Each weekend, the PC Gamer writers are asked a question about PC gaming, and provide their answers in two or three short, sweet paragraphs (find previous editions here). We then invite you to join in, via the comments below. This week: what's the most disappointed you've ever been by a game's ending? Spoilers follow, naturally. 

Jarred Walton: Shadow of the Beast

This one goes way, way back to the late '80s and early '90s on the Commodore Amiga, which probably predates most of our readers. I was in high school and Psygnosis became renowned for amazingly smooth 'parallax' scrolling graphics, with Shadow of the Beast being the prime example of the studio's work. (Yes, I'm aware there was a remake for PS4 in 2013.) For the time, the game looked beautiful, and it was punishingly difficult. My friends and I spent months learning the game and mastering the combat and movement. It was far more than just 'git gud', as the game offered no save points and a limited number of lives.

My memory is that it required about two hours of continuous play to reach the final boss (maybe a bit less), and all too frequently we would die long before reaching it. Of course, once we reached the final boss, we had to unravel how to beat it. Much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth ensued, but eventually my friend Dan Newman managed the Herculean feat.First, let me clarify something: every time you failed, you would see a scene of the game with the beast's skull and ribs on the ground. It had become an all-too-familiar scene. And when we finally beat the game? It was the same image, minus the skeleton, with the short note: "Congratulations! You have freed yourself from the shadow of the beast." We were pretty sure the developers didn't expect many players to actually finish the game. We were so disappointed that we never played the game again.

Andy Kelly: LA Noire

I love L.A. Noire more than most, but the ending is so frustratingly bleak that every time I finish it, I'm left with a bad taste in my mouth. Not only does Phelps die in a sewer, but most of the big hitters involved in the Suburban Redevelopment Fund scam get away with it because they agree to testify to the DA. And as if that wasn't bad enough, scumbag vice cop Roy Earle gives the eulogy at Phelps' funeral.

Okay, Phelps is a bit of an uptight jerk. But that doesn't mean I have to be happy with the guy I've just spent 30 hours dying covered in shit. But hey, you couldn't ask for a more noir ending. The movie Chinatown, a huge influence on the game, ends in similarly bleak circumstances. So in that respect I guess they're just paying homage to a genre classic. But I would've liked to see a little more justice served.

Tom Senior: Every 4X Game

I am disappointed with the ending of every 4X game I have ever played. I labour for hours to build an empire and crush my enemies, and in the end I get a pop up that says "yup, you did it." Then I spend a minute feeling slightly empty and wondering what it was all really for.

Grand strategy games seem to sputter out rather than escalate towards the end. There are exceptions: Alpha Centauri and XCOM weave a story into the strategy to give you a crescendo and a satisfying finish. Total War: Warhammer 2 uses objectives brilliantly to push the campaign's biggest armies into a final showdown. It's a problem that designers have been attacking in earnest for the last five years or so—see also Endless Legend and Endless Space—so I expect we'll see some interesting 4X endgames in the next decade. I hope so anyway. I don't want to feel sad on a victory screen again.

Andy Chalk: Myst

I loved, and will always love, Myst, but the ending is a tremendous anticlimax. The story is all about a couple of guys giving their dad a hard time, and the role you play in sorting it all out. At the end, you do your bit, he pops off to have a word with them, then comes back and says, basically, "That's that." And that is that: he doesn't reveal if he's killed them or given them a good whoopin' or played the "your mother would be very disappointed" card or what. It's just a vague reassurance that they won't be dicks anymore.

Then he tells you that he can't give you any kind of reward for all the work you've done, or even offer to help get you back home. All he says is that you're welcome to explore his magic library to your heart's content. Hey buddy, that's literally what I've been doing since I got here!

And then on top of that, he says, "Oh by the way, I might need you to do me a solid with this other thing I've got going on." At which point he's like, okay, I got work to do, I'm busy, piss off—and he puts you on "ignore." You can teleport back to Myst Island, you can quit the game, or... no, that's it, those are your options. It just kind of stops. And that's the good ending! In the bad ending, he yells at you and calls you a name. 

