The Incident at Abernathy’s Farm
I was replaying Fallout 4. I took my hundreds of hours of playing Fallout 76, and applied it to 4, and ended up having a really good time, getting myself leveled up. Also, I was really enjoying how nice the game looked, after the eyesore that is 76.
But then I made a mistake and decided to follow the story. This didn’t seem like a mistake at the time. I rescued Nick Valentine, found Kellogg, waded through his memories, and then slogged all the way out to Virgil before it felt like a mistake. I actually really liked the section with Kellogg—it was a little one-note, but it was well done, and you don’t often do a deep dive into an enemy character’s back story like that.
The problem was that the story really deflated my drive to keep going. What seemed imperative when we started was revealed to be wrong. I could start to see where part of the drama was heading, and I didn’t really want to go there. So to slog all the way out to Virgil and have him effectively tell me that the princess was in another castle was a let down.
To make things worse, I had to fast travel home. Getting to Virgil ruined my power armor, and there wasn’t any way to fix it where he was. Getting home would be even harder than getting there, or I could just magically appear on the other side of the map. Look, I get it, you walk back and forth across the same spots on the map, you’ve seen it, you’ve done it, you’re just wasting time by walking, but I really prefer walking to fast travel. It feels more immersive, especially when you make the decision to go somewhere on the other side of the map. It was a habit I got into while playing Fallout 76, where fast travel cost caps, and I had, at the time, plenty of other things to spend my caps on.
Things would be simpler if the Creation Engine could handle rendering things faster than a character can run, but sadly, it can’t. The drop-out and draw-in are really jaw-dropping, when you think about it, considering that this is on the PS4. 4 is better than 76, in that 4 maintains a high draw distance and high resolution textures, which in my mind means the engine went backwards with 76, since it came out later. 76 does have the added stress of having to be online and multiplayer, but even 4 struggles to keep up with a character moving at the default full-speed trot.
Anyway, fast traveling home left a bad taste in my mouth, and after I repaired everything, I didn’t really feel like pushing forward on the main quest any more. I started poking around close to home, and ended up at the Abernathy Farm for the first time in the game. The Abernathy’s were friendly enough, and asked me to find their daughter’s locket. Since I was looking for something to do, I agreed. We started to part on good terms, but then things went south.
A pack of super mutants attacked the farm. I jumped in to help them defend it. One of the settlers decided it would be a good idea to attack one of the super mutants with a pitchfork by jumping in front of my shotgun, and suddenly the Abernathy’s were attacking me as well as the super mutants. Even once the mutants were gone, the Abernathy’s kept attacking me, chasing me as I tried to run away. I made the mistake of trying to stop and talk to them, see if we could resolve it, but ended up killing all of them.
It’s just one farm, one quest. I was still able to claim the Abernathy Farm as a settlement, so all I really lost was the quest. Still, it really took the wind out of my sails. I walked up to the top of the Abernathy farmhouse to the look out rail, and took a seat and stared out into the rainy night before signing off. I haven’t signed on since.
I’ve been thinking a lot about these Creation Engine games lately. On one hand, they seem perfect for me with their open-ended nature. I love being able to go anywhere and do anything and get to write my own story. And I could do that in 76 while I was leveling. What I thought the promise of 76 was going to be was that you could explore and level without having to follow a story, without having to do missions that hinge around a four choice conversation tree. I don’t want to do someone else’s interactive story. I want to create my own story organically, and I was able to do that, to an extent in 76.
But now the four choice tree is back in 76 with the Wastelanders update, and the space that was mine to build and explore is gone, now filled with chattering NPCs who all say the same three lines in different voices. The last part of the 76 experiment is over, and it is now just a Fallout-themed MMO, like the Elder Scrolls Online, complete with the monthly subscription. And maybe that’s what it should have been from the start.
Maybe the world that I enjoyed, exploring and trying to unravel the mystery of why there were no other people, just monsters, would have been better served as a single player, offline game. Because there was a weirdness to the missions that you would find, this disconnect between being in a shared world with other players and having missions that felt unique. You can really feel the difference going back to 4. When you complete a mission in 4, it’s done, and then world has been changed. You can come back, and things will still be changed. What you do has an impact on the world, but the world doesn’t keep growing. Those bodies will be lying in the street for a good part of the game, maybe the whole game, I don’t know, I’ve never played it all the way through.
In 76, while you would get rewards for missions, they didn’t impact the world because they couldn’t impact the world because you share that world with other players. This is the problem with every MMO that has these old-school RPG missions in them. What I would like is a dynamic world that reacts to my actions but keeps moving without me without this tightly constrained story structure that dates back to the dawn of computer gaming, when the best we could do was a multiple choice menu. I want someone to take the experiment that was attempted with 76 and carry it all the way through, not give up on it and go back to what’s safe.