There are things I only worked out how to do in Fallout 4 [official site] after hours and hours of play, so I thought I’d spare the rest of you from similar confusion. From fuss-free shopping to streamline construction and power armour management, and of course figuring out how to run those blasted settlements, here are a few must-know pieces of hard-earned wisdom. Some apply to total greenhorns, some might surprise even people fairly deep into the game – and I’ll add to them as more occur.

I can’t quite decide if the game just got itself into a bit of a muddle when it comes to explaining its many, many less than obvious systems or if it truly has a sink or swim philosophy, figuring that it’s far more satisfying for players to work everything out for themselves. I suspect the former, to be honest, given its many other glitches and that most of the features it fails to document are down to user interface obfuscation (and a complete absence of relevant tutorial) rather than delightful things one might stumble across through experimentation. (Although I include a couple of those too).

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Note: some spoilers for the appearance and behaviour of a relatively early companion NPC follow, as do references to one of the world’s central and ongoing conflicts. None of the ‘main’ plot events are spoiled, however.>

There are many familiar archetypes when it comes to roleplaying companions. The snarky jokester one. The sexy-but-secretly-sad one. The cute or comic appearance but incongruously murderous one. The noble truth-seeking one. The rogueish but with a heart of gold one. The chosen one. The totally outlandish one. The guilty one. The grumpy one. The happy one. The sneezy one. We know ‘em all, we’ve liked many and hated some, loved a few, rolled our eyes at the obviousness of more still.

Nick, one of Fallout 4 [official site]’s optional companions, could easily fit into one or more of those categories, but I feel he has a more defining trait, and one which I don’t believe any other RPG party member has managed to the same extent: kindness.

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Nuclear apocalypses generally aren’t a very good thing, but while they’re capable of wiping out much of life, they really don’t have the capability of destroying colour. However, so entrenched in us is the idea that apocalyptic wastelands are in sepia tone that the colour scheme is a shorthand for communicating the devastation. But blimey, it’s a murky place to be. Thankfully, ubergenius Razed of Nexus Mods has already put together a mod using ReShade and SweetFX Preset that sees Fallout 4 [official site] sensibly brightened up a little. And it’s very easy to add to your game.

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Bethesda make big, divisive and generally extremely good games, but they really don’t seem to know what a PC are. While we’re certainly used to PC builds of their historically PC series coming out looking like they were sloughed off a console, hastily scraped off the floor, then dumped on a desktop, it still grates. It’s no surprise that the in-game graphics options are negligible, requiring multiple quits and restarts to tweak to satisfaction. It’s certainly no shock that the UI is blatantly designed to be viewed from a sofa, so madly huge and clumsy for us with our noses pressed to the monitor. But it’s pretty shoddy at this point that standard settings like FOV, particular widescreen settings, stuttery framerate limits, and switching off their perennially ghastly mouse acceleration, are hidden in .ini files. Fortunately the smart folks making Steam guides have it all figured out. I’ve explained a few of the fixes below.

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Above: The Murderettes>

I briefly mention how much I dug Fallout 4‘s colourful, playful clothing options in my review, but given that my hard drive is full of screenshots of that stuff, it seems a waste not to give it its own post. The costumes are, as far as I’m concerned, Fallout 4 [official site] at its absolute best. Take a look below.

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Fallout 4 [official site] is an open-world roleplaying game from Bethesda Game Studios, creators of Skyrim, and is set in the Boston area of America, 200 years after nuclear war all but wiped out a technologically-advanced civilization. Your character emerges into this blasted world after centuries in cryosleep, then must choose their own objectives and allegiances while battling mutants, monsters, machines and militia. It’s out tomorrow.I spent last week with it, and here’s what I made of it. This piece does not contain any plot spoilers.>

52 hours. A level 29 character. 27/50 achievements. Two different endings seen. Feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface. Size, of course, is something we can all but take for granted from the follow-up to Skyrim and Fallout 3 the lingering question is whether a new layer of quality could be applied to all that wasteland quantity.

Well, good news. Either technology finally caught up to Bethesda’s aspirations, or they took so many arrows to the knee from the resoundingly popular but much-lampooned Skyrim that they finally did something about the presentation issues we’ve been whining about. The refreshingly characterful Fallout 4 fixes problems which have dogged their games for years – although it then throws in brand new ones to compensate, and it maintains the traditional smattering of bizarro bugs and underwhelming combat.

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