Fallout 4: The Good - Art, Land, Architecture, Setting

Fallout 4 is a visual masterpiece in comparison to the rest of the franchise.  Hands-down it is the most interesting region that has ever been presented in terms of its localized architecture, art work, history and shows a good understanding not just of Boston and surrounding suburbs, but also of the Northeastern US in general.  The Commonwealth is expansive, filled with history and has many environmental stories that will cause the player to stop and just look at it to see if a way that the last moments of the region played out can be fit together.  Life continued on right to the moment the bombs dropped and not everyone took it seriously that the bombs were actually dropping.  The bank robbers that only have skeletons left and the duffel bags filled with cash, the man putting trash out in a dumpster, the couple that knew what was coming and spent their last moments together are all to be found in the setting of FO4 along with much, much more.

Under Bethesda the Fallout franchise has more starkly put a dark mirror up to the era of the 1930's to early 1960's, and utilizes the science fiction of that era to shift away from the movement to transistors and, instead, to the power of the atom as the source of beneficial progress.  Nuclear fission products did not supplant prior internal combustion power sources, be they power plants or vehicles.  Instead a hybrid economy arose, with the change from coal, natural gas, gasoline and diesel never being a complete process, although many industries did a complete change-over due to the advantages of compact nuclear power sources.  How such sources work doesn't need an in-depth explanation as, indeed, our world didn't go down that path nor make the discoveries that happened in that world.  The designs seen in-game show the remains of vehicles, industrial sites, homes and many other buildings that reflect multiple different forms of energy use to reflect this.  The Red Rocket Truck Stop would service gasoline, diesel, fission and fusion vehicles since they didn't service just trucks but personal vehicles like cars and motorcycles.  That rich history was shown to a lesser degree in Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, but it is to be seen throughout FO4.

Geography is not only stunning but used to demarcate regions of relative safety with the Northwestern part of the map, the player starting area, being one of the safer regions.  The Western Central part, just below it, is less safe and the more the player travels to the Southwest and then South the less safe and easy the world is to survive.  That southern most area is highly irradiated and still has the radiation of the bomb that went off there and the nuclear material from the power plant complex that were thrown into the environment.  That region called The Glowing Sea is in the Southern part of the map and it is much closer to what is seen in FO3 than anything else in the Commonwealth.  The Central portion of the map has relatively safe places that define it: Diamond City, Goodneighbor, Bunker Hill.  Within that region and just a bit around it to the south are some very hard to navigate regions full of the ruins of Boston itself.  The architecture of the Fallout franchise shines through with the skyscrapers all the way to row houses reflecting the cultural heritage left by generations of people living there.  To the Eastern Central out to Fort Strong things are a bit less stressful, but have definite hotspots of trouble to encounter.  Above that is the Northeastern region that is less full of hostiles but still treacherous.  The North Central is the transition zone of escalating hostility between the Northwest to the Northeast, and has its own perils to the furthest northern part of the map.

This form of zoning is only approximate, at best, to the player, but allows for a quick glance to help jog the memories of just where it is and what sort of threats can be found.  If you are north of the Charles River, then you'll see the ruins of Boston to the South and you are in a somewhat safer region if you can see the ruins of C.I.T., though Cambridge is a major concern just to the North.  Safety is relative and within each zone that is also true, as there are places of solitude and safety within even The Glowing Sea.

If there is any knock to this instance of the franchise, it must also be extended to the prior two under Bethesda: boarded up homes really just don't fit the world.  First who had the time and resources to board them up?  The nuclear attacks came out of the blue, unexpected and without warning, so no one had time to board them up before the bombs dropped.  After the bombs dropped there wouldn't be enough time, resources or food to board them up.  In-game lore shows that Raider gangs started forming within days of the bombs falling, and in our own world we have seen what happened within that same three days of Super Storm Sandy: individuals forming gangs, looting, threatening other people, and generally showing civilized activity to be a veneer that can easily be broken.  The Fallout universe had things less well constrained if the presence of addictive chems throughout the Commonwealth is any indication along the presence of a drug dealer in the cul-de-sac neighborhood of Sanctuary Hills showing just how deep the rot had spread.  Even military order didn't last more than a week or two, in the few places they were deployed.  After that, no one would bother to board up homes.  Yet they are a pervasive part of the landscape.  This is an instance where the design team kept with the Lore, but the Lore itself makes no sense.  Even worse are homes that aren't boarded up that have nothing of real interest in them, save a demonstration that there was a pre-war use of the home and possible post-war use, as well.

