Fallout 4

• 1. Introduction

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  Fallout 4 begins on the 23rd of October 2077, the day the nuclear bombs fall. The 2015 action role-playing game comes from Bethesda Game Studios, and it is the fourth main entry in the Fallout series. Earlier games in the series start long after the war is over. This one opens on the day the old world ends, then leaps across a huge span of time. Who is the parent searching a ruined Boston for a missing child, and what do they find there? How did Bethesda build the world around them? And what happened once millions of copies reached players?

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• 2. A Retro-Future Boston

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  The year is 2287, ten years after the events of Fallout 3, and the region players explore is called the Commonwealth. It covers the American city of Boston and the Massachusetts land around it. Two hundred and ten years have passed since the Great War, the nuclear holocaust that ended a conflict between the United States and China over natural resources.

  Diners and drive-in theaters dot an alternate history that kept the look of the 1940s and 1950s while technology moved in the directions that era imagined. Society in this version of the past produced laser weapons, gene manipulation and nearly autonomous artificial intelligence. Yet it still runs on atomic power and vacuum tubes, with integrated circuits mixed in. Architecture, advertising and daily habits look much as they did in the 1950s, and children play with robotic rocking horses.

  After the war, money is the bottle cap, usually just called a cap. The most striking relics of the old world are the Vaults, high-tech fallout shelters. One of them, Vault 111, is where the story proper begins.

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• 3. The Search for Shaun

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  A Vault-Tec representative signs a family up for Vault 111 just before the bombs drop. The family is the baby Shaun and either a husband named Nate or a wife named Nora, depending on the sex the player chooses. Inside the vault, they are tricked into cryogenic pods and frozen alive. A century and a half later, the spouse is killed and Shaun is taken away by a mysterious group. When the life support system malfunctions, the protagonist thaws out and finds every other resident dead. This character becomes known as the Sole Survivor.

  Back at the old home, the family's former robot butler, Codsworth, greets the Sole Survivor and suggests heading to the nearby town of Concord. There the Sole Survivor befriends a dog named Dogmeat and meets Preston Garvey, a member of a revived Minutemen. In Diamond City, a settlement built inside Fenway Park, the Sole Survivor hears about the Institute. This organization terrifies the Commonwealth by kidnapping people and replacing them with synths, humanoid robots that look exactly like real humans.

  The Sole Survivor rescues Nick Valentine, a prototype synth working as a private detective. The trail then leads to the mercenary Conrad Kellogg, who killed the Sole Survivor's spouse. Kellogg is hunted down and killed, but with his last words he reveals that Shaun is inside the Institute. Meanwhile the Brotherhood of Steel reaches the Commonwealth from the Capital Wasteland aboard a modified airship, led by Elder Arthur Maxson.

  A cybernetic device taken from Kellogg's brain lets Dr. Amari, a brain specialist, help the Sole Survivor read his memories. They show that the only way into the Institute is teleportation. Brian Virgil, a former Institute scientist, supplies schematics for a large teleportation device. The Railroad, led by Desdemona, helps the Sole Survivor obtain a teleportation chip and have it decoded. Once the device is built, the Sole Survivor steps inside the Institute.

  There, a much older Shaun serves as the Institute's director. He explains that his abduction 60 years earlier was part of a synth experiment, chosen because his pre-war DNA was uncorrupted. Four groups now stand ready for war. The Institute is a secretive technocratic society that grew from the former Commonwealth Institute of Technology and specializes in building synths. The Brotherhood of Steel is a quasi-religious paramilitary that wants to regulate advanced technology. The Minutemen are a militia that protects settlements in need. The Railroad is an underground organization that wants to rescue synths from the Institute.

  With the Minutemen, Preston Garvey promotes the player to General and the group retakes its old base. After repelling an Institute attack, the player slips back in and blows up the reactor, killing Shaun and everyone else. Joining the Brotherhood means destroying the Railroad, since helping synths clashes with the Brotherhood's ideology. A massive robot called Liberty Prime then leads the way into the Institute, where the reactor is again destroyed. With the Railroad, the player works for the Institute while secretly organizing a synth rebellion. After wrecking the Brotherhood's airship, the player assaults the Institute, frees the synths and destroys the reactor.

  Siding with the Institute is the only path that spares Shaun from the explosion. He is dying of cancer and wants the Sole Survivor to succeed him as director. The Sole Survivor destroys the Brotherhood's airship and massacres the Railroad's headquarters, and Shaun then dies peacefully.

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• 4. Companions

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  Thirteen companions can travel with the Sole Survivor, but only one may come along at a time. Dogmeat, a loyal German Shepherd, is the only mandatory companion. Six others must at least be encountered during the story. They are Codsworth, Nick Valentine, Preston Garvey, Deacon, a Railroad agent, John Hancock, the mayor of Goodneighbor, and Piper Wright, an intrepid reporter.

