Bethesda beefing it with a calamitous 'next-gen' Fallout 4 update just as everyone's falling in love with Fallout again is the most Bethesda thing imaginable

GamesRPGFallout 4Bethesda beefing it with a calamitous ‘next-gen’ Fallout 4 update just as everyone’s falling in love with Fallout again is the most Bethesda thing imaginableWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: GOG.com)

Vault Boy demonstrates how to duck and cover

In a week where Escape from Tarkov dev Battlestate Gamesfunctionally pressed the self-destruct buttonon years of success and community goodwill with an insulting $250 package for an unfinished game, it’s hard to imagine there being competition for the most unnecessary self-own in the industry.And yet: Bethesda Game Studios, riding high on a wave of goodwill for the Fallout series after the smash hit show,broke many of the mods in Fallout 4⁠—a game that still boasts a colossally popular mod scene nine years on⁠—in order to roll out a “next-generation” update that hardly changes anything.

Next-gen?

(Image credit: Bethesda Softworks)

Fallout 4 next-gen update screenshot - nail gun

What is ‘next-gen’ about this update?

Perhaps most crucially for this “next-gen” update:no graphical upgrades or changes on PC. There’s not even a token ray tracing option that you’ll never turn on. What is “next-gen” about this update? This patch is a normal-sized, dare I say it,smallupdate that fails to justify the amount of disruption it’s caused.

The patch also adds some small, free DLC⁠—user made as part of Bethesda’sCreation Clubpaid mod initiative⁠—but we’re effectively getting these quests and items at the expense of a vast library of free quests, items, QoL fixes, and more. If I had to choose between a small pack of “premium” goodies or access to a functionally infinite well of user-generated content, I would absolutely go for the latter every time, but as with the rest of the patch, nothing about these added Creation Club bits and bobs justifies the upheaval⁠—we shouldn’thaveto choose.

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I know that busted updates, borked mods, and other vagaries of game development shouldn’t be taken personally: they’re the result of people’s day jobs, workplace incentives, institutional inertia, things that we all experience or are guilty of from time to time. Over two years ago, Bethesda greenlit a Fallout 4 patch that seems to have languished in Starfield’s shadow before getting rammed into the game last week. But man, dealing with this thingfeelsinsulting.

Bethesda has courted its mod community and seems to understand the role it plays in these games' staying power. And yet, here we are, nine years on, with a library of nearly 50,000 Fallout 4 mods (that’s just on the Nexus) in limbo. Future projects will adapt to the new patch⁠—the authors of the essentialScript Extenderare still working on a fix⁠—but what about abandoned mods? That one project you just adore that last saw some love in 2017 before its author got a job and started a family?

Unless Bethesda rolls back the patch itself, or finds some way to fix its compatibility with past mod projects, I worry that we risk a split mod scene, with arollback version of the gamethe only way to play some great older mods.

We’d have been better off if Bethesda had just left well enough alone on PC.

(Image credit: Prime TV)

Vault overseer

I think that a perception of insult, no matter how unintentional, goes a long way to explaining how fan resentment can boil over into the memetic Bethesda hate I mentioned earlier. There was even a kernel of worthwhile criticism to the otherwise-odious discourse about theFallout show’s take on the series timeline.

I don’t care about timeline discrepancies or what have you, but as PCG news writer Joshua Wolens argued, there’s a frustrating, powerless feeling to seeing artists diminish what you love about a fictional world as they take it over and modify it⁠—in this case, the enforcement of apermanent Fallout 4-flavored status quotaking priority over moving the world forward in the ways that Fallout 2 and New Vegas did.

There really was just no need for this sour finish to what’s otherwise been an incredible few weeks for Fallout, thematic criticism aside. Whatever tweaks might have been needed for PS5 or Xbox Series support, we’d have been better off if Bethesda had just left well enough alone on PC. Now a huge driver of Fallout 4’s popularity and decade-long staying power has been thrown into disarray over an update that would hardly be noteworthy were it not for all the problems it’s caused.

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