kill you. But it’s not like that means shit all. You’re just gonna leave the area and never come back, because there’s nothing there.

Now, does that seem like a big deal? At all? I mean, of the hundreds of quests in this game, that’s one of the only ones that actually remained in my memory because it had some scripted noises. All the other quests are essentially the same, except without an egg, and you just show up at a place and kill things. Sure, there are a very small few that have a little more depth, but just not many. Even the main quest line and the faction quests seem shockingly simple and straightforward. Again, it’s almost all just going to a location and killing everything there. The best things tend to be the handful of companion quests, that you can access by traveling with a specific companion until they like you enough to confide in you about their problems, and then you can help them do something. Like the private detective character wants to solve a 200 year old case to track down a crime lord, so you have to travel to all the police stations across the wasteland to find clues to his whereabouts. Of course, I’m making that sound better than it actually is. The game points you directly to each clue, so there is no satisfaction in solving an actual mystery or anything, and then the end result is that the dude was just sat sealed in a tiny room, immortal for 200 years, alone, and somehow with enough resources to survive and not go batshit insane from the solitude and cramped living space, and you show up and kill him. And his room wasn’t even fucking HIDDEN, it was in a place that was heavily populated by dozens and dozens of raiders and wasn’t like a super bunker or anything, it was just regular brick walls. I find it impossible to believe that a) he never thought to leave and b) nobody else saw the huge security door and thought “Hey, something good might be in here, I’ma blow up the wall and get in.”

Okay, now onto the story and plot and character! And oh god, the factions! Yeah, I still haven’t even gotten to those elements yet! We have SO MUCH more to discuss! Are you excited that we’re catching up after so long apart? I am. I could just talk to you forever.

Right off the bat I was at odds with the game due to Bethesda’s decision to give the character a family and obligations, and a dedicated and personal plot. Spoilers for the first five minutes of the game: You are a recently married person who has just had a child with your spouse and have settled into a new home. War were declared. The three of you make it safely to Vault 111 where you’re immediately cryogenically frozen. You wake up an indeterminate amount of time later to witness someone shoot your wife and kidnap your infant son, only to be frozen again for another indeterminate amount of time. My first thought was: FUCK YOU, I HAD NO INTENTIONS OF ROLEPLAYING AS A FATHER. This is not a choice I would ever make in any circumstance. And now my character has all these motives forced on them – my personal interests as a player of this post-nuclear apocalyptic roleplaying game are to a) explore and see what’s up and b) whatever the fuck I feel like at a time and in a situation. I don’t need plot points forced on me like that. It made me feel at odds with the protagonist at all times. Prime example, my thought process a short while into the game:

“Relatively speaking, it’s only been three days since my character watched his wife get shot in the head and- Hey cool, is that a bed Piper and I can fuck in?”

That type of stuff is fine in anything but an RPG. If you want to tell a particular story and give the main character a substantial and personal motive, that’s cool, but don’t crowbar it into a series that’s historically pretty much explicitly the opposite of that and then still act like your game is the same old open-ended choice-based, player-driven RPG as before. You can’t eat your cake and then still have your cake. That’s not how anything works. And these particular criticisms may seem weak and petty, because for the average player maybe there’s still just enough roleplaying that it doesn’t matter, but to a fan of the genre or the series I think the criticism has merit. I’m certain there are ways they could have done it better while still maintaining the gist of it, if they’d put some time and effort in. And you might point out that this isn’t that different to Fallout 1 and having to find the water chip. But the difference there is that’s just a reason for you to leave the vault. And it’s a super simple reason. You can do whatever you LIKE when you get out there. It’s not the same in Fallout 4, where almost every quest comes back to your spouse and kid, and your character’s emotions.