Boarded up homes are a minor quibble and an eyesore, only.  Where Bethesda shines is the Vaults of the Commonwealth and the corruption behind each of them.   Vault 114 was just a job to appease local mobs and unions, though it was set to be a social experiment of packing the rich and wealthy together in communal living arrangements.  That didn't happen, and post-war mobsters found the place to be a relative safe haven compared to the surface of the downtown.  Vault 111 was a cryogenic experiment that went on far longer than it was intended to go on, due to the internal breakdown of command and the lack of food.  Vault 75 was meant to breed child super soldiers, and used ruthless culling and genetic manipulation to try and achieve this end, until the super soldier children overpowered their superiors and left the Vault.  Vault 81 was meant to breed an omnicure to all diseases that could be harbored in molerats...mutant molerats provided by Vault-Tec.  Only an Overseer with a sense of scientific ethics and good morals stopped that, but condemned the researchers to die in isolation so that the rest of the Vault could survive.  Vault 95 was set up to provide a drug-free environment for junkies to rehabilitate them, and yet had an insider that would open up the door to a storage area full of enough drugs to last years.  The results were grim as the addictions so long kept at bay returned in force.  Just from the base game, these Vaults show a good understanding of how Vault-Tec did things, and while there are some instances of questionable Lore, the over-arching ideas remain.  The only thing missing from the mix, and there should have been at least one in the region, is a Vault with a Garden of Eden Creation Kit.  Still if you had that and a control Vault, then The Institute would never have happened the way it did as the technology of a GECK is far beyond anything even The Institute, as seen, could ever do, so you can understand why there isn't one near this major metropolitan area in terms of game setting.

When the Fallout franchise moved to Bethesda and became a first-person experience, the world changed and that meant a fully fleshed out and modeled world that held the remains of the pre-war world.  The Nuclear Age continued onwards in the Fallout universe and yielded a rich post-nuclear war setting that Bethesda Game Studios has enriched to make the world feel as if it was lived-in before the Great War.  The style has shifted in a subtle fashion between the Capitol Wasteland and the Commonwealth which is reflected in the urban and suburban environment.  The lack of a strong moral foundation promulgated by government and corporations, plus the promulgation of addictive substances means that after the Great War the lack of certain individual restraints was given free reign so that Raiders still continue to be a threat long after the centralized government fell.

What must be remembered is that with the retreat of the Roman Empire civilization became far more localized, and while the actual living standard of the entire population fell the necessity for strong local rulers shifted the focus of survival.  Geography played a part in some of this, so that peoples unified by local language and culture began to cohere as actual alliances and political entities.  Yet in some regions the localized rulers were always at odds with each other, and would remain so for centuries, which is why 'The German Question' of the early 19th century was pertinent as the region had a few larger political entities (Prussia and Bavaria) and dozens of Counties all of which meant that the regions was referred to as The Germanies. These regions did start to shift into common trade alliances and would finally be united after the Franco-Prussian war by treaty.  If Fallout is giving its setting a treatment similar to that of the collapse of centralized rule, then it is Fallout: New Vegas that shows the start of strong personalities attempting to pull off the creation of somewhat primitive new Nations from the wasteland in the form of Caesar's Legion.  Lack of societal cohesion in Fallout 4 can be attributed not just to the background factors but the active intervention of The Institute that killed off the Commonwealth Provisional Government.  For an organization that disdains the surface world and its population and claims that no one can touch it, that is an odd sort of behavior.

Yet it is that singular organization, The Institute, that gives one of the most visually interesting experiences in the Fallout franchise.  Once inside the architecture, lighting and so much else has a feel to it that can only be expressed in terms of cinema and movies.  On first sight my reaction was that of seeing a cross between The Shape of Things to Come (1936), Forbidden Planet (1956), and perhaps just a bit of Logan's Run (1976).  I've called it a showcase elsewhere and it is truly just that: a showcase of architecture and technology with a definite fetish for a sanitary environment that is unlike anything else ever seen in the franchise.  There is also an Orwellian vibe to the entire organization that is reflected in the use of synths doing menial tasks and Coursers patrolling the upper reaches of the interior.  After leaving the post-war world and functioning pre-war area, the presentation of The Institute is meant to inspire awe and overwhelm the PC and the player.  That singular time is one that is bound to stick in the minds of players as it is one of the most memorable visual pieces not of just Fallout 4 but the entire franchise.  It is a modern alt-history masterpiece with its own furniture design that is utilitarian, spartan, clean, neat and simple, yet fully in the utopian mode derived from the 1950's view of the future.  The Institute follows the view that only the best and brightest get to survive in safety, comfort and purposeful asceticism, while everyone else gets to be looked down upon by them for having to make a hard scrabble living in the wastelands.

