5 Dark Things You Learn About Yourself Playing Fallout 4

My favorite part of Fallouts past was that the games were truly open-ended. You could go nuts and slaughter a whole town, save for those damned invincible children, who still insisted on entering into battle with you only to spend every turn panic-sprinting to the edge of the map you little sons of bitches. And if one of your victims just happened to be a major quest-giver, well, that's called a consequence, motherfucker. Sometimes your actions have them.

We lost some of that with Fallout 3, which had invincible major characters. Oh, sure, that made for "a smoother progression in plot" and ensured you didn't "accidentally screw your whole game 'cause that guy on the aircraft carrier called your hat ugly so you slaughtered the entire society two hours ago and only just now found out you needed the captain alive to get the last mission to beat the game." You'd think having a few major characters that can't be killed would make the game less violent and more moral, but the opposite is true. Now I know that once I start machine-gunning mini-nukes into a farm because one of the ranchers stupidly rejected my sexual advances, anybody important will just take a knee for a moment, then get back up and give me my quest. There are no real consequences.

That's been happening since Fallout 3. But Fallout 4 adds a bigger problem: I have seen very few opportunities in the game to be anything less than a good guy with a personality problem. That's down to the nature of the central story. In the early Fallouts, and in New Vegas, you were pursuing a fairly neutral goal. In Fallout 3, and now 4, you're looking for a lost family member. In 3 it's your father, and that sort of limits your role-playing options. No truly dark and malevolent character is out there in the wasteland screaming, "Daddy, why did you leave me?!" into the radioactive winds.

In Fallout 4, however, you're after the people who murdered your spouse and kidnapped your child. You are cast, from the start, as the good guy. Sure, you can go all Taken on them and do some messed-up stuff in the pursuit of justice, but at the heart of it you always know you're doing the right thing. And I never thought that would be a problem for me. I usually play as a generally good guy who occasionally responds to rudeness with a Molotov cocktail.

Wait, wait, I've got a super witty response to this ...

But now that the option to be a murderous psychopath is limited, I'm apparently unhappy. See, first they came for the assholes, and I said nothing, for I am not an asshole; then they came for the dickheads, and I said nothing, for I am not a dickhead; now they've come for us, the bastards, and there is nobody left to speak out.

And this is a problem for me.

See, like in all the Fallouts, you can get a dog companion. And like in all the Fallouts, people will attack that dog companion. And like in all the Fallouts, when that happens, I lose my shit and butcher everything around me. But this is too much: The dog is a bit too real, and the animations when people attack that dog are vastly improved. It used to be that enemies would punch in the general direction of your dog, visually appearing to miss by a good three feet because there was no special animation for dog punching. And it still hurt my feelings.

But for Fallout 4, Bethesda apparently hired a dog-punching motion-capture division -- just a bunch of sociopaths in green suits beating the shit out of puppies to observe their reactions -- because you can now see every skull-shattering crack as raiders beat your beloved pup into the ground. And I can't take it. I used to travel with the dog companion often -- just me and my dog against the end of the world, because dogs don't judge you when you drink out of an irradiated toilet. They just wait their turn. But no more. As soon as the option was available, I sent Dogmeat out to Sanctuary to live his life in peace, and now I am dogless. This is no kind of apocalypse.

The combat is much improved, and I'm kind of ... mad about that? That sounds stupid, but hear me out:

It's totally stupid. I'm probably an asshole.

Here's my totally-stupid-probably-asshole thinking: Fallout 4 has finally made third-person POV a viable play option, which I'm very happy about. And it feels good -- the camera settles into a Resident Evil 4-style over-the-shoulder approach, which means real-time gunplay is much smoother. And that's necessary, because when you activate the targeting system by hitting the V.A.T.S. button now, it just slows down time a bit (it used to stop time altogether while you planned out everything you wanted to do, which in my case was mostly shooting people in the crotch a thousand consecutive times until they begged a god that did not exist to put an end to their torturous existence while I laughed and laughed).

In the older Fallout games, V.A.T.S. meant combat was entirely turn-based. In Fallout 4, V.A.T.S. means that you queue up actions and watch them rapidly play out, then suffer through a few moments of awkward panic as your badass slow-motion ability runs out and you are revealed to be a stumbling bumblefuck in real time. In the old Fallout games, where combat was slow paced and involved clicking on which eyeball you would like to explode next, I could fool myself into thinking that I was a dangerous assassin. Now I still start fights that way, jumping into V.A.T.S. and smoothly headshotting one opponent, blasting out the knee of another, then detonating a mine beneath a third -- until my super slow-mo power runs out and I trip backwards over a mailbox, become stuck on a stump, shoot my partner in the neck, and get suplexed by a deathclaw onto my own grenade, which explodes, sending my head -- complete with appropriately disappointed and embarrassed expression -- sailing into a trash can.