Oh, and my second thought during that first five minutes? “Man, that fucking baby I didn’t want and have no interest in saving but will have to spend this game searching for is either gonna be an adult or dead by the time I find him.” And sure enough, he’s an adult. And in some weird shit that the Greeks probably did first, he’s named Father and he looks exactly like you. So yeah, the main quest plot was heavy-handed, predictable, often times felt forced (be it due to varying degrees of triteness, or feeling as though it was forced on you as a player) and in general just felt weak to me. And I touched briefly on the companion plot lines earlier, too, but that was mostly to criticise the poor quest mechanics. Now I’m gonna criticise the poor companion quest plot lines! Nick Valentine? Cool companion, cool character, interesting backstory, TERRIBLE QUEST. Piper? BEST companion, Waifu of the Year 2015, NO QUEST AT ALL. Everybody else? Not worth talking about. Their quests are either “Go to location, kill some guys” or they don’t have a quest at all. But I guess I have to give Bethesda credit for Piper, and to a lesser extent for Nick, the only two cool characters in the game. They have good stories, good voice acting, decent lines… it was enough to make me actually care about them while I played. But there are tons of companions, and given that they’re all a time sink and only two of them are worth a damn they feel like an almost pointless addition to the game and they don’t add much. Oh, and as much as I liked Piper, I don’t understand the romance aspect of the companion system. When you choose to romance someone, all that happens is that they get a couple extra lines of dialogue if you press them and ask how they feel your relationship is. You have to be like, “Yo, we cool?” and then instead of being all like “Yeah man,” they’re all “We are SO fucking cool, man. Your dick is, like, ENORMOUS.” That’s the only difference romancing a character makes. Oh, but it does mean if you sleep in a bed, you’ll get a temporary experience bonus. But considering that this game also shits experience on you and is already too easy, that’s not required.

Alright, I think I’ve bitched enough about the companions and the main character’s story, so now it’s time to bitch about the factions and how a) they’re all awful and b) their individual plot arcs and ideologies compound on the already poor plot and turn the story into a complete chore. Let’s begin with the Brotherhood of Steel. You’ll remember them from previous Fallout games, except before they were brutal, morally questionable authoritarians, and in Fallout 4 they’re just straight up fascists who want everybody else to either be dead under the heels of their jackboots or kneeling in servitude to them. Their ideology is one of intolerance and arrogance, and was difficult for me to find any common ground with. I mean, I’m fine with the idea of eliminating your enemies if your enemies are limited to mindless zombies or a cruel and heartless oppressive regime, but when you’re the heartless oppressive regime and your enemies are anybody who would sorta just rather not be oppressed today thank you, I have a little trouble getting on board. Their quest line also requires you to make enemies of every other faction, so if you have any interest in the other factions, they’re not a good choice.

Next we have the Minutemen. They’re the good guys, for all intents and purposes. They’re about as morally good as factions in this game get, I suppose. Essentially at the start of the game there’s only one Minuteman left, because the rest of them turned traitor and killed everybody but him. So he immediately makes you the new general in charge of the Minutemen, and demands that you go out and help every ragtag settlement in the wasteland and recruit them to join the Minutemen. This is actually a never-ending quest series and is mind-numbingly boring and a source of endless frustration. At one point, he had me go help a particular settlement where someone had been kidnapped. So I rescued the person, went back to tell Preston, and he immediately informed me that another settlement needed my help, only to give me the EXACT SAME KIDNAPPING QUEST, AT THE EXACT SAME SETTLEMENT. In the TWELVE SECONDS that passed between me returning her safely to her home and telling Preston that she was safe now, she got kidnapped again. Now I know how Mario feels. That princess can STAY in another fucking castle. Also one time I showed up at a different settlement to help with a kidnapping, and the guy runs up to me and says “You have to help me! They kidnapped my friend!” and then raiders wandered by and triggered combat so the conversation broke off. And then after they were dead, he looked at me and said “Please help! They kidnapped my wife.” Damn dude, you upgraded that relationship pretty fast. Does she know about it? I mean just a second ago she was your friend, and now she’s your wife? She’s not even HERE, dog. You’re sounding kinda like a creeper to me. Anyway, so yeah, the Minutemen have little to no presence in the game, all told. Preston simply acts as an annoying source of boring grinds that achieve nothing of any value.