  The other six are optional. Cait is an Irish-descended cage fighter, and Curie is a robotic scientist. Danse is a Paladin of the Brotherhood of Steel, and Robert MacCready is a mercenary. Strong is a Super Mutant who is sympathetic to humans, and X6-88 is an Institute Courser.

  A companion can act on the player's behalf. If the Sole Survivor lacks the skill to hack a terminal or pick a lock, the companion can be ordered to do it. Every companion except Dogmeat judges the player's choices and reacts in one of four ways: love, like, dislike or hate. Those reactions raise or lower a score called affinity.

  At an affinity of 1,000 points, a companion idolizes the Sole Survivor and grants a specific perk. A companion whose affinity falls low enough leaves the player's service for good, and some actions turn one hostile on sight. Seven companions become romance options once they idolize the player, whatever the player character's gender. They are Cait, Curie, Danse, Hancock, MacCready, Piper and Preston. Curie can be romanced only after her mind is moved into a synth body.

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• 5. Settlements and Combat

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  More than 50 guns fill the game, and over 700 modifications let players reshape them with parts such as receivers, barrel types and laser focuses. The gun handling was done by id Software, unlike in Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. The camera can switch between first-person and third-person views. Armor now comes in layers. The crafting system covers every object in the game that the player can loot, so scavenged junk becomes explosives, weapon upgrades or building material.

  The T-45 power armor was redesigned to behave more like a vehicle than a suit. It runs best on battery-like fusion cores, and players can add a jet pack or choose separate armor plating for each part.

  Settlements are the biggest new feature in the series. The player can break down many objects and structures and reuse the raw materials to build freely. Power lines carry working electricity. Merchants and other non-player characters move in, and the player must feed them by planting food in makeshift patches and building water pumps. Turrets, traps and bombs defend against random attacks. A happiness meter rises as the player meets needs such as food, water, beds, defense and power. Extras like a Barber Chair and a Trading Stand raise it further.

  The Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System, or V.A.T.S., returns with a change. It now slows real-time combat instead of stopping it, and the action plays out from varying camera angles in a computer-graphics version of bullet time. Each shot spends Action Points, so the player can do only so much in a given moment. Attacks can target single body parts. A headshot can kill quickly or blind, a shot to the legs slows an enemy, and shooting a weapon disarms its owner. Critical hits are now triggered by hand through V.A.T.S. rather than by random chance.

  The Pip-Boy is a personal computing device strapped to the player character's wrist. It shows statistics, maps and collected items, and it plays game cartridges called Holotapes. A downloadable app for iOS, Android and Windows devices can show the Pip-Boy on a second screen. Character growth runs through S.P.E.C.I.A.L., seven statistics: strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility and luck. About 275 perks are available to earn. Fast travel is disabled in Survival Difficulty. The soft level cap sits at 65535, and the game keeps going after the main story ends.

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• 6. Making the Wasteland

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  Plans for Fallout 4 took shape in 2009, when director Todd Howard wanted to explore the Fallout world before the bombs fell. A team started that year, including Istvan Pely, lead artist of Fallout 3, once he finished that game's downloadable add-ons. The studio's full attention then went to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. It came out in 2011, and Bethesda kept supporting it with updates until 2013. Fallout 4 entered full production from mid-2013 to mid-2015.

  The Creation Engine, first built for Skyrim, replaced the Gamebryo engine used in Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. Dynamic lighting lets any structure or item cast shadows, and Howard pointed to god rays and volumetric lighting at the E3 2015 press conference. The engine adds motion blur, temporal anti-aliasing, height fog, dynamic dismemberment and screen space reflections. Bethesda explained one effect this way: "When a rain storm rolls in, our new material system allows the surfaces of the world to get wet, and a new cloth simulation system makes cloth, hair, and vegetation blow in the wind." The company said the game would run at 1080p and 30 frames per second on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

  The character editor dropped the sliders of earlier games. Players click and drag each facial feature, and the character can be a man or a woman. For the first time in the series, the protagonist is fully voiced, including every decision-based dialogue option. Brian T. Delaney and Courtenay Taylor play the two versions of the Sole Survivor, and the dialogue system holds 111,000 lines.

  Conversations are looser than in Fallout 3. The camera can move from first-person to a cinematic third-person view, and players can back out at any time. In Howard's words, "You are free to walk away anytime if you want, or you can even shoot him in the face."

  Howard said that PC mods would work on the Xbox One version, and the team hoped to bring them to PlayStation 4. Asked about the failed attempt at paid mods for Skyrim, he said Bethesda had no plans for a similar effort here. Mods made with the Creation Kit reached Xbox One in May 2016 and PlayStation 4 in November 2016.