Samuel Roberts: Fallout 4

I used the Mass Effect 3 image in the header because it's the classic example of people reacting negatively to an ending—in this case, so much so that the developers changed it. But the one I got in Fallout 4, where I rebuilt Liberty Prime with the Brotherhood and we stormed the Institute's base, was far less satisfying to me, mostly because it felt like a retread of Fallout 3's finale. I guess I wasn't too invested in the story of what happened to your protagonist's child, either. 

It sounds like there's some interesting variance based on which faction you're allied with, but my particular one left me a little cold, and I've actually never been back to the game since then—even though I played every single Fallout 3 DLC pack. 

Joe Donnelly: BioShock

It's BioShock for me. I loved its Andrew Ryan/Atlas revelation so much that I spent a full afternoon overzealously explaining it scene-by-scene to my definitely not interested mother. I wanted to make her understand the storytelling potential of videogames, and that this climax rivaled any of her favourite books or films.   

Of course I conveniently left out how awful the game's actual ending is. After building such a rich world, such a cool cast of characters, such a neat combat system, and, clearly, such a dramatic end-of-story twist—to have it all topped off by a horse dung firefight with an overpowered Frank Fontaine was such a let down. Would you kindly get in the bin.   

Phil Savage: Deus Ex? Half-Life? BioShock

I have to narrow it down to just one? OK then. Maybe Half-Life? Secretly I don't mind Xen, but the boss fight against a giant floating baby is perhaps a bit much. Or how about Half-Life 2? Climbing a tower to shoot orbs at an aging politician is a tad anticlimactic. Or perhaps it's the Deus Ex series, which regularly throws off notions of choice and consequence to offer three potential outcomes—letting you pick whichever one you want. 

No, I think in terms of pure disappointment it's BioShock. It's a disappointment because of how much worse the ending is compared to the Andrew Ryan scene about two-thirds of the way through the game. That's a clever encounter that plays with the perception of a player's desire for direction and progression. Back in 2007, that was the good shit. It was much better than the game's actual end, which involved a man transforming himself into an Ayn Rand book cover, because... yes, objectivism, we get it already. Kill him, and you're treated to a short cutscene in which you're awarded either a family or a nuclear bomb depending on how many children you murdered during the game. Art!

Literature’s had a pretty good run, much of it without any fancy graphics and animations and particle effects to bolster the words. Games love text too. Text is cheap. You can paint a picture of galactic chaos or epic history in about the same time it takes to type ‘and then something cool happened’, without having to spend the next week designing armour and creating 3D characters to act it out. Yet despite centuries of practice, most games still haven’t worked out how to present all this (which let’s face it, is often there more for the writers’ satisfaction than our actual enjoyment) in a punchy, satisfying way. What works? What doesn’t? Let’s take a quick look at some of the ways games have handled books, letters, codexes and more. 

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Even when you don’t affect a world that much, it’s nice when it pretends. News stories are one of the best and cheapest ways to both highlight your achievements, and reframe them in interesting ways, from acts of heroism to outright terrorism. Human Revolution wrapped them in one of the sleekest packages for this—the Picus Daily Standard. At once a chance to see what was taking place out of your sphere, and see the effect of your adventures on the world. While even a few years later, the futuristic look feels distinctly retro compared to iPad news apps, to say nothing of whatever direct-brain interfaces we’ll likely have by the time of Deus Ex’s dark not-too-distant-future, Picus keeps it pretty, keeps it punchy, and above all, keeps it brief. 

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Ah, but when it comes to eBooks, things aren’t so smooth. Look at this. Even the original Kindle would wince at these datapad layouts, complete with non-slidable panels, slow refresh rate, poor quality fonts and typography, and non-consistent use of glows. Sure, it’s readable, but it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to, even before factoring in that in the wasteful future of Deus Ex you apparently need a new device for every Wikipedia entry. The crappy quality of this design only stands out more amongst Mankind Divided’s otherwise superbly rendered future, where everything you encounter seems to have emerged fully formed from the brain of a maverick product genius. This, meanwhile, feels like a first attempt at customising Twine. 