So that’s the future Minutemen. Who’s next? I guess the future Underground Railroad, who are named The Railroad and are all about freeing the slaves. Yeah, Fallout 4 ain’t subtle with its parallels. Where to start with these bleeding heart assholes? Jesus christ, their cause is good but their methods and extreme blind dedication to their ideology without any margins or grey areas makes them just insufferable. Backstory time: in Fallout 4, there are robots called synths, which look exactly like humans and were designed by a group called The Institute. Nobody knows why, but there are robots that infiltrate the wasteland disguised as humans and often do bad things, like replacing real people with robot clones and shit like that. It’s fucked up, but some synths develop free will and the Railroad wants to free them and give them their own lives. That’s cool, and a good cause, and anyone with free will and sentience deserves that freedom to do with as they see fit. The problem with the Railroad is that they’re basically PETA, and would happily murder a thousand innocent humans to save the life of one synth and don’t see an ethical or moral issue with that. But relatively speaking, they’re still on moral high ground compared to the Brotherhood.

Last and DEFINITELY least (yeah, even worse than PETA and Nazis in walking tank armor) is the Institute. Ugh, these fucking pieces of shit. Now, the Institute are responsible for the murder of your character’s spouse and kidnapping of your son, but as I already explained, that don’t mean shit because I didn’t choose to have a wife and son in the first place and felt no attachment to them. I just wanted to explain that kidnapping and murder are definitely in the Institute’s list of things it’s totally okay to do, to give you an immediate sense of their overall perspective. As if those fundamentally evil acts weren’t already enough to make you loathe this faction, there’s also that thing I just mentioned, about how they create synths who go out into the world and murder people and replace them, living their life in their place, lying to their families, spying for the Institute, and generally killing everyone when they’re done with their mission. And we’re not talking super clandestine military infiltrations and spying or whatever. No, the Institute murdered a husband and father who runs a farm and replaced him with a synth clone in order to keep tabs on how well some genetically modified crops grow, with the intention of decommissioning the synth and killing the entire family once they had the results. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of basic evil shit the Institute do. So we’ve established they’re evil, but did I mention they’re dumb as fuck, and more vague than a stereotypical teenage girl’s attention whoring facebook posts of sad songs from Vevo youtube channels? For some reason, the Institute insists that it’s the only viable future for mankind, because they’re replacing mankind with robots. What? I’m sorry, could you elaborate a little more please? I’m really not following.

That’s enough to get my point across, I hope. All of the factions blow fat dicks for days, if it wasn’t clear.

As an offshoot of my rant on the Institute in particular, I did want to revisit that thing about the synth replica people. It comes up a ton throughout the story, and there are a handful of characters in the game who are synth impostor clones. Generally there are notes explaining their true nature, or quests that reveal it and such. Now, my first thought early on playing the game when learning about the synths and the threat the Institute poses was “Oh cool, is there gonna be a constant sub-plot where certain characters turn out to be sinister robot clones and I have to do some detective shit to find out who, and hunt them down and root them out? That’s actually kinda sweet!” But fucking NO OF COURSE NOT. What is this, NOT a game made by Bethesda? Why would anything cool EVER happen?! Yes, a bunch of characters are either openly synths, or secretly synths, but it’s never a surprise, and the closest thing to one being remotely important is Paladin Danse, a Brotherhood member and possible companion to the main character. When you visit the Institute you can find out he’s a synth, and then choose to kill him for the Brotherhood (even though he’s not evil and he himself didn’t even know he was a synth) or keep him alive and go against the Brotherhood’s wishes in the process. But I digress yet again. Kinda can’t help it, I’ve got a LOT of shit to sling at this game and the garbage company who made it, and it can be difficult to keep my laser-like focus at times. Anyway, I was hoping for a big through-line in the game where I could take it upon myself to make the wasteland safer by tracking down and eliminating those who were malicious synth spies, but it’s not possible. That one I mentioned earlier, the husband and father who runs a farm and was replaced by a synth? You might think with all the exposition the game gives you about him, and how sinister his purposes are, you’d have the choice to confront him and reveal the truth to the family whose patriarch he killed and replaced, but no. Instead, you have to either side with him when someone else confronts him, or simply be an asshole who intentionally fails to discourage the person in severe mental distress from attacking him. I’m sorry, this game is called Fallout? What the FUCK kind of quest is this shit for a Fallout game?! Choices? Options? What the FUCK. Was THAT. SHIT? I wasn’t about to let a family continue living with the Pod Person who murdered their husband and father, but I wasn’t about to let someone else kill him in front of them while they still believed him to be the real Roger, which would have made them think of the GUY WHO WAS TOTALLY FUCKING CORRECT as a murderer, and me as the asshole who didn’t stop him. So I talked the (totally correct and sane) accuser down from attacking the synth. The synth was saved, the family was content, blissful in their ignorance. And then when everybody was sleeping I slit the synth’s throat in his sleep. His body still remains in his bed and his family act like nothing happened and thank me for saving him any time they see me. I guess that’s the best I can hope for in this game.

