Greed never changes

Photo courtesy of Pottero/Wikimedia Commons

When it comes to the recent pathetic trend of overwhelming greed and incompetence in the video game industry, Bethesda Game Studios holds a spot as one of the worst contributors to this epidemic. Bethesda has been around for over 20 years, and is well known for its acquisition and creation of various highly popular franchises, such as The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and Doom. However, over time, especially recently, they have built up a large reputation of releasing rushed and bug-ridden games, then re-releasing said games with minimal additions multiple times over the course of years to try and milk as much revenue as they possibly can out of them for as long as possible. 

In response to the large success that was the first season of the Fallout (2024) television series, Bethesda decided that they would release an update to the decade-old Fallout 4 (2015), which is their most recent single-player game in the franchise, to capitalize off of the show’s success and draw in new players.

 It did not go well. Not only was the update lackluster in terms of content, only adding barely a handful of their “Creations”—which is just their way of saying mods that you have to pay for—but it also spawned tons of technical issues and broke community-made mods that you didn’t have to pay for, although that is not to say that the ones you had to pay for even worked in the first place. As you would expect, people weren’t too thrilled about this, and Bethesda eventually got things straight. Mostly. 

Back in October, Bethesda hosted a livestream announcing the so-called Fallout 4: Anniversary Edition (2025) and gave vague details about what it would include. According to them, it would include the game itself, all four of its DLCs, as well as over 150 of those aforementioned monetized mods. This in itself is extremely underwhelming, as in years past Bethesda had already released Fallout 4: Game of the Year Edition (2017), which included all of the same content, minus the paid mods, for a grand total of 40 dollars—20 dollars less than the Anniversary Edition. 

So, the only “new” content that is included in this edition are these “Creations,” and although paying 20 bucks for a pretty good amount of extra content may not seem too terrible, if you look closely at what exactly is within this bundle you will realize that the bulk of what is included has already been in the game for years, and if you had already paid for any of these mods the price of the bundle will not change whatsoever. Plus, to make things even worse, the “Over 150 Fallout 4 Creation Club add-ons,” as Bethesda puts it, is a very misleading statement as over half of these “Creations” consist of paintjobs for armor, weapons, etc., which are, quite frankly, pretty ugly anyways. 

As for the update itself, it is awful. All it intentionally adds is, you guessed it, more paid mods, as well as a new interface for the menu in which you can purchase them, which is extremely slow and buggy. And then there were the unintentional additions, which consisted of all the same issues last year’s update also suffered: crashes, an infestation of bugs, and broken mod compatibility. 

It also came with an issue that is arguably worse than all the others, which is that the game may not even recognize that you own some of the paid mods, and as much as that sucks, for many unlucky people it did not even recognize that they owned the actual DLCs of the game, which are often much more expensive and content-filled than the mods. This combination of lackluster, re-released content as well as a completely game-breaking update makes it quite obvious that Bethesda were looking for a fast and cheap way to resell their most recent singleplayer Fallout title in an attempt to capitalize off of the release of the television series’ second season, which releases next month. 

This would also explain why many of the new paid mods are themed around Fallout: New Vegas (2010), which heavily inspired the second season, although why they decided to go for this instead of remastering one of the most beloved RPGs of all time for the second season is beyond me; It definitely would’ve sold better. 

But seeing this company’s track record, I’m led to believe that wouldn’t have gone well either. So, long story short, if you really want to buy Fallout 4 (2015), get Fallout 4: Game of the Year Edition (2017), and if you already own the game I would recommend avoiding this update at all costs. You would have more fun giving yourself radiation poisoning.