15 Crazy Mistakes You Never Noticed In Fallout 4
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From canon-killing retcons to faulty game mechanics, here are the worst, and most insane, mistakes found in Fallout 4.
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Fallout 4 is a polarizing title—and that’s putting it lightly. On one hand, Bethesda’s post-apocalyptic action RPG has been praised by critics from some of the web’s biggest gaming sites for pushing the series into new exploration-driven territory. On the other, it has come under fire from longtime fans for straying too far from its classic role-playing game roots.
Once upon a time, the Fallout series was owned by Baldur’s Gate publisher Interplay, and, rather than the full 3D graphics it boasts today, America’s favorite post-nuclear simulation took the form of an isometric, top-down role-playing game bursting with dark humor, sinister charm, and so much lore that you could lose a weekend just reading up on Vault-Tec’s many malicious experiments. When Bethesda bought the rights to the Fallout IP in 2004 following the bankruptcy of Black Isle Studio, fans were eager to see what the Elder Scrolls publisher had in store for the retro-futuristic series. Fans expected an epic adventure full of snarky characters, memorable environments, and tough moral choices. What they got was Fallout 3, a game about finding your deadbeat dad and fixing a glorified Brita Filter—and they weren’t impressed. When Fallout 4 went on to echo the same theme of reuniting a broken family, many long-time players powered down their Pip-Boys for good.
But no matter what side of the fence you’re on, it’s safe to assume you’ve funneled countless hours of time and energy into the Sole Survivor’s quest for vengeance. It’s also safe to say you’ve likely stumbled onto quite a few glitches, bugs, and lore breaks on the long, dusty roads of The Commonwealth. From canon-killing retcons to game mechanics that splatter immersion like a radroach at the business end of a super sledge, here are 15 crazy mistakes you never noticed in Fallout 4.
For shame, Bethesda. For shame…
15 Companions = Infinite Inventory
Virtually all Bethesda games have three things in common: 1) a rich world bursting with vibrant areas to explore and exciting loot to collect, 2) hundreds of hours’ worth of side quests, and 3) a few hours of playtime before a game-breaking bug puts your journey on pause until patch 1.0.0.15. But not all bugs are rage-quit-inducing. In Fallout 4, for example, there’s an infamous exploit that can be triggered when a human companion’s inventory is full. Instead of trading with them, you can drop the item you’re trying to unload and instruct your companion to pick it up, and voila! They’ll add it to their inventory even though it surpasses their carry capacity. It’s a cheap way to load up on gear and avoid hauling 99 rolls of duct tape back to Red Rocket on foot.
14 A Lot Can Change In 200 Years
Fallout 4 is said to take place 210 years after a massive war ravaged the civilized world, plunging it into nuclear winter—and, yet, dilapidated houses are still littered with the skeletons of their former occupants. Rotting fish still line conveyor belts, eyes peering out into the emptiness between dented rebars and charred planks. And, most irritating of all, nobody has figured out how to fix a dang car. You can scrap together a teleportation machine out of chewing gum and a coffee mug, but you can’t wire a fusion core into an atomic powered convertible? C’mon.
My point is: two centuries should be enough time to start the States back on track to a somewhat functional society. What gives, Bethesda? For a game with so much personality, it’s a shame that Fallout 4 can’t accurately depict the passage of time.
13 Pre-War Safe, Post-War Loot
Speaking of problems with its timeline, Fallout 4 plays fast and loose with plausibility straight from the get-go. At numerous points throughout the game, you can snag post-war equipment, items, and more from safes and other containers presumably locked before the events that caused the apocalypse. For instance, at one point in his or her adventures, the Sole Survivor discovers a downed Skylanes airliner, Flight 1981, which crashed on the morning of the Great War—that is, 210 years ago. Sure, raiders have picked most of the passengers’ luggage clean. But, for whatever reason, they’ve ignored a safe underneath the cockpit… a pre-war safe that just happens to be loaded with post-war chems, ammunition, and weapons. While one might argue that raiders or scavengers could be using this “secret compartment” as their own personal stash, the fact that it’s hidden behind a master-level lock suggests otherwise. Overall, it’s a pretty massive immersion-breaking issue.
12 The Origins Of Jet
In case you haven’t noticed, lore is kind of a big deal to Fallout fans. Head on over to any internet message board dedicated to the series and you’ll find countless threads filled with post-apocalyptic historians debating the most minute inconsistencies. Today’s topic of discussion? The origin of jet, a beloved—and highly addictive—chem. Well, According to Fallout lore, jet was originally created by a specific character from Fallout 2—Myron, the Mordino Family drug prodigy—who extracted it from Brahmin dung (stay classy, dude). However, according to a pre-war log found on a terminal in Vault-Tec Regional HQ, Fallout 4’s Vault 95 contains a massive amount of the stuff. As with most lore inconsistencies, the discovery of the jet problem led to many a fan theory. The most plausible? Bethesda screwed up—or they intentionally retconned the item’s origin. Either way, players were pissed!