Fallout 4

In the not-too-distant future, who needs books? We’ll have computers! Specifically, ghastly green teletype machines that would be tolerable for simple acts like opening doors, but could be much more of a nightmare if the cast of Five Nights At Freddy’s occasionally popped up for a jump-scare. The horrible font. The clackering of the text. The endless pages that try their best  to tell stories of post-apocalyptic horror, despite being locked in an interface that would make even a hardened wasteland explorer decide that whatever happened probably doesn’t matter that much. Even accounting for the 50s vibe of the rest of the game, these are hideous technological throwbacks that knife their own storytelling in the back. The closest they come to being appropriate to the setting is that in using them, the living definitely envy the dead. 

Skyrim / Ultima

What’s an RPG shelf without a few strangely short books that probably don’t need hundreds of pages and a stiff leather jacket? While RPGs have always been wise enough to realise that most players will accept this deviation from reality, it’s still interesting to look at the differences between these two great franchises. Skyrim for instance clearly assumes that all of Tamriel’s readers are half-blind—or possibly playing on a television screen—leading to very slow-paced tales on glorified flashcards. Ultima meanwhile wanted you to squint. But at least Ultima had the advantage that unless a book was specifically screaming ‘crucial plot element’, it was most likely to be flavour, sparing you tediously flicking through shelves in the hope of finding a boost to one of your skills. At least both franchises keep their tongues firmly in their cheeks, whether it’s The Elder Scrolls’ obsession with the Lusty Argonian Mage, or Ultima’s fine line of joke books, occasional explosive booby-trap pranks, and the revelation that wise Lord British, founder of Britannia’s favourite story is “Hubert the Lion”. Can’t sleep without it, apparently... 

Mass Effect

A controversial one here, perhaps, but Mass Effect is one of the games where the built-in Codex arguably makes the world less enjoyable. The game does a fantastic job of introducing everything that’s actually important without relying on it as a crutch, with the dry writing and endless unlockable pages of SF guff coming across as homework rather than a gripping read. Do we really need to know, for example, the origins of every last whiffle-bolt supplier on the Citadel? No. It’s just not that important. Save it for the design bible and tie-in books.

While there are a few interesting flourishes, including Codex entries based on what the universe thinks rather than necessarily the actual truth, the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy it is not. And ironically, it shows the difference itself, in the form of Mass Effect 2’s fantastic Shadow Broker DLC and the unlockable files within, which actually do give you a chance to peer at your party’s dirty little secrets. Jack’s secret love of poetry. Miranda’s online dating life. Tali’s repeated installation of a suit tool called ‘Nerve Stim Pro’. Oh, the blackmail opportunities...

Dishonored 2

Dishonored is a great example of how just a little thing can really annoy. Its text isn’t difficult to read, the font is pretty well chosen, if not exactly conveying the sense of a written document in the same way as many other games with this level of texture and detail, but does it really have to sway back and forth while you’re reading? There’s a time for ambient animation to breathe life into a scene, and a time to make the player feel slightly sea-sick. No. Scratch that. True for the first, not so much for the second. Swish… swish… it’s an effect applied to all the menus and other data screens and really contributes to making reading the lore an unpleasant experience. A shame, because that lore is actually interesting. Dunwall and Karnaca are two of gaming’s best cities, and their depth and backstory is fascinating. If you can stand to actually read it.

The Longest Journey and Life Is Strange

I'm bundling these together because they do the same basic concept—the primary text in the game is our main character’s diary. This serves several purposes, including offering a potted version of the story if you dip away for a while and forget things, but most importantly giving us a direct look inside their head. It’s a technique that only works if you actually like the main character, but fortunately that’s not a problem for either series and its charismatic leading ladies. In particular, it’s a way of bridging the gap between our perception of the game, as an untouchable god-figure, and theirs, as someone for whom all these moral decisions are actual life-changing events. Simply seeing the game from that perspective is enough to make everything carry that much more weight, and it doesn’t hurt that they’re fun reads too.