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• 7. Launch and Verdicts

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  On the 2nd of June 2015, Bethesda posted a countdown timer set to expire at 14:00 UTC on the 3rd of June. The game's website went live slightly early, showing the box art and platforms, then disappeared and returned at the scheduled time. The trailer arrived when the countdown ended, and it confirmed the setting of Boston and the Massachusetts countryside. More details followed at Bethesda's E3 press conference on the 14th of June 2015.

  Pre-orders opened right after the announcement. A collector's edition included a wearable replica of the Pip-Boy that could hold a smartphone running the second-screen app. Windows pre-orders also earned an announcer pack for Dota 2 featuring the voice of Mister Handy. Bethesda said the game had gone gold on the 23rd of October 2015. It reached Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on the 10th of November 2015.

  On Steam, Fallout 4 sold 1.2 million units in its first 24 hours, and digital sales beat physical ones on day one. Almost 470,000 players were online at once on launch day. That broke the record held by Grand Theft Auto V for a Steam game not developed by Valve Corporation. Bethesda shipped 12 million units to retailers in the same first day. In February 2017, Pete Hines said the game had outsold Skyrim over the same period, though he gave no number.

  Metacritic described reviews on all three platforms as generally favorable. GameSpot's Peter Brown gave a 9 out of 10 and called it "an argument for substance over style and an excellent addition to the revered open-world series." Andrew Reiner of Game Informer also gave a 9 and wrote, "Bethesda has created another game you can lose your life in." IGN's Dan Stapleton scored it 9.5. Phil Savage of PC Gamer called it "a loving production." Polygon matched the 9.5, while Destructoid gave 7.5 and said many of the series' signature problems had carried over. Critics praised the depth of the world, player freedom, crafting, story, characters and soundtrack. Complaints focused on simplified role-playing elements and technical issues.

  The awards followed. Fallout 4 took Game of the Year at the 19th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards and the 12th British Academy Games Awards. The Game Critics Awards and the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences named it Role-Playing Game of the Year. GameSpot placed it sixth on its list of the best games of 2015, and GamesRadar placed it fourth.

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• 8. Patches, Add-ons, Disputes

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  Patch 1.2 improved the frame rate and fixed early bugs, but it interfered with unofficial mod support. Patch 1.3 improved graphics on all platforms and added a status menu for settlers. Patch 1.4 prepared the game for the Creation Kit and the add-ons, and patch 1.5 brought a revamped survival mode. Fans also published unofficial patches for problems the official ones left alone.

  On the 16th of February 2016, Bethesda announced details for the first three add-ons. Automatron, released on the 22nd of March 2016, lets players build a custom robot companion from parts. Wasteland Workshop followed on the 12th of April 2016 with new settlement options, including cages for captured creatures or humans. Far Harbor, a story expansion set in Far Harbor, Maine, arrived on the 19th of May 2016.

  At E3 2016, Bethesda revealed three more packages. Contraptions Workshop came out on the 21st of June 2016, and Vault-Tec Workshop, which adds a brief narrative, followed on the 26th of July 2016. Nuka-World, released on the 30th of August 2016, sends players to an amusement park run by three raider groups. The Operators chase wealth, the Disciples favor brutal close-quarters violence, and the Pack has a primal, zoo-inspired identity. Players who side with the raiders can conquer settlements across the Commonwealth.

  Bethesda also announced a virtual reality mode at E3 2016, and Fallout 4 VR launched as a stand-alone game on the 4th of December 2017 for PC on the HTC Vive. At E3 2017, the studio announced Creation Club, an in-game system for buying custom additions, and it went live in August 2017. A performance update announced in December 2022 was delayed and reworked into native versions for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. It arrived on the 25th of April 2024 with ultrawide support for PC. It also broke mod support, caused interface problems in ultrawide mode, stopped Quality mode on Xbox and wiped Steam Deck settings.

  Two legal fights followed the game. Commercials featured the 1961 song "The Wanderer," sung by Dion DiMucci, whose contract let him deny the song's use if he disliked the ads. He sued ZeniMax Media, Bethesda Softworks' holding company, demanding the ads come down and $1 million USD in damages. He said they "featured repeated homicides in a dark, dystopian landscape, where violence is glorified as sport." A 2019 class action then argued that the Season Pass was sold as covering "all of the Fallout 4 DLC we ever do." Creation Club arrived later, and Season Pass holders would have to pay for it. The plaintiffs even sought an injunction against Microsoft's planned acquisition of ZeniMax.

  Fallout 4: Anniversary Edition was announced on the 23rd of October 2025 and released on the 10th of November 2025 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Windows. It bundles the base game, its add-ons and the earlier Creation Club releases. Reviews were mostly negative, since the new items looked unnecessary, poorly designed and mostly cosmetic, and they broke popular mods. A Nintendo Switch 2 version followed on the 24th of February 2026.

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