At this point in time many people are enjoying their time with the newly released Fallout 4. I was, up until two nights ago when I last played. Bethesda RPGs are known to be a little janky, and it makes sense that they are. The scope of the worlds they create are unparalleled, so when people don't look at you while talking, or float a little too far off the ground it's kind of funny.
There's another type of jank that Bethesda games bring to the table that's not quite as funny, and at this point has me considering whether or not I should continue to play the game. The last time I played I found myself in a building with a lot of security in it. Many terminals to hack and robots to loot. I did my business, and then made a save. I then continued to do a few more things and made a quick save. There was an elevator to another part of the building, which I then took up. At the top I got gunned down by an assault robot I had never seen before. That's fine, I can just load my last save and go back there. Wrong!
Upon loading the game I go back into the elevator and hit the button to go back up to the top of the building. Immediately the frame rate drops below ten and continues to chug for a few minutes. The game eventually went back up to speed, but the elevator kept on going. I waited a minute and it still didn't stop. No big deal right? That kind of stuff can happen when a game has so many moving parts. Giving it the benefit of the doubt I load again, and it does the same thing. I load a third time and the game crashes to the main menu of the PlayStation telling me that an error occured and the game had to close. Cool!
What made me even more angry was that the PlayStation then told me I should try updating the game, There is no update. When a game crashes like that, especially on a console it kills all of my motivation. So I just turned off the PS4 and went about my life doing other things. Earlier today I booted it back up. I tried the elevator again hoping that it would work, but once again the frame rate chugged and when it came back up to speed the elevator never stopped.
Fine. I decided to give up on the building. I open the door to go back out into the wasteland and the game crashes! Oh sweet! So now I can't go up in the elevator, or get out of this building without the game breaking. Amazing!
This wouldn't be nearly as frustrating if my last save wasn't far before this point. People always recommend making multiple saves and saving often, but I had two saves very near to each other that are now both unusable. The autosave system also only works after ten minutes go by and you look at your pip boy, or you eneter a building. Surprise, I hadn't looked at my pip boy in a long time, and the most recent autosave is in the building that crashes the game when I try to leave it! Yes, I can go back to a save that was a half hour or so before this point, but now I'm always going to be worried that the game is going to break in spectacular fashion.
I realize that these kinds of things don't happen to everyone, but when they do they're devastating. There is a very real scenario in which I would have had to start the game all over after playing for over twenty hours.
I know that the amount of variables in Bethesda RPGs make them nearly impossible to playtest, but this kind of stuff is ridiculous. Maybe a patch will come out eventually to un-break this building, but will I still care then? Who can say?
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