11 Tall Tales
Developing a video game is a collaborative process, which makes it hard to point the finger at any specific department when something goes wrong. Alas, this one’s a pretty obvious screw-up on the part of Fallout 4’s writers: During a quest called “Short Stories,” your character is asked to tell a story to a classroom full of children in one of the game’s vaults (Vault 81, to be exact). One of your options is to talk about the time you saved a certain character—one Preston Garvey—from a deathclaw, one of the wasteland’s most notorious nasties.
The thing is, while the game seems to encourage you to lend him a hand right out of the gate, it’s entirely possible to avoid Preston for your entire play-through. And if you just so happen to meet up with Katy and her students before fighting off the baddies with Preston, well… you can still tell them a story that never happened. And before the conspiracy theories start flying: Yes—this was a mistake. No—it’s not confirmation that The Institute replaced your character with a Synth and implanted them with false memories.
Speaking of The Institute…
10 The Not-So-Impenetrable Institute
The Institute, a super-advanced, top-secret scientific think-tank, is Fallout 4’s archetypal “Boogeyman.” Feared by the ever-paranoid residents of The Commonwealth, these sinister scientists and their army of androids are regularly accused of kidnapping residents and replacing them with synthetic doubles—”synths.” Their motives? Not for you to know. Their location? Veiled in mystery. Unless, you know, you happen to dig—or nuke—a hole through the C.I.T. Ruins and find your way into their lobby. Yup—the “Commonwealth Institute of Technology,” based on the real-world Massachusetts Institute of Technology, even has the shady organization’s name in its title… I mean, any scavenger with enough firepower could wander right in. Reeeal secret, guys. Good job. Whoever thought that hiding the league of shady sci-fi super-villains underneath the ruins of a location literally known for its relationship to technology and the advancement of knowledge has really got to go back to the M. Night Shyamalan School of Twists.
9 The Not-So-Deadly Disease
While we’re on the topic of The Institute, let’s talk about Shaun. A.K.A. Father. A.K.A. Your son. A.K.A. The leader of The Institute. Confused? So is The Institute, apparently—at least when it comes to, oh, you know, keeping the head of their organization alive. In Fallout 4, you spend a great deal of time looking for your kidnapped son, Shaun. When you find him, you discover that not only is he an old geezer, but he’s the head of The Institute, a scientific organization at the cutting edge of unheard-of breakthroughs in medicine and genetic modification. Oh, and you learn one more thing: that your son—their leader—is dying from cancer. One would think that, with The Institute’s profound scientific prowess, they could cure Shaun by augmenting him with cybernetic enhancements the way they did for Kellogg (who lived to the ripe age of 108 before you busted a cap in his cyborg hiney). Or, like the game’s protagonist, maybe they could put him into cryogenic stasis until a cure is found.
Well, Bethesda has one thing to say to those ideas: Nope.
8 The Curie Conundrum
This one’s another mistake that could have been avoided with an extra set of eyes: Curie, a robotic companion, is discovered in a room with two computer terminals which give convoluted—if not entirely contradictory—explanations of Curie’s origin. One explains that she was painstakingly modified by an engineer named Dr. Kenneth Collins while the other suggests that she, under the name “CVRIE,” was a robotic assistant provided by Vault-Tec for research assistance. Fans try to dismiss this as an error with various explanation—one of which is more or less universally accepted: that CVRIE is a modified Miss Nanny bot whose personality, while already adapted for lab assistance by Vault-Tec, is further enhanced by the work of Dr. Collins. That’s all well and good, but the fact that the two terminals are only a few feet away from one another and provide such confusing, contrasting origin details is jarring—and immersion-breaking—to say the least.
7 Preston Vs. Preston
Curie isn’t the only fan-favorite companion to have their characterization mangled by the wrecking ball that is crappy oversight—or, in Preston Garvey’s case, missed opportunity. As mentioned earlier, Preston Garvey is a relatively important—and recruitable—character in Fallout 4. He’s the leader of a local band of protectors called the Minutemen, he’s all about helping the locals out with any raider/mutant troubles, and he’s typically pretty outspoken about his strong sense of justice. Until… he isn’t.
At one point in the game, a random encounter pits the player against a Preston Garvey impersonator—a thug in disguise. You’d think that the clever writers over at Bethesda would take this opportunity to load our real Preston up with some snarky dialogue about this imposter—and you’d be wrong. Not once does Preston acknowledge his doppelgänger. And in a game so obsessed with identity and the fear of synthetic doubles, his sheer absence from this exchange strikes players as odd and out-of-character.
