I buckled in and decided that I really needed to go ahead and push onward with Fallout 4 seeing as how the game was very nearly coming to a conclusion, or at least as far as the main story is concerned. Just like Fallouts I have played in the past I could tell that we were nearing the end of the story and I figured "there's no way it can be harder than the previous mission where the difficulty spiked massively" and I was correct.
That Castle defending mission seems to have been an anomaly, and as it turns out, that anomaly was a completely optional one anyway - I just didn't realize it at the time.
Just like every Fallout game that I have ever played, this one presents you with some tough choices to make as far as how you pursue the "end" of the story is concerned. No matter what you do, you have to completely screw over some people that at one point or another they trusted you, took you in, and depended on you for help. You developed a bit of a bond with whoever you decide to screw over in the end, but there is no way around it.
The fun part of this game is that it is completely up to you which organization you are going to side with, but the end result for whoever it is that you decided to screw over, is still pretty tragic.
In "Nuclear Option" things start out in a frustrating fashion and I am disappointed in myself that I will admit that I used the ol' internet to get me started in the correct direction because the only thing you are told about where you actually start this mission is that the entrance is underwater and then you get given a very approximate location as to where that underwater entrance might be.
If you are in power armor (and you really should be if you don't want to get worked hard in a firefight) you move extremely slow underwater even though you are never going to run out of air. It's just boring wandering the length of the river looking for a giant pipe and I quickly grew very tired of this and just looked it up online.
After that point though, the game thankfully returns to a difficulty level that it was at before that dreaded Castle Defense level and things are more normal. It's actually really fun because you have a bunch of soldiers that come along with you when you invade the Institute. It's a good thing too because the layout of the Institute being circular and going on for what seems like forever results in you not really knowing which direction you are supposed to head in during most of the things that happen.
I dealt with it though, although I can tell after 40 hours of gameplay or so, that I am kind of over the game and ready for it to end.
I admit that running into "Father" towards the part where you have to plant explosives in the reactor is pretty tragic. Because this guy has always been nice to you and as you find out during the story, he is actually your son. I think Bethesda did this definitely on purpose, forcing you to make a really horrible decision to kill your own child in order to progress.
You keep justifying it by reminding yourself that the Institute kidnaps people from the surface, tortures them, kills them, then replaces them with "better" synthetic equivalents. They have also ruled with an iron fist in the areas they do control and do not help humanity on the surface even though they probably could have. So when you blow them all up at the end (which you have to do) it does feel a bit sad when the "end" sequence rolls and shows that the Commonwealth will remain a wasteland of sorts because you are choosing to eliminate the most advanced (by far) organization that exists on Earth.
Even the annoying Preston Garvey tries to briefly talk you out of hitting the button at the very end and I was like "hold on, a lot of this was YOUR idea!"
After all that happens you get given a bunch of XP and you are standing on your viewpoint rooftop and then the game just keeps going. There are other things to do, and still 3 factions that you can potentially screw over. I guess that is what people kind of end up doing if they ever are going to 100% this game, if that is even possible.
Apparently the raids will continue for ever, but since I don't play games that don't have endings in my pursuit of never playing MMO-like games ever again, I am just going to hang it up here. I have plenty of other games to play and I thought now would be a good time to dabble in Warhammer, a game that I have had in my library for a good while now.
Also, a new Final Fantasy game that is turned based and has more of a crisp updated 90s graphics to it just dropped and I always tend to enjoy games like that.
Fallout 4 gets high marks from me in terms of story but (and this will be controversial) the actual gameplay / combat leaves a little to be desired. I think most people probably just used their "slow down time" focus attack and then hide until it recharges just like I did because the game does a good job of almost forcing you to do so.
The "final mission" was a decent one, but because of the layout of the Institute you do spend a great deal of time running around in circles and wondering where the people that are shooting at you happen to be standing in the distance. I was so OP though that this didn't really matter. We blazed through the enemy pretty easily and emerged victorious. Big surprise.
I recommend F4 for anyone that like this sort of game. Aside from the couple of difficulty spikes and some very big bugs that I am still in awe remained in the final product for over a decade, I have no beef with this game.
