Alternatively, you could turn on the heater and smoke him out.

So, Fallout 4 is out! People have been asking for my opinion on it, but I'm going to pass on the game. This is probably why people call me an elitist gaming hipster, but there's just not a single thing about Fallout 4 that appeals to me. It just looks awful to me, both as any other video game AND as a Fallout game. Now, I'm not going to lie and say I'm the biggest Fallout fan, because I'm not. Despite reading all about them, I've never even played 1 and 2, so I can't even fall back on "It's not like the old games, so it sucks!". However, I DID play Fallout 3 and New Vegas, and while I hated Fallout 3, I loved everything about New Vegas. Everything about that world is so wonderfully well-written, well thought-out, fully-realized. The characters are down-to-earth, every quest is interesting, the game excels at environmental story-telling, and god I love how the factions are done, how everything culminates into this one event with you as the center-piece influencing what happens. It's one of the best written games I've ever played, and really, I just want more of that game. It's not a perfect game, by any means. It's severely hampered by some really obvious cut content and the gamebryo engine is just terrible, but with what they had to work with, Obsidian made an incredibly solid game. 

Fallout 4 seems to have done away with just about everything I liked about New Vegas. I loved how much of a blank slate the courier was in New Vegas. Your backstory is simply "you're basically a mailman who got shot in the face during a routine delivery in the wasteland". Once you're back on your feet, you're free to do anything you want and tell the story you want. Despite being shot in the face, you're never "forced" to seek revenge on your shooter. You still have a delivery to make, sure, that's determined for you since it's your job, but the way your character feels about the situation, the way your courier goes about its mission, and the events that transpire are all firmly in your control. Your courier doesn't have any backstory, so it could be whatever you want it to be. With Fallout 4, so much is determined for you. You start out in a happy, nuclear (haha) family in a nice house with a robot before things go to shit. Your character, male or female, is fully voiced throughout the game and constantly reiterating how you should be feeling about things or making inane comments about the world. There's no room for a blank slate here. New Vegas gave you the tools to make your character whatever you wanted them to be, with the one restriction being that they were a courier. With the right look and perks, you could make it so your courier was a gay former tribal raider who turned legit and put their skills to use as a courier, and it would be convincing. In Fallout 4, you can't really do any of those things. You're stuck as a straight family man/woman with a white person's voice no matter what, and you can only affect small things afterwards like whether or not they like or hate newspapers or other little irrelevant things. 

New Vegas's story is also commendable because there's no "twist" that ruins your story experience if you know about it beforehand. There's no shocking reveal at the end, there's no two-sentence statement that counts as some major spoiler to ruin everything. From beginning to end, it's just an enjoyable, well-written journey that keeps you engaged at all times in a believable world. Fallout 4, much like Fallout 3, puts writing and story on the backburner, but with Fallout 4 there's a particularly stupid twist that people have been so eager to share. I won't tell you what it is, of course. I might not like the game but I'm not going to be a dick about it. But the fact that what little story there is stupid as hell doesn't bode well for a series that's typically rich in story-telling. If they're dialing back the role-playing elements and dumbing down the story, then what's there to interest me?

I've got a million other little complaints. Charisma checks are back to Fallout 3's random percentage-based attempts, instead of New Vegas's great system where your dialogue prompts actually change to reflect your low speech skill. So instead, your character will just say the exact same line but it will just randomly pass or fail based on your charisma level. I hate the dialogue wheel (the only time where a dialogue wheel has worked well in a game is in Deus Ex: Human Revolution). There's no low-intelligent dialogue like in 1/2/New Vegas, so you can't do a caveman run of Fallout 4. From what I've seen of the first hour, the pacing is all over the place. You're killing Deathclaws mere moments after hitting the wasteland, for fuck's sakel. So many assets and mechanics are just directly lifted from Skyrim. The majority of the new features seems to be directly lifted from the modding community of the past games. And of course, as what has now become tradition with Bethesda games, it's a buggy mess. I'm not sure why the gaming community gives them a free pass every damn time when other games like Arkham Knight and Assassin's Creed Unity are burnt at the stake for glitches, but the blind eye that gamers and journalists alike give Bethesda is ridiculous and hypocritical.

So no, I'm not going to play Fallout 4. I'm too wary from Bethesda's past mistakes and there's just nothing in it that I find appealing, even as a Fallout fan. Am I missing out on some fun stuff? Maybe, but I just don't care to find out when all my favorite elements of the past game have been stripped out. Xenoblade Chronicles X is coming out in a month and that looks like a good open-world action-RPG that's way more up my alley. For those that are playing it, I do hope you're enjoying it. Don't think I'm telling you you can't. I'm just telling you why I wouldn't.

SEE YOU ON FRIDAY!