Other times, I just do a bitchin' cartwheel through my own nuclear explosion.

I didn't need to know this, Fallout. It wasn't hurting anybody, letting me think that I would be a Roland-esque gunslinger come the real post-apocalypse. I didn't need to be brought down a peg and shown that just I'm Mr. Bean in power armor. Fallout games used to be where I went to meticulously plan exactly how my enemy's crotch was going to explode and when, not for thrilling, edge-of-your-seat action. I have plenty of other games for action; I have only Fallout for my delusions of strategic crotch explosion.

Fallout 4 contains something we all thought we wanted badly: the ability to build and maintain our own post-apocalyptic fortress. Further, we can now manage a whole string of apocalyptic settlements with an iron power fist, pneumatic-punching society back into shape. On the surface, that seems awesome. Fallout has always been about the ability to do anything you want, so it's about time we are able to choose to be homemakers instead of nuclear samurai. But here's the shitty thing: If you give me that option, apparently I will take it.

Now, instead of dropkicking Super Mutants into frag mines, I'm spending my apocalypse scrounging materials to build the perfect armchair for my dining set and making sure my loyal settlers have enough tomatoes.

Don't get me wrong -- nothing about the game actually forces you to do this. Short of a few mandatory tutorial quests, you can give the poor settlers of the commonwealth the hardest double bird your agility skill can produce, then wander off into the wasteland and never think about them again. And god, I want to. I don't want to give a shit about my house in Fallout. I don't want to go to IKEA in real life; I certainly don't want to spend all afternoon at the post-apocalyptic IKEA workbench in my burned-out garage. I want to bum-rush a raider with my machete and chop his goddamn irradiated dick off, not meticulously place furniture in a shack mansion. Or rather, that's apparently what I want to want to do, because if you actually give me the option, I choose to be a stay-at-home kind of wanderer. So now here I am, the most reluctant interior decorator in the wasteland -- yearning to crush skulls but instead stuck crushing flower petals for my homemade potpourri.

About the only thing my wife likes about modern video games is the character-creation process. So this time, I let her design my wanderer. She made a female, which isn't surprising. She likes to play as women, because it helps the immersion. For that same reason, I play as men. Always have. When given the option to create a character, this is the first time I've ever gone with female. And I can't hack it.

When I play as a dude, whatever happens to that dude is pretty much OK. Insult him, attack him, demean him, nuke him. If it furthers my progress in the game, whatever. But it is much, much harder for me to let that shit go as a woman. Make a sexist comment to me, call me a bitch, imply I'm just there for sex -- and I'll have to electro-sword your whole town. Sorry about saving the world and all, but maybe the mayor should have thought of that before calling me "little girl."

I know, I know: This is just a game. I shouldn't take it personally. And I'm not saying it's a problem with Fallout itself -- I'm not bemoaning the lack of progressive attitudes in a character named "Raider Scum." But for whatever reason, I take insults much more personally playing as a woman. Maybe it's just down to the role-playing effect -- the less like yourself the character is, the more thought you'll have to give to their reactions. But for better or worse, Fallout 4 taught me that I wouldn't last a day as a woman in the real world. The first time somebody slapped my ass without express invitation it would make the papers under the headline "BABY GOT BACK AT CATCALLERS IN BRUTAL DOWNTOWN MASSACRE."

Buy the first book in Robert's hilarious supernatural thriller trilogy, The Unnoticeables. You can also read more from Brockway at his own monument to narcissism, The Brock Way, or follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

Fallout 4 isn't the first time Robert Brockway was changed forever by Fallout. See how he became a hoarder in 6 Ways 'Fallout: New Vegas' Made Me A Worse Person, and learn what happens when Fallout consumes your every waking moment in 4 Awful Realities Of Binge-Playing All The 'Fallout' Games.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see why playing Fallout raises the risk of your sense of justice being skewed irrevocably in How 'Fallout' Proves Morality Is Arbitrary, and watch other videos you won't see on the site!

Also follow us on Facebook, because the comments section mirrors nuclear fallout in every way.