The Witcher 3

What separates The Witcher from most in-game codexes is its sense of character, with everything being described from the perspective of in-game poet, lover and occasional sidekick Dandelion. The nature of the game also rewarded taking the time to dip into the Codex, given that for a travelling monster-slayer, knowledge is power, and never took away from the fact that while us as players might not know our drowners from our necrophages, Geralt himself was always able to be a reliable source of information and provide the condensed version.

Realms of the Haunting

Here’s a retro classic, sadly not helped by the low-resolutions of the mid-90s. Nothing damages the mood of an otherwise well-made document like peering at it through a letter-box and finding it more poorly compressed than an old JPEG from a lost Geocities page. It’s not quite as bad blown up to full screen though, and even with its technical problems, it demonstrated how to write documents that actually fit the world and contributed to the lore without feeling like extracts from the design bible. Most took the form of letters between the characters, their identities not always immediately obvious, and turning the relatively simple battle between good and evil at the heart of the story into an epic tale of Faustian deals, ancient cults, doomed love, and a deep mythology stretching between multiple worlds. The visual look certainly didn’t hurt, with everything presented as aged pages, hand-drawn maps and messily scrawled journals. And if you didn’t like them, you got to burn several of them as part of a puzzle. Splendid.

The Neverhood

Of course, if you really, really want to make sure nobody misses your game’s lore, there’s always the Hall of Records—aka The Place Where Basically All The Game’s Backstory Is, as carved onto the walls of a corridor that takes about five minutes to trudge through even if you ignore all of the words. Oh, and when you get to the other end? You have to walk back, obviously. You know it’s good stuff when even a game’s own wiki states, and we quote, “it is suggested by most not to read all of it.” Truly great literature. Who could ask for anything less?

But of course, these are just a few cases. Which games have convinced you to pause saving the world to flick through a good book, and when has that background just been so much blah? It’s fun to get lost in backstory, just as long as the writers aren’t too obsessed with their own lore.

It was just a hair over two weeks ago that we reported on the Capital Wasteland project, a recreation of Fallout 3 in Fallout 4. A pre-alpha gameplay video demonstrating the old game in the new engine looked good, and progress seemed to be coming along well, even though there was much still to be done. After a recent discussion with Bethesda, however, the team making the mod has decided to shut it all down. 

"Recently we have communicated with Bethesda regarding our planned method to implement the voice acting and other audio from Fallout 3 Into the Capital Wasteland. During this Conversation it became clear our planned approach would raise some serious red flags that we had unfortunately not foreseen. This contact resulted in us changing our methods to attempt to continue working," project lead NafNaf_95 wrote in an announcement on the Road to Liberty Discord. 

"After some thought it appears there is no fully Legal way for us to continue developing the Fallout 3 in Fallout 4 Portion of The Capital Wasteland. Projects like these have always existed in a Gray area of the law but we as a team value our connections with many members of the amazing dev team that is Bethesda Game studios." 

The mod makers gave thought to replacing all the voice acting in the game but ultimately decided against taking that path, saying that the game "loses its charm and personality" without the original actors. NafNaf_95 added that creating a new, original story in Capital Wasteland isn't possible because some team members have asked that their work be removed from the project. 

Something may yet come out of all this—"We're not gonna throw out everything," the team said in a separate tweet—but right now, "we're taking a break." They also asked that fans not take out their unhappiness on either Bethesda, or on contributors who asked that their work be removed: "They are well within their rights to do what they did and anyone who doesn't see that needs to check themselves," NafNaf_95 wrote. 

Interestingly, the Capital Wasteland's "sister project," Fallout 4: New Vegas, was confronted with the same issue but has elected to press ahead with all-new voice acting. The F4NV team said in a Facebook post that it too had initially rejected the idea of recording new voices, which it decided would be 'far too much work, for far too little reward," especially since it could just use the existing voice acting. But given the legal hangup, the F4NV team elected to keep going and replace the audio.

The change won't impact the release schedule for Fallout 4: New Vegas, but it will have an effect on how it's released: The voice acting team will be working independently and on its own schedule, so some voice acting elements may be missing from future F4NV releases until it's complete. 

