A few months on, having devoted over 180 hours to a single play-through of the game, I thought it might be the right time to reflect on the impact settlement building has on this latest incarnation of the Fallout universe.Īlex Wiltshire convincingly argued on these pages that Fallout 4’s Commonwealth hasn’t really moved on as much as you would expect it to have done in the intervening 210 years since the bombs dropped. I had only just started the game then but had suggested that any serious focus on the settlement building element was a case of Nero fiddling while Rome burns, given that you really should be making more of an effort to track down your only child who’s been kidnapped in front of your eyes. No one could accuse me of having commitment issues.īack in November I wrote on this site about the joy of homes and hubs in videogames, introducing the piece by saying how excited I was at the prospect of getting to grips with Fallout 4’s expansive settlement building system. Before I can reverse out of the conversation, Preston’s blurting out details of yet another bunch of needy swines in need of a saviour.Īnd yet for all my cursing and hollow threats, I still trudge off to wherever it is he’s asked me to go, like some obedient, rifle-toting Stepford Wife, this reaction being all the more ridiculous for the fact that I’d already finished the main story and its side quests fifteen hours beforehand. Some impulse that would have been better left ignored makes me tap E, prompting my character, Halle, to tell him how she’s just cleared out her 235th batch of Raiders from the Federal Ration Stockpile. I’ve just fast travelled back to Sanctuary Hills, my home of choice in Fallout 4, and after storing my junk in the workshop I accidentally bump into Preston who’s pretending to do something useful to a tato plant. I swear, if Minutemen stalwart Preston Garvey gives me one more unsolicited quest to go and rescue one of the dopey bastards from Abernathy Farm who’s managed to get themselves kidnapped again, I’m going to punch a hole clean through my monitor and send the repair bill to Bethesda. Thanks to the settlement construction system, he hoped to find a home in the ruins of the old world, and as the game's expansions draw closer, these reflections on the game's building and management features capture a world on the verge of another dramatic shift.
Jonathan Morcom has spent almost two hundred hours with a single Fallout 4 character.
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