Systems: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, Linux, Steam OS
Release Date: November 5, 2015 - April 25, 2024
I genuinely don't know where to start with
Fallout 4 and its accompanying DLCs. I spent nearly 262 hours, or 210 in-game days, which honestly surprised me because I did a somewhat decent job of roleplaying my character of Jacqueline. Kind of. I had Jacqueline have a 100-hour detour from trying to find her kidnapped son to the island of Far Harbor to help a colony of synth refugees, all the while infiltrating a fanatic religious organization, The Children of Atom, while succumbing to frequent near-fatal amounts of radiation. Before we continue with this meandering article, I'd recommend reading/rereading my
First Impressions article from last August, where I do a bit of character introduction and cover my first 47 hours.
Now, 214 hours later, let's jump back into the end of the middle of Jacqueline's story in the wasteland of the Commonwealth of the former United States, 2088.
Yes, the game starts on October 23rd, 2077, the day the first bombs were dropped in the United States, and your character, known colloquially as the "Sole Survivor", wakes up exactly two hundred years later on October 23, 2277. I finished Jacqueline's story on May 20, 2088. During those 210 days, I had her join the reformed Minutemen and helped set up 30+ settlements that pledged loyalty to the Minutemen after completing numerous fetch quests. Jacqueline also helped a synth detective absurdly named Nick Valentine with a case (that I've since forgotten about) to find out information about her kidnapped son, only to discover that he was being held by The Institute, and quite safely and happily at that.
As a result of being told that her son was alive and well taken care of, Jacqueline had a brief crisis where she ended up helping another family try to locate their missing daughter, where she ended up saving the synth colony of Acadia on the island of Cold Harbor from the Children of Atom and a handful of fearful citizens in the town of Cold Harbor. I also replaced the leader of the Children of Atom with a synth with the help of the synth leader
DiMA (after doing some batshit-crazy brain hacking mini-games). The daughter was convinced that she was a synth, but later returned to her family on the mainland with loving and open arms, regardless of whether she was a human or a synth.
Jacqueline also stopped an uprising of robots from an eccentric figure self-titled The Machinist, whose mechanical creations had deduced that the best way to save the people of the Commonwealth was to kill them all. She also helped a super mutant scientist recover a serum from The Institute to help him revert back to his human form, and accidentally wiped out a small village of the Children of Atom when she accidentally caused one of the members damage while jumping down from a room while wearing power armor.
Jacqueline later joined the Underground Railroad to help with the relocation of synths who had escaped from The Institute, while also at the same time infiltrating The Institute, only to find out that her son, who was taken recently, had in fact been taken over 60 years earlier and was the leader of said Institute. While running missions for both factions, Jacqueline made life-long enemies of the Brotherhood of Steel by stealing a fusion-based energy source from the BoS to power The Institute's reactors indefinitely, only to blow it up during an incursion by the Underground Railroad, where her dying son Shaun was caught up in the blast. But she did rescue, in the dumbest narrative way possible, a synth copy of her son as a 10-year-old boy, so now Jacqueline can be a Mom to a child.
Although I did save the game before I ran the assault on The Institute to see if, in fact, I could save hundreds of lives by killing one person, the leader of the Underground Railroad and then become the new leader of The Institute via the biggest case of nepotism since 2016. It turned out that I would have had to have killed a lot more people. However, I wasn't entirely happy with that timeline, or the idea of running fetch quests for different department heads, which is rather an odd feeling since I'd been running fetch quests for nearly the whole game. But by this point, I had forgone my MO of not fast traveling and was regularly fast traveling, especially if I was encumbered (here's lookin' at you fully leveled up Strong Back perk). I had felt that I had seen all there was to be seen between the Underground Railroad's HQ and wherever Tinker Tom needed me to place a
MILA or wherever a dead drop was, and its subsequent clearing out of a safe house; this was probably around the 190-200 hour mark for those keeping score. Although I still never fast-traveled to a settlement went they were under attack. I was pretty hands-off with the settlements, only really having 3-8 people at each one and keeping the recruiter signal off after having it on if it was required by a quest. I fortified most with a couple of turrets and made sure that each had enough beds, food, and water, but that was about it. I also did about 99.45% of solo without any companions or Dogmeat. There were a couple of missions that required you to have a companion and once those were over, I sent them to live at one of the settlements, or they went back to their starting location in case I wanted to pick them up later. I didn't.
I started the
Vault-Tec Workshop DLC, but decided that running a Vault-Tec-style vault wasn't for me, so I turned off the recruiter signal there too and left
Overseer Barstow to wallow underground until she leaves or goes feral herself. I also didn't do the
Nuka World DLC, which seemed to focus on creating a raider colony and sending out raiders to raid settlements, and that wasn't at all who Jacqueline was. She had a 10-year-old synth to take care of; I'd also read that unless you were going in to develop your character as a raider/leader of raiders, that some of the fights were needlessly difficult so I decided to skip that altogether. I also got over my annoyance with power armor occurring so early in the game simply by not really using it until after getting back from Far Harbor, and only then very rarely. I probably had close to 100 unused power cores and 15+ at varying levels of power left.
Obviously, I really enjoyed
Fallout 4 and especially the
Far Harbor DLC. Like a lot of western-styled RPGs, I really enjoyed the early game the most when I was constantly cobbling together ever slightly better bits of mismatched armor and there always being a chance I could die from taking on one too many raiders. After coming back from Far Harbor, I had found all the pieces of the Marine Armor set which I ended up modding to include Deep Pockets to help increase my carry weight, but every other piece of armor I found did not give me a better overall armor rating, so for the remaining 150+ hours, I was in the same armor, which did feel a little stale by the time I liberated the Commonwealth from The Institute. But roleplaying definitely helped here a lot because it meant that I would periodically change up my armor or weapon to better suit the specific mission I was playing if it called for it.
Yeah, I think having played for 261 hours in the end really summarizes how I felt about this game in how I decided to play it. Good world, satisfying level progression, too many settlements that I never really felt invested in (so don't worry about them)*.
*More On this. Maybe if each of the settlers had been given a randomized name instead of just "Settler," there might have been more of a connection and reason to feel invested in the creation and maintenance of a settlement. True, there were some settlements with named characters like Covenant, The Slog, and Greygardens, but all of the random settlers that show up are only "Settler." It's harder to care about someone if they're only a title. There might be something there.
P.S. I also just realized how underutilized the cannon artillery placements you learn from doing the Minutemen questline involving the Castle. I get the idea of creating cannon placements at other settlements to have a wider range, but it felt like most of my important and hard battles were fought indoors, where the cannons are not going to reach. Neat idea, but it never felt practical. Or maybe I just didn't fully understand the in-game mechanics.
P.P.S. I'm also now just wondering if there was an endgame where the Brotherhood ot Steel attacked The Institute as a final test of your loyalty, or if it would always be against the Underground Railroad.
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