Said games are mostly about how the world picks itself back up after the bombs. The events of the other post-apocalyptic entries - New Vegas and the like - fly past while you’re in cryogenic stasis. If you never played the game (or watched Monster Factory) the intro is this: Your custom character gets locked in a freezer for 200 years while an alternate history North America gets nuked. It’s genuinely jarring - like playing through as a ghost NPCs can see and here, but who isn’t really there. The problem is, having seen that journey to its conclusion, I can finally report the game doesn’t actually give a glowing shit about its own premise. That’s especially true in Fallout 4 - a game that ironically tried to put more emphasis on the player character and their journey through a post-Boston wasteland. The most essential stories feel anything but.

They remember nuking Megaton and turning into a werewolf while sculpting lovers out of cheese wheels. They remember joining the Dark Brotherhood or the Thieves Guild. At least as far back as Oblivion and Skyrim, people don’t talk about their central plots. That’s where the meat of these games resides anyway. Just a little slurpy loot goblin licking cakes off ancient tomb walls while scavenging bullets. I prefer to pick a direction and explore, eating any floor trash I find along the way. Like most people I almost never bother beating Bethesda games. It’s only the second Bethesda Game Studios title I’ve ever “finished,” the other coincidentally being Fallout 3 back in 2008. Specifically I finished Fallout 4 - the studio’s last single-player stab at the sci-fi series from 2015. I beat the main story quest in a Bethesda game.

Fallout 4 journey mod