In the grand tradition of modders remaking old Bethesda RPGs in newer Bethesda RPGs, modding crew Road to Liberty is recreating Fallout 3 in Fallout 4. The video above, which the team released late last week, shows how (part of) the underground Metro network looks when redone with Fallout 4's prettier tools.

Perusing the Capital Wasteland website, it's clear the group is making steady progress – there are plenty of screenshots showing some of the most memorable areas in Fallout 3's vanquished Washington. Still, the group is still eager to have 3D and 2D artists volunteer their time in order to fast track the mod's progress.

If you'd prefer to see New Vegas remade in Fallout 4, there's an in-development mod for that, as well.

As if the nuclear apocalypse, having my wife murdered and my son stolen wasn't bad enough, Fallout 4's Mongrel dogs are about to get tougher. I hate Fallout 4's Mongrel dogs at the best of times, thus the idea of them becoming more socially aware in battle makes me feel a little queasy. 

Greslin's Pack Attack Fallout 4 mod is responsible for this, as it attaches a script to all Mongrel dogs that continually evaluates the canine's "current immediate social environment and threat situation". In turn, if a dog senses other dogs nearby, it'll become more aggressive in the knowledge its backup isn't far off. If it realises it's on the back foot in any given fight—ie, if it can't find its companions, or has taken a lot of damage—it's more likely to turn tail and run. 

"This essentially means that Mongrel dogs, especially when they hit in packs, are now a lot less predictable," says Greslin. "And more dangerous." Great. 

Here's Greslin with the skinny:

In the vanilla game, an Actor (you, me, dogs, robots, etc.) has an Aggression stat (how likely it is to attack), a Confidence stat (cowardly/brave/foolhardy), and a general Combat Style (which specifies combat behavior in more detail).  Normally these stats are hardwired into Actors, including dogs.  If an Actor is a coward, they're usually - but not always - a coward forever. Thing is, I've never been satisfied with how Fallout 4 handled Mongrel Dogs.  I like dogs, and I've always felt that Mongrels needed a lot more social awareness and cohesion than simply being a go-kill-em melee torpedo on four legs.  And, it turns out, the above stats can all be changed on the fly.

When a Mongrel is loaded into the game, it will immediately do a threat assessment (am I being attacked?  is there an enemy nearby?) and an immediate area scan for other Mongrels.  If it finds other dogs, it will act more confidently and aggressively as a pack attacker.  On the other hand, if it realizes that it's the last dog standing, or it's been seriously hurt, it's a lot more likely to tuck tail and run.  Combat styles also change appropriately.

More information on Pack Attack, including installation instructions, can be found via the mod's Nexus Mods page.  

Fallout modder Hein84 makes some of Fallout 4's most popular texture mods, including Vivid Landscapes, which made it onto Chris's list of best mods for the game (going over that list just makes me want to reinstall). He has just released a compilation of all his work, bringing improvements in trees, landscapes, buildings, roads, and bridges into one place, and if you want to make Bethesda's RPG prettier then it's well worth a look. Best of all, you can scale it up and down based on the power of your rig.

Vivid Fallout—All in One replaces lots of the default visuals with more realistic, weathered textures (Hein84 claims they are actually less demanding on your graphics card than the originals) and sharpens some of the vanilla textures to make them look better. The overall result is a marked improvement. Take a look at the before and after shot below to see for yourself.

You can download 1K, 2K or 4K versions of Vivid Fallout—All in One to match the power of your PC. If you're not sure, you might want to opt for the 'Best Choice' version instead, which balances texture quality with steady performance, or the 'Best Performance' version if your PC struggles with that.

You can find all of the files on the mod's Nexus page. Make sure you uninstall any of Hein84's existing mods before you try this one out, otherwise it won't work.

If you've been waiting for just the right moment to finally dive into Fallout 4, it's here. Fallout 4 is free to play on PC right now, and this free period lasts until Sunday, February 4. During that time, the base game is 50% off (Steam says this 'weekend deal' lasts until February 12, which may either be an error or an exceptionally long weekend).

