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Fallout fanatics might say that the franchise lost its way a long time ago, when
Fallout was turned into a shooter with more “mainstream” appeal. But if you ask an average fan, they’d probably say that
Fallout games are supposed to be rich, choice-driven games where you have the freedom to role-play as you wish. That description could more or less apply to
Fallout 3 and
Fallout: New Vegas. But that’s not what you’ll find in
Fallout 4. The newest
Fallout is more of an action game than even its immediate predecessors, and as such, Bethesda has streamlined many of the elements that used to define
Fallout as an role-playing series.
Gone are the extra attributes known as skills, which players could use in novel ways while exploring the wasteland. In
Fallout 3, for example, if you had a high enough explosives skill, you could defuse a bomb in the middle of a city, thus saving everyone. Or, you could choose to detonate it. The entire questline was only available to you if you built your character in a certain way, and while that’s a design that locks some players out from experiencing a rad thing, it did give a sense that how you built your character actually
mattered. For a role-playing game, that’s pretty important. The combination of skills folding into perks, along with the lack of level cap in
Fallout 4, means that your character build no longer matters in the way that it used to. You start out OK at most things, and eventually, you’ll be a god at everything. Especially combat-oriented things.
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