A few things that irritate me about Fallout 4

First off I want to say that I love this game and am in no way saying that it is a bad game. I do think that all things should be open to criticism though and Fallout is not an exception.

While I really look forward to playing and find the gameplay really addictive and fun (without being an MMO btw) there are certain things that happen in this game on a regular basis as well as some bugs that are still in the game despite the bugs being well-known and quite old, that annoy me. There's just a few so far but I want to talk about them right now.

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There's this important character NPC that you regularly interact with named Preston. Certain quests cannot be completed and gotten XP for until he talks to you about it and finalizes it. He regularly gives you rather easy and map-exploring quests about clearing certain settlements and for the most part they are a great way to get some XP as well as advance your knowledge of the overall map so you can fast travel easily.

This all works wonders until you have a major quest with him called "Taking Independence" where Preston and a crew of other minutemen work as a team to to retake a castle that is of some importance. Once you initiate the quest you enter into something that I think is bugged and has been bugged for a long time because the internet is awash with people complaining about it and I don't understand how after all these years Bethesda still hasn't bothered to correct this.

What happens is that this Taking Independence quest is a LOT more difficult than what you are normally up against as you will face off against a gigantic bug creature called the Mirelurk Queen.

This thing is enormous and as the skull next to the name would indicate, this baddy can hurt you fast. In fact, if she gets a proper swing in on you you are almost certainly going to die immediately.

This is a really tough battle, so tough that I haven't beaten it yet and before I jumped ship I died half a dozen times, barely made any headway on winning the fight and just decided to walk away until I get some better weapons and maybe some higher abilities.

But then the bug/glitch kicks in. Preston (the guy in the first picture) is fixated on this one mission and presumably until you complete it, he will not discuss anything else with you. If you speak to him in the camp to try to advance other storylines he just says "we need to focus on retaking the castle!" and won't help you with anything else.

This is a bug, it is a well-known bug. There are PC ways of bypassing it through command prompts and certain "fixes" that are recommended on PS5. I don't have a console and the fixes don't work in my situation - I've tried all of them. So since so many of the other quests rely on speaking to Preston I am now unable to do any of the quests I have saved up. It's annoying and I'll have to find a way of getting my XP up some other way.

Honestly, this game has been out a long time. How is this glitch, widespread glitch mind you, still in the game?

Moving on I guess

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Legendary enemies out of nowhere

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While I am sure there are a lot of higher level people out there that truly enjoy randomly encountering a legendary enemy out in the wild, I am not one of them. I'm already low on ammo, I"m only level 14, my sidekicks are damn near useless, and I am just trying to complete so low-level missions. But out of nowhere, just walking down the road every now and then, some legendary enemy pops up and one shots me and sends me back to my last save, sometimes this can be quite a while in the past too.

Why is this in there? Are we trying to pull a "Skyrim Giant" situation where you get worked over by some random thing in the wild? I would understand if these were fights that you had to engage in order for them to happen but often they will just be in some random area like next to a railroad track as you are innocently walking to an objective that is meant for noobs. Of course you are going to get destroyed and the only thing that this accomplishes for me is to encourage me to quicksave like crazy all the time which I guess I am thankful that this is a two-button process that executes rather fast.

Getting stuck randomly

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This has happened to me multiple times as well as to my companions (which is less of a deal because you can just leave them) but there was this one time that I was running from a random legendary that spawned in my path while I was on a level 10 quest and I just ran like Forrest Gump out of there. I holed up on the second floor of a building and waited it out. The legendary eventually went away so I jumped back down from the 2nd floor and landed on some boxes and then went through them, halfway. I couldn't walk forward, I couldn't jump up, I couldn't do anything but spin around.

The obvious fix for this is to initiate fast travel but as any veteran Fallout player will tell you "you can't fast-travel with enemies nearby." So now I can't kill the enemies that are nearby because they are not moving, I cannot move to engage the enemies and basically I am just fucked. If you don't have a quicksave nearby you could be looking at backtracking in your travels quite a ways. There should be a button for this or something. Something that will move you a few pace to the side so that you are no longer stuck in the glitchy terrain unable to move. There isn't though, even though Bethesda is very aware of the fact that this happens to almost anyone that plays the game.

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So the moral of the story here is that you need to save the game very often or you could end up needing to repeat lot of stuff, which isn't that bad because most of the game is pretty fantastic.

I'm just kind of surprised that a studio as big as Bethesda would be aware of these issues and just do nothing about them. I guess they have other things to do. I suppose if you want true open world, and that's what this is as very little is completely locked out for you, there are going to be a few glitches here and there. I'm willing to deal with them though and look forward to playing this game every day.