…. because reasons. Also, the Gamestop employee from July no longer works there. Or he is hiding in a closet somewhere. But I did get the hard copy of the Guide with the map. The rest of the free art was a complete disappointment; it’s just copies of the S.P.E.C.I.A.L graphics. They really should have just gone with gun porn.

And the game. Oh well…. So much to say. On Suvival mode, through past Concord. This building thing looks very promising and that’s a good thing looking at how many negative comments I scrawled down in the dark last night. So in no particular order:

10 Things I Hate About Fallout 4 on the First Day

*.*.*SPOILERS*.*.*

1. Gendered Intro. No one cares about the emo problems of whatever his name was. After how great the opening of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas was, this first person take was a huge disappointment. The place where it goes wrong is that one guy isn’t Epic. Fallout is a world destroyed, and the tone of “as long as my family is okay, it’s all okay” is antithetical to a nuclear holocaust. And it’s a shame because I loved their S.P.E.C.I.A.L video clips while the game loaded. So I started the game with my teeth grinding.
2. You can’t see the back of your head in character creation. I thought this was Next-Gen console or something. Look, Bethesda. 95% of game play is done staring at the back of your character’s head. I’m more interested in what that looks like that how wide my eyebrows are.
3. NO LONG HAIR?! I’m really beginning to think I just paid several hundreds of dollars for another X360. I would even find it acceptable if long hair versions were long only when wearing social outfits, but switched to something up if your character put on armor. (Also, weirdly, why are there no detached earlobes? All of the character earlobes are regressive gene versions, which gives an odd genetic view of the future.)
4. Having your character know what is in a closed cabinet or box before opening it breaks immersion. Shatters it. It breaks the whole feeling of actually having to search for supplies in a nuclear wasteland. Making the game .0001 seconds faster for speed players is not likely to be appreciated more than the simmering annoyance for loot-a-holics.
5. Overseer’s coat. Why can’t I have it?!
6. Too many early locks that you can’t unlock. By the time you can pick them, the weapons behind them are likely to be obsolete.
7. Dogmeat: Showing affection, or an emotion, is key to forming bonds between characters in role-play. Yet you can’t pet your dog. Are there seriously no dog owners employed by Bethesda who could have pointed this out? All you had to do is turn the “Nevermind” feature into a pet-the-dog animation (several at random so it’s not boring). And while we are at it, that feature should also not remove the character from stealth as  it does currently.
8. Your character doesn’t walk around with your currently armed weapon visible. It’s immersion breaking to pull a minigun out of thin air, let alone not walk around with a pistol on your hip. It’s a cheap way I suppose of avoiding clipping, but to be honest a great deal of the character graphics are horrible. The lip-synching is off and the movement is really wooden close up. It’s more or less Fable 2. I’d even say Fable 3’s character movement was better.
9. Endless number of boarded off houses. That was a given part of previous Fallout titles, but it was one thing I really thought would change with Next Gen. And… nope. And endlessly boarded up Concord. There’s no real difference in playable area for Fallout 4 in comparison to earlier games. And I’d have to say that this complaint is the flip side to how much loot, good loot, my character already has stashed away. Way, way, way too much stuff lying around for a nuclear holocaust game, and especially for a mode that says “Survival.” Not that we got to see the return of real Survival Mode from FO:NV, sadly.
10. Okay, the big one. The baby. OMGWTF. This isn’t Fallout, this is Mass Effect. Six hours yesterday, and it’s the middle of the afternoon and I’m still not back on because I hate this so much. Giving a character this kind of a detailed, scripted background and constraining game motivation strips the roll-play out of an RPG. (Besides the murder of your spouse.) This is a set of rails from which the gameplay narrative never escapes. You don’t get to decide who your character is, because as any parent will tell you, your children override your personal life.

Think about previous Fallout games, and how the player was free to craft their character’s backstory. New Vegas literally gave you a blank slate with amnesia. Even if it was cliché, it worked. In Fallout 3, you determined your moral landscape by roleplaying out your daily interactions with other Vault dwellers. The events were the same for each play through but you could be an angel or a bully. The game allowed for both. But in Fallout 4, you are playing a character written by another person. For the wife playthrough, that means wife-mother-lawyer. Real character creation isn’t deciding how you respond to a door-to-door salesperson and then turning a mobile above a crib on the verbal command of your husband. The house was mildly interesting, but the lack of real and meaningful choice will make additional playthroughs a chore.

I should reroll my main character and name her Ally McBeal.

That, in the end, is the gameplay of Fallout 4. Being scripted into a unfulfilled and underachieving middle-class housewife chasing a baby through an imaginary future. My pain could only be alleviated by multimedia mash-ups of that show and the horrible dialogue clips from this wasteland of Boston.

Time to go chase the Dancing Baby….