Fallout 4
Bethesda is riding high off the success of Amazon Prime’s Fallout TV show, which has blown up interest in the last four Fallout games, Fallout 3, 4, New Vegas and 76, increasing sales and playercounts massively.
It is great timing that Fallout 4 just got a “next-gen” update after many years, except that…it is very much not going well, and for some it’s doing more harm than good to the game, and reinforcing Bethesda’s “buggy” reputation. What’s going on?
- PlayStation players who got the game through PlayStation Plus Extra were not able to upgrade to the next-gen version, confusing many. Bethesda has now chimed in that it will indeed be available without explaining what happened, but hopefully at least that aspect will be cleared up soon.
- On PC, there is concern that this really did not do all that much and actually broke a lot of things. The number of bugs fixed is not all that many for an update supposedly this big. The update has broken a number of longtime Fallout 4 mods many players have been running for years and thrown future mod projects into chaos. And while there is now ultrawide support for the game, it stretches out the UI with no FOV slider to be able to fix that. The game is also still locked at 60 fps on PC and cannot go higher.
- Steam deck users have had their settings wiped out by the update in addition to the above PC issues.
- Quality mode for the game is broken on Xbox Series X/S, according to reports. Disabling performance mode doesn’t do anything, as the game stays at 60 fps and the resolution remains the same. This does not appear to be happening on PlayStation.
This does seem to be going at least somewhat better on console than PC, which I suppose was the main focus of the “next-gen” update, given the next-gen consoles we’re talking about. But it’s not a great start and many players excited to play an upgraded version of the game have been left disappointed. Perhaps this will all be fixed in time, but it shouldn’t have rolled out with all these issues, that’s for sure. I thought Bethesda was getting a bit better with this stuff (I legitimately did not have a single serious bug in my first Starfield playthrough) but this needed some more time and care.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