With three out of four endings to the game having The Institute fall, there is an indication that this viewpoint and the meddling involved will see the destruction of this form of eclectic asceticism and that those who survive it will be unable to rebuild anything like it in the near future.  In many ways that is a sad sort of ending that loses such artistry.  It is a style locked in a bubble, however, isolated and secluded with a bent towards pleasing efficiency, and that is not the future of humanity.  In hanging on to ideals and going into seclusion The Institute creates a beautiful marvel, a showcase environment, and one that cannot withstand the hatred it has spread by its activities.

That other organization before the war, Vault-Tec, gets its own DLC and that one gives the design aesthetic of modular building used to create old world beauty.  Being able to build a Vault allows the player to think out just how an underground space that is to have a living society in it should be set up, and after many bad examples given by Vault-Tec it is possible to think out just what an expansive Vault requires.  The build area for what was to be Vault 88 is huge, far larger than any Vault ever seen in the franchise, and allows for this modular concept to gain its full scope of expression.  It is sad that the underground area is set up so as to break up the ability to build a unified Vault, and it is only with mods that allow the removal of pieces that were fully removable elsewhere can the actual underground can be made available in full.  If The Institute is the post-war utopian ideal, then the Vault is the pre-war survival and get by ideal made into a reality.  The Vaults have pre-war design power systems which do fail, in often spectacular ways either by lifespan or intent by Vault-Tec itself.  For all of that the ability to design something larger than The Institute and put into a play a fully functioning population framework that is self-sustaining and yet able to trade with the outside world gives a different experience and outlook to the player.  The design of Vaults is also future oriented, sanitary but less well lit than The Institute and has a definite industrial feel to it.  Modular industrial utilitarian which uses a grid layout for design rather than the circular layout of The Institute, which is done for end user building and simplicity but has an impact on design constraints.  With that said it is very possible to build a Vault larger than The Institute and with more reliable power supplies, plus a better layout for inhabitants and placing down job objects for them to work at.  The idea of Better Living Underground from Vault-Tec is realized in the DLC and gives a final piece for creating settlements that are fully enclosed environments easy to separate from the outside world and still be open to trade and interaction.

The Nuka World DLC brings forth the entire park as entertainment experience gone horribly wrong after the bombs dropped.  While the place is a total mess, with rides no longer working, the actual theme park has a good design concept behind it.  This does emulate parks in the common world between Fallout and our universe, namely that of the Disney brand complete with castle and everything.  Built long after those early parks, the stasis of culture is retained in full so that the 1950's size, style and culture show through the post-war mess.  It was my hope that the DLC would offer a way to rebuild all the rides and attractions, and slowly staff them with robots and personnel from the wasteland, but that was not to be.  Even after ridding it of the Raider gangs, a final unlock to clean up the park and remake it into something that would attract customers is not to be had.  There is no grand, unified workbench system like in the Vault-Tec DLC and the entire region features one, single place to build a settlement.  Bethesda may have had far grander ideas for this park, but it falls short of completing them.  With that said the design and layout of the park itself is excellent and continues on in the tradition of having separated areas for themed attractions: Kiddie Kingdom, Dry Rock Gulch, Safari Adventure, The Galactic Zone, and World of Refreshment.  Throughout the park the automated announcement system is stuck on its continual repeating cycle of announcements in each area, and the Nuka Cola machines with working screens still offer a cycle of Nuka Cola shorts featuring Bottle and Cappy.  Throw in the theme song for the park that the player may find themselves humming as they play, and has its own eerie ability to stick in the head long after leaving the game, and a complete cola-centered theme park experience is granted that is unlike anything else in the Fallout franchise.