6 No Training? No Problem!
Maybe I’m nitpicking here, but this one is pretty self-explanatory: According to lore established in Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, power armor—the armor worn by the Brotherhood of Steel and, in Fallout 3, The Enclave—takes extensive training to wear. Well, that’s what the B.O.S. Elders tell you—in reality, your “training” is a fade-to-black followed by text informing you that you’ve received said training. Still, it’s enough to suggest a little elbow grease was required to operate what is essentially a wearable tank. In the fourth incarnation of Bethesda’s post-apocalyptic action RPG, however, a totally untrained former lawyer—I’m talking Nora, the female protagonist—can pilot a set of power armor within the first half-hour of the game. No learning curve. No “training.” Just a whole load of lore-breaking nonsense and a bullet-ridden deathclaw carcass to clean up.
5 Core Meets Lore
But neglecting to acknowledge the protagonist’s lack of training isn’t the only misstep Bethesda took in their attempt to make power armor more accessible in their latest Fallout game. Fusion cores, the main energy source for power armor as well as the all-but-universal power source for all things shiny and retrofuturistic in the Fallout 4 universe, are just a little less than lore-friendly. Scattered throughout the game, these inconspicuous yellow cylinders are not exactly hard to come by… which is odd, considering the fact that the apocalypse occurred because of a severe lack of resources… like, you know, energy sources… Hmm.
Add that to the fact that fusion cores just don’t make any sense, even in their own canonical context! How can a power source that runs a wearable death-machine for twenty minutes power an elevator indefinitely and keep generators running for presumably hundreds of years?
Bethesda: “Because science!”
Sounds legit.
4 The Name Game
This one seems to tick everybody off. During random encounters throughout the game, your character, a stranger displaced in time by two full centuries, will call an NPC by their name—despite the fact that you never spoke to them before, didn’t hear their name in passing, and generally never knew that they even existed. This tends to happen most frequently in large, settled areas like Diamond City, where you’re likely to find higher concentrations of important NPCs like merchants, quest-givers, and the like. I know, I know: it’s a simple way for the game to get around having your character introduce themselves to every single NPC. But that doesn’t make it any less uncomfortable. It irks players, it squashes role-playing, and it kills immersion, pulling you out of the game right after you’ve stumbled onto your first big settlement.
3 The Secret of “The Secret of Cabot House”
The secret of the Cabot House isn’t that its residents are jacked up on eternal life serum or that their patriarch is an insane, immortal archeologist obsessed with his magic alien helmet. It’s that the string of quests associated with the titular home are totally bugged, entirely broken, and controller-smashingly unplayable. The worst part is that they’re some of the most interesting missions in the game, jam-packed with enough weird sci-fi camp to make Lovecraft jump for joy.
Depending on the specific quest—of which there are three—lending a hand to the Cabots can result in one of many nightmarish bugs. Sometimes, Emogene disappears behind a wall. Sometimes, your character gets trapped behind a locked elevator door by an NPC who is (poorly) scripted to open it. If you’re lucky, you can complete the quest only for the ever-infuriating Jack Cabot to treat you like a stranger every time you approach him for your reward.
2 Poor Billy
The Fallout series has a history of subtly poking fun at pop culture. One of their most shining satirical moments came in Fallout: New Vegas, where a skeleton wearing an Indiana Jones hat can be found curled up in a fridge. But while New Vegas played with the survivor-in-the-fridge trope for laughs, Fallout 4 went in an, um, different direction. At some point in your quest to find your lost son and avenge your spouse’s death, you’ll find yourself following a distant voice only to wind up in front of a locked fridge. When you open said fridge, you’ll be welcomed by a young boy who’s been trapped inside for over 200 years. Yes—of course, he’s a ghoul. The only problem? The original Fallout made it a point to show that ghouls had to eat food and drink water to survive—there’s even a quest about it! Poor Billy wouldn’t have made it a few days, much less two centuries, trapped without nourishment. And that’s ignoring the fact that he somehow managed to survive nuclear armageddon in a kitchen appliance, ghoul or not.
1 You’re (Not) S.P.E.C.I.A.L.
Fallout 4 has its detractors like any other video game, but many fans will argue that its biggest mistake was taking the “role-playing” out of a “role-playing game.” In Fallout 4, you start off with a lover, a child, a career, and, more or less, an entire family history. Makes it a little hard to mercilessly slaughter an entire settlement for a few extra caps and a bottle of soda, doesn’t it?
Not only that, but the game’s emotional narrative doesn’t mesh with its open-world game mechanics. It spends the first few hours hammering into your head the fact that your entire family has been dispatched, everyone that you know and love is gone, and civilization as you know (or, rather, knew) it has been eradicated… and then it encourages you to collect comic books, paint baseball stadium walls, and get a freakin’ haircut.
Priorities, man.
Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/crazy-mistakes-you-never-noticed-in-fallout-4/