Look, I’ve been spitting fire for so long that only bitter ashes are left in my mouth to the point where I can’t even taste the salt anymore. It’s time to end this. Have you been keeping score? Don’t worry, I have, and it is not looking good for Bethesda:

Aesthetics: Bethesda failed to improve on Fallout 3’s aesthetic weaknesses. Given the time they’ve had to build some real improvements into the engine, this doesn’t really feel excusable. (Reminder: This isn’t an argument about improving the GRAPHICS. It’s about aesthetic and artistic quality. Fallout 3 looked like ass because of the bland color palette and excessive overuse of the same assets and models and animations, all of which Fallout 4 repeats with even more excess.)
Game feel: Bethesda chose to reuse the same dated, limited engine as their other games, making no worthwhile or tangible improvements. As with the aesthetics, this is inexcusable. They had time to make this better. They chose not to.
Content: Distinctly lower quality writing, less depth of quests, quests tend towards excessive repetition, there are a number of infinitely repeating quests that serve no purpose except as a time sink, and roleplaying elements have been dumbed down significantly or removed entirely. This is a massive and sad step down from previous installments in so, so many ways.
Plot: Lack of meaningful endings, faction questlines are too limited and their goals and ideologies too contradictory and inflexible, lack of good characters.

So in all areas, Bethesda either copy/pasted Fallout 3, or just plain made things worse. With the time they’ve had since their previous projects, I feel as though Bethesda could have invested it much better than they did. They could have created a world with more interesting locales and characters. They could have created some quests that actually have some depth and an arc other than “go to a place and kill a bunch of dudes.” Instead they spent that time creating a really basic Fallout Sims expansion where you can place items around an area and call it a settlement. I mean, that’s the only real difference between this and Fallout 3. You can now place objects in areas. It achieves absolutely nothing and is yet another way to waste your time. But I can’t blame them for being lazy and cheap. I really can’t. I’m gonna hate the system, not the person who abuses it. They did this because they knew they could cheap out, half-ass it, and still sell a million zillion copies and undoubtedly a ton of DLC later too. Because people are dumb and eat this shit up.

I dunno. I don’t get it. I invested so much time into this, hating it from the start, and it’s baffling, really. There is definitely a paradoxical addictive quality to Bethesda games. I know I loathe them – the simplicity, the fact that I played Oblivion so long ago (my first experience with Bethesda) and yet every Bethesda game since has been the exact same thing. And yet, when I play them… it’s like I have to do everything. I have to go through the whole thing, and take care of every loose end, and wrap things up with a little bow. You give me a rotten, broken world like this and I have to set every little thing right. And I’d come home from work and have a free evening and get on Fallout to check more bullshit quests off the list and wrap up more annoying little things in little bows so I could get one tiny step closer to the catharsis of finally uninstalling it and getting some much needed hard drive space back.

I think… this is it. I’m free now. I just have to take a couple extra screenshots for this… article(?) and then I can go and live my life again. I solemnly vow to never play another Bethesda game again. I hope I remember that vow and stick to it. I think to make myself feel better, I’m going to play a game that actually does this world justice. I’m gonna go play Fallout 1.