The grand design layout and the way each area gets its own and separate treatment allows for the environment to tell much of the story and that story is backed by terminal entries found in the park.  The ghoulification of the workers in Kiddie Kingdom is recounted not just through terminals but actually recounted by a rare sentient Glowing One who organized the people as they became ghouls.  They watched friends and lovers go feral and felt the slow decline of their mental capacities, yet these people tended to those people and hoped that a cure might be found.  It is one of the saddest stories in Fallout 4, and yet, if you search thoroughly before the final encounter, it can offer a final if forlorn hope to the last sentient survivor who will then shut down the radiation sprayers in their zone for good.

Dry Rock Gulch is run by robots and was a refuge for some traders who tried to take refuge there when the Raider gangs moved in, and they were overcome by bloodworms.  The Robots continue on as if the war never happened and go about their daily routine oblivious to the lack of park personnel.  It is surreal in many ways to walk down the western oriented streets and see just how the old west of movies were captured in this one setting.

Safari Adventure has mutated creatures created post-war and the story of how a ghoulified survivor utilized truly high tech equipment to create living creatures to survive and then, finally, isolated and used FEV to create creatures that might defend the area is fascinating.  Too bad neither Institute nor Brotherhood are interested in Nuka World, but that would require thoroughly integrating the region into the Commonwealth instead of just making it a one-way street for Raiders to prey upon the Commonwealth.

The World of Refreshment with its River of Quantum Nuka-Cola (would that it were so!) has become the home to mutated Mirelurks called Nukalurks, as was the case in FO3.  That wonderful blue glow of the Nukalurks sets them apart from the rest of their kin in a visually interesting way.  The story garnered from the last day of the old world is one that allows for an understanding of what dedication to a job meant for so many on that Saturday morning, and the distant lights from the exploding bombs seen over the mountain tops told of its end.  Some people let the radiation kill them, others committed suicide and one or two tried to get back home.  This is the legacy of the old world and how it still had people with a work ethic.

Within the Galactic Zone are robots that have been put onto hairtrigger combat alert because their main control system had its Starcores removed from it.  Gathering those up from inside and outside the Galactic Zone can be a study in peril, yet, for all the hostility of the robots they can be deactivated.  Sadly Bethesda decided that the ranged Robotics Expert had to be a close range skill, thus removing the 'ranged' portion of it...thankfully mods put that back in and it is possible to control robots by aiming at them with manual sights and triggering the skill, just like you used to be able to do!  Instead of fighting the robots a goal of deactivating them one by one can allow for this entire area to slowly be made safe, though at the cost of XP since you don't get anything for just shutting robots down.  But it is the robots that make the Galactic Zone so enticing, beyond the smaller stories found within it.  Once enough Starcores are reinstalled to allow for the major segments of the robots to be put into a non-combat mode, and then the final one discovered, the entire Galactic Zone can be brought back online with all of the surviving robots to go about their mundane tasks and ignore the fact that there are no customers to serve.  As a player I had so hoped that the entire zone would become a build site that would allow for the creation of new robots to replace any I had to destroy, but that is not the case.

Outside the park, proper, there is a mystery mansion, a town dedicated to the personnel that staffed Nuka World, and the return of the Hubologists who are led by a visionary to Nuka World to receive the experience of a lifetime.  This environment is in keeping with the location of many theme parks being far away from cities and having a rural area around them, and mirrors our world in many ways due to this.  What may have been a lush grassland or somewhat swampy grassland has now become a dry place, with only the remnants of the swamp remaining where water still flows.  It is enclosed by mountains on all sides, so no walking back to the Commonwealth is possible, although many others have done so it is not something the PC can do.  It would have been nice to allow a different way to go through the park without the main story for it being active, but that is not the case.  Still nothing can detract from the fallen splendor of a theme park, and it is a shame that Bethesda, so set upon the VR experience, didn't make a way to repair all the rides in the park and even finish those that weren't completed.  If they did they would have a VR experience like none other available to the hardy wasteland explorer.

Far Harbor's DLC gives the setting of an island shrouded in a low level radioactive fog, and The Islanders pressed back from homesteads to the port town of Far Harbor.  Getting there requires a quest, and then taking an automated boat to The Island.  Like the Dragonborn DLC in Skyrim or Point Lookout in Fallout 3, this means getting a tour of the outer part of the harbor by the boat before docking and then becomes the game mechanic to go back and forth between the two areas.  The landscape is that of Maine, with swampy lowlands and rugged mountains, and some plateaus and coastal flatlands scattered throughout The Island.  Mutated creatures of The Island are unique to their environment and have those that drop from the tall trees or spring from the marsh and swamps, while others can be found on the coasts, including normal types of Mirelurks and a unique type known only to The Island, plus other creatures like the Fog Crawler.  A group of Super Mutants somehow got to The Island have taken over a few sites there.  Those that stay too long in the Fog become crazed Trappers, which are the Raiders of The Island.

