I’ve spent a lot of work time playing Fallout 4, what with its being the biggest release of the year. It gave me the chance to write a couple of super-helpful guides, and a three-part diary about trying to approach the game different from that of most reviewers. So I’m left with a whole bunch of opinions about it, which it makes sense to collate into my own little WIT. It’s worth noting I’ve nowhere near completed the game, approached it strangely, and not put in nearly as much work and effort as Alec did for his official RPS review. These are just my thoughts based on what I’ve experienced so far, as spoiler free as I can get it.

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1) Passivity makes me fidgety. Even in a film, TV show, gig or novel I’m hugely enjoying, my mind will at some point drift to the clock, wondering how soon until it ends, how soon until I can stand up or talk or check something or eat something or go somewhere. Awful, I know. Games, broadly, need me to be doing something most of the time, and that is the greatest weapon I have against a propensity to boredom that I am not at all proud of. This is also why I start to go spare in something like StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void, as it spends so much of its duration pummelling me with particularly low-grade passive storytelling, and my frustration that I have to watch this nonsense instead of do things for myself goes through the roof.

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I confess to an ever-so-slightly heavy heart when I began writing a diary series about Fallout 4. I’d only just finished the review, which had involved over 50 hours of play, and on top of generally wanting a change felt that I’d exhausted the game’s possibilities. As I wrote in said review, my key gripe with the game is that almost every problem is now solved by banal violence, which closes the door on its potential as a source of anecdotes.

I was wrong to be wary about going back. My complaints about Fallout 4 stand, but I’m enjoying it much more playing second time around, entirely avoiding story, entirely avoiding safety and instead imposing my own set of rules.

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I’m generally quite averse to game merchandise – I like to keep my flesh-life and my screen-life separate – and I have very mixed feelings about Fallout 4 [official site], but this action figure is making me rethink my approach to desk decoration. It’s a semi-transforming power armour toy, containing a removable, boilersuit-clad Vaultdude within, and made by high-end figure firm 3A. I know we don’t go in for game culture stuff here that much, but this is gosh-wow brillo.

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As the dragons finally return to their nests to hibernate and the ghosts don their chains to help remind misers of the meaning of the season, we approach the end of another year. As is tradition, that is time for we at the guild-house to award both quests and questers the ceremonial Scrolls of Honour . (Chorus of affordable angels)>

Scribed upon only the finest vellum in ink taken from a particularly recalcitrant octopus from the Abyssal Depths, they are a testament to skill and imagination and occasional disappointments that mean exactly nothing whatsoever except that I have a column and so I can hand out whatever made-up crap takes my fancy. Lo! We begin!

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Ever been sat in front of a Weapons Workbench with a tonne of material, wishing you were free to craft whatever the hell you wanted? Sure you have. And with no crafting restrictions, you could teach those Super Mutant Ancient Behemoths obnoxiously roaming the Commonwealth a serious lesson. Imagine if you turned up with, I dunno, an Electrified Triple Barrel Minigun? They’d shit an irradiated brick for sure.

The Any Mod Any Weapon mod for Fallout 4 [official site] asks: what’s stopping you?

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Continuing a perma-death diary in Fallout 4, in which I begin with absolutely nothing other than a plan to to voyage around only the outermost periphery of the world.>

Michael Radiatin’? More like Michael Radiated.

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So I’m wandering through Fallout 4 [official site], and I come across this old diner, sitting there, neon still lit, almost jaunty in a destroyed land. There’s a guy outside called Wolfgang, a leathered drug dealer, who explains that a mother and son have set up a shop in this diner, and that he wants paying for goods he’s sold to the son.

I go inside, aiming to resolve the problem between the dealer and the son, and get into conversation with the mother. But, looking down, I notice that, despite trading from this place, she hasn’t thought to remove a skeleton from one of the booths. Because why would you remove a skeleton from your shop? Or any of the filth that s accumulated on the floor?

It s just one of the weird little things about the world of Fallout 4 that I find confusing and alienating. Little things that nudge me out out my suspension of disbelief that this is a place. Instead of enveloping myself in all its detail, it just gets me wondering, absently, is this how it would be>?

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Continuing a perma-death diary in Fallout 4, in which I begin with absolutely nothing other than a plan to to voyage around only the outermost periphery of the world.>

Oh great, now I’m addicted to booze. And in the game, etc. … [visit site to read more]

Continuing a perma-death diary in Fallout 4, in which I begin with absolutely nothing other than a plan to to voyage around only the outermost periphery of the world.>

You voted that I swim out into the poison sea, to find out what lies beyond the water. I’m afraid I can’t honour that.

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