Other discounts during the free weekend: 40% off Fallout 4 Game of the Year Edition (which includes all the DLC) and 50% off the season pass. Here's the full list of discounts:

50% off:

• Fallout 4 Core Game
• Fallout 4 Season Pass

40% off:

• Fallout 4 G.O.T.Y. (Game of the Year Edition)
• Fallout 4: Automatron
• Fallout 4: Contraptions Workshop
• Fallout 4: Far Harbor
• Fallout 4: Nuka-World
• Fallout 4: Vault-Tec Workshop
• Fallout 4: Wasteland Workshop

Tired of the same crummy settlements that look a bit like they were cobbled together from rotting wood and rusted metal because they were? Yearning for an outpost that's not just a bunch of patched walls and grimy rooftops but hearkens back to a time when commerce and capitalism ruled the land? Wait no more: here's a mod for Fallout 4 that let's you build a big damn skyscraper, and a functioning one to boot.

You can't use this blueprint, called Elysium Tower, just anywhere: you'll have to build your skyscraper in Starlight Drive-in. But, wow. It's massive, with over 20 floors, including the upper two that comprise your home. The first five floors provide autonomous food production, and there's a trade center with shops, a synth production department, a science center, a swimming pool and gym, plus plenty of room to build and customize on your own.

Note: this isn't one of those mods that's a simple one-click install. If you want this big honkin' skyscraper looming over the Commonweath and reminding all that crane their necks up in wonder that you're a living god, you're doing to have to do some work. There are 24 different plugins (listed on its page at Nexus Mods) that you'll need to get your skyscraper running perfectly, including one from the Creation Club's interior decoration pack that you'll need to buy if you don't already own it. The modder also advises you not to turn on all the building's lights at once, because there are simply so many of them that your fps may suffer for it.

Still. Wow. It's certainly something to behold, and below you'll find some pictures to gawp at.

Sim Settlements is so good it should be an official part of the game, said Chris following the launch of kinggath's Fallout 4 settlers mod last year. It went on to win our Best Mod of 2017 and has since received an equally-impressive 'Rise of the Commonwealth' expansion. 

Now, IDEK's Logistics Station aims to "simplify [the] logistical concerns" of settlement maintenance, by creating an Industrial plot that automates supply lines and improves inter-settlement resource sharing. 

"Settlement networking sucks," says the mod's creator IDontEvenKnow. "Supply lines are annoying to set up, and even more annoying to redefine as you unlock more settlements. The standard system that shares food and water between settlements is just as happy to feed your settlers corn as it is your cache of Mirelurk Queen steaks. Collecting the surplus food, water and tax money that your settlements produce is tedious.

"To alleviate this, I created this mod. With Sim Settlements, your settlers are happy to build their own towns—why shouldn't they manage their own logistical needs as well?"

In practice, players assign settlers to each settlement's Logistics Station, who are in turn automatically assigned a caravan route to their nearest settlement. As your network grows, the mod lets your supply lines maintain efficient routes without additional input—and your supply lines will automatically arrange themselves to "produce a minimum spanning tree."That looks something like this:

Logistics Stations also redistributes resources in a more efficient manner against standard supply lines, which in turn is designed to maintain settler happiness. More information on that, as well how the mod handles storage and resource auto-collection, can be found via the mod's Nexus Mods page. 

For more on Fallout 4's Sim Settlements mod itself, check out Chris' words here. 

If you're looking to up your stealth game in Fallout 4, creep on over to Nexus Mods and slip the Tactical Distraction System mod into your bag of tricks. The mod lets you whistle or toss a bolt, creating a sound that will catch the attention of an enemy (or enemies) in the vicinity, luring them over.

These two features work a little differently. Whistling will lure an enemy over to the spot you whistled from, so you can either whistle and then scuttle away, or wait in place to take them out. Throwing a bolt, meanwhile, will lure the enemy to the location where the bolt hits the ground. It's a bit reminiscent of Metal Gear, or Hitman.

Your enemies won't be sitting ducks, modder FLipdeezy promises. They'll search around the area carefully, and they won't be distracted if they're already in combat.

The ability to whistle is automatically added as an inventory item upon installing the mod, while the bolts will need to be crafted at a chemistry station. Check out a video of the mod in action below.