It seems that for big companies a successful project that was once “shot” becomes both the basis of commercial happiness for many years and a creative curse. Ubisoft is only engaged in various modifications on the theme of “assassins” in a big city with synchronization towers, and for Treyarch and Infinity Ward the words Call of Duty and “computer games” have already become synonyms. Bethesda’s gold mine is the once-found recipe for the Ancient Scrolls, in the image of which Fallout 3 was also made. Nobody was expecting a miracle for the fourth part of the post-apocalyptic saga – the company makes completely different games than Black Isle Studios and Interplay Entertainment.
Once again, we remind you that RPG reviews can (and do!) contain minor spoilers, revealing details of some quests and plot. If you are one of the particularly pensive ones, read at your own risk!
Cryogenic Hibernation
Indeed, the new Fallout is based on familiar TES principles. Nevertheless, New Vegas embodied the same mechanics, but the public received it favorably. So it’s not about isometric perspective or unique author’s handwriting. Fallout is built on a deep atmosphere, pervasive in every game episode the possibility of choice and fascinating non-linear quests. And with all these components Bethesda managed perfectly.
At first, the plot develops rapidly and leaves a feeling of some chamber of what is happening: our character is babysitting a child and chatting with his wife; in a minute a representative of Vault-Tec enters the apartment and happily informs about the successful “registration” of the family in the shelter in case of nuclear war; and in another minute this very war begins: a radioactive mushroom looms on the horizon, and our family together with the whole town evacuates to the shelter, located a hundred meters from the house. Only, as it turns out after a while, the underground shelter turns out to be an experimental laboratory, in which the functionality of the body is studied after a long cryogenic freezing …
But our heroes, not suspecting anything, sit down in comfortable capsules and go into a deep and long sleep, dragging on for more than a hundred years. The slumber is interrupted by an unexpected invasion of mysterious people, after which our character goes into oblivion for some more time, to then get out of the fatal asylum and face the post-apocalyptic world.
The storyline, despite the more than predictable resolution of the main intrigue, succeeded to the best of its ability. Detective investigations, journeys into memories, shocking “revelations” – Bethesda scriptwriters learned a lesson from the third part and created quite an interesting story. However, after the passage there are serious questions to the motivation and meaning of actions of some characters, and a couple of episodes, like the study of the past of a man on the remnants of his brain, gives a naive pseudo-scientific.
But the most interesting thing starts when the traditional for Fallout task of “finding something or someone” (in this case – a child) gradually turns into a global conflict between several factions: “The Institute, the Brotherhood of Steel, the Underground, and the Minutemen. Each of them has its own views on the world order and the future of mankind. We are free to choose which of them to join.
The prodigal father
Our actions have a real effect on dialogs with certain characters. Thus, we can either honestly move up the career ladder of only one of the organizations, or unscrupulously work for each of the factions, or spy, giving, for example, all the information received within the walls of the “Institute”, the “Brotherhood of Steel”. One way or another, you can’t sit on all the chairs: in the end you will have to make a series of difficult moral choices, after which there is only one desire – to go through the game again and find out what unrealized opportunities remained behind the scenes. There is always a choice here, no one tells you which side of the main conflict to take, who to help and what to do. You can even shoot the main story character – the game will not stop, but will carefully update the log of tasks.
The consequences of your actions won’t keep you waiting. Bring a mutant scientist a healing serum – in a few days he will become human. Give a reporter from Diamond City a detailed interview about your life – wait for the publication. Locals discuss the latest events in the world, remember your exploits, sleep in their houses at night and go to work in the morning. The world lives its own life and constantly reacts to the player.
And yet, the behavior of NPCs is not fully described, because of which sometimes there are unfortunate situations that destroy the credibility and realism of what is happening. For example, once my character needed to meet with an agent of the Institute, a faction hated by the Brotherhood of Steel, to get a quest.
However, the agent couldn’t give me the quest, because he was very much engrossed in a firefight with the Brotherhood troopers who had landed at the place of our meeting. No one could win for ten minutes, so I had to destroy a friendly soldier from the Brotherhood of Steel, of which I was a member. The most surprising thing was not even the fact that the fighter did not try to resist me and steadfastly endured the shots to the head until his death, but the fact that the paladin Dans, my accompanying “brother”, a man of duty and honor, ready to give his life for his faction, after my “betrayal” said something like: “Take his stuff. That thing won’t need them anymore.”
These instances aren’t terrible in and of themselves at all, but they spoil the atmosphere. NPCs can endlessly aim at trees while shouting: “Here’s to victory!” Characters crash into each other and overshadow the road, look inexplicably where during dialogs, bump into chairs as insurmountable obstacles. I got rid of the notorious sheepdog after the first walk – I couldn’t look at the disgusting animation. There are more than a dozen candidates for the role of the only companion during the passage.