For the design, Far Harbor gets very high marks in giving a quaint feeling to the main port, and the general feel of how The Island survived on the tourist trade prewar.  It was also home to a submarine base, recently taken over by The Children of Atom, and to a Vim! bottling plant, which was in fierce competition with Nuka Cola for survival.  Toss in  a lumber mill, older ports, and a ruined port taken over by Trappers, plus the main park in Acadia, and the pre-war conditions take shape, even in their ruins.  This is a setting with a feeling of dread and suspense behind it, and the rare clear day does nothing to dispel this feeling.  There are a few areas that can become settlements, and building on them means taking their unique geography into mind when doing so.  This single DLC offers a much stronger main story than the base game, and gives the player much agency in deciding the outcome of events for those on The Island.  The factions (Synth Refuge in Acadia, The Children of Atom at the sub base, and The Islanders at Far Harbor) have no requirements on them surviving and the game offers solutions ranging from a temporary truce and cease-fire to all-out annihilation of everyone.  What happens is up to the player, and though there is some nudging to follow the 'good' route, even that leaves a bad taste in the mouth: there are solutions to Far Harbor's problems but none of them are particularly 'good' and some are spectacularly 'bad'.

There is no way to do the creepy nature of Far Harbor justice without playing it.  For setting and story, plus boiling down the essentials of the base game story to something with a wider spectrum of solutions, Far Harbor actually outshines the base game in many particulars.  The major downfall within the settings is the platform and building minigame necessary to get to DiMA's memories, and anyone replaying the game will want to find the console commands for a PC to get past it the second time as it offers nothing new the second time through.  It gave me some headaches and that meant only being able to play for a few minutes and then doing something else while the game was paused.  I would have preferred a hacking game or perhaps going into locked library space off of the main base instead of that minigame.  Consider it the puzzle platform section of Fallout 4, and if you don't get a headache and like figuring out 3D puzzles, well, more power to you!  For everyone else, you may want to skip it on subsequent playthroughs.

Needless to say there is a Vault on Far Harbor, Vault 118.  It is perhaps the most humorous quest going through FO4, that being of an over-the-top murder mystery amongst people who had their brains put into Robobrain bodies.  Yes you can solve it with enough questions and observations, and find the real culprit!  Who you decide to finger and how you nail them (or even IF you want to do that) is up to you.  And lets just say there is one small section that, with a high Charisma, becomes available for those of you missing the robotic interlude concept.  Still this Vault is unlike anything else in Fallout, and was something diverted by the rich and powerful to get their own seclusion from the post-war world, and even undermined Vault-Tec's original concept but the new one got their approval.  I wish that was buildable after the Vault-Tec DLC but, sadly, it isn't.  I would have really liked to complete the design and offer The Islanders an opportunity of low class Better Living Underground which, actually, is far superior to their current arrangement.

Design and style considered, there isn't much to Automotron, although there could be so much more done with it.  Basically The Mechanist's Lair, from upper reaches to final living quarters should be one, integrated build zone and the player allowed to clean up the garbage and mess of the place.  The Mechanist would have done so learning robotics skills and assigning clean-up duties to robots as they were built, come to think of it...luckily there is a mod for that.  Without mods the Mechanist's Lair is an underwhelming place to build and actually very frustrating as its level design features no snappable components to work with.  The place needs a major overhaul and reworking, but doesn't need the Vault-Tec treatment, however, just the sort of work that is offered for build components that would allow the industrial theme to be re-utilized.  Beyond that the setting, with a few nice touches, is basically pre-war industrial going to slow ruins.

Overall Fallout 4 and its DLCs get high marks on artistry, creativity, and getting the settings done right.  The few quibbles are just that: quibbles.  Fallout 4 is visually in keeping with the franchise and yet suitably different to accentuate the regions it contains.  That is what anyone playing in the Fallout franchise under Bethesda wants to see, and it is done very well for this game.  Kudos to the design teams doing all this hard work!