The first thing that I wanted to do in the Christmas break between terms of failing at journalism school, wasn't to catch up with other video games... It was to hunker down with Fallout 4. Sure I've got a lot on my plate that I want to do: Play more Splatoon, Battlefront, MGO, and eventually get started on Yakuza 5, but for some reason Fallout 4 just happened to become my priority.

It's not like this is the first time either. It's was exactly around this time many years ago where I couldn't turn off Fallout 3, So it felt very fitting to put some thoughts together (and a little video piece at the bottom I did for funsies). It took a lot of willpower to step away from the game to write anything about it, because thinking about it would always lead to playing it, so I consider this a personal victory.

I love playing this game.I love wandering the world, taking out raiders, robots and ghouls even while sometimes in power armour.

I love finding new locations and finding all the useless garbage and bringing it back to my sanctuary just to make something with it.

I love standing on high and looking off into the endless horizon of rubble.

But let’s be fair, it’s all because I have a love for post-apocalyptic fiction.

That's the one thing Bethesda does really well. Out of all the open world games that I’ve played in the past year (maybe even as far back as two or three I guess? I don't know. when did uh..... Skyrim come out?), Bethesda has really mastered the ‘sense of place’ that a lot of other games don’t seem to have.

They pull this off because of all the little things. It’s what you can pick up, it’s the queries from your companions, it’s the other people that you walk by which have their own set of problems that they need to deal with on their own.

They throw all of this into a radiated melting pot of dread.

I have to applaud the Commonwealth for being what it is, and consider the land as a whole to be more of a main story, than the critical path you were supposed to go on. I mean let’s talk about that... There’s always a vault dweller, which is limiting the way you can start the story. Granted, having the main character be frozen in a vault for over 200 years is an interesting way to do it, but the game didn’t spend enough time in the pre-war era for that to even matter.

You’re not given the chance to know much about your character other than they love their son very much.

So when you wake up from your frozen slumber, and you’re wandering aimlessly murdering people, you bump into factions that all have their own ulterior motives (Save for the Minutemen. They don’t really do much of anything other than ask you to save the same settlement five times in a row. It’s no wonder the people of the Commonwealth have a lack of faith in them). But even with the amount of factions, only two of them seem to be important to the story.

Well… One other faction is trying to be just as important, but I hate the Brotherhood of Steel so much, and they tried really hard to get me to like them!

Altogether it plays out in an ending that I know I didn’t want. I sat through a couple of story beats several times exhausting all hope for a diplomatic option that would never happen. Which gives me the reaction, “Well if you can’t agree with me you might as well die, because you’re only going to be a pain in the ass later.”

So what I think I want to tell people is, it’s okay to not go to this game for the main story and I think I have a good reason why:

There’s one character in particular by the name of Nick Valentine, a detective in Diamond City and someone that becomes your companion. He had a back story that went on just as long as mine, but because he wasn’t me, it was more fleshed out. We wander around the Commonwealth doing business like a couple ’o’ gumshoes, getting all of the intel on his last big case. AND while there was a part of me convinced that what I really wanted was to be a wasteland detective, my time with him got me excited to seek out other companions. It pushed me to do more side content. Suddenly, finding my son wasn’t the most important thing in the world.

I think regardless of your character’s start point and motivations, everything should be level in an open world. The ending of a game with this design is so lackluster because there’s just more to it than that. It tells you, “congratulations, you’re done,” but you’re not really done. The game knows that you’re not really done, so it immediately reminds you that you can do something else and that makes the experience very ‘middle of the road’. I can’t really look at the main story as priority when everything else is just as good (if not better), so who’s to say what that main story is.

I want to throw all of that out the window and say none of that even matters, because I just want to be left alone in the world doing whatever I feel like.

That's what keeps it good, and keeps you invested.

(and I made this, because I'm practicing.)

And now we get to some... personal matters?

The thing about putting this together (especially with the video piece) is that I always gotta think about my career ahead. Spending a lot of time at journalism school, has made me think about what I want out it. Since April, other classmates and I started a news podcast called NewsFriends and it's been exciting. It started out as a small goof of a show (with ridiculous news videos). It's been cool to watch it grow not only with an audience, but seeing what the people involved are getting out of it, is pretty damn exciting too.

But as much as I do that stuff, and how interest in news is important to me (wether it's feature writing or beat reporting), It's strange to feel more excited about games press. To watch it grow and change, it's something I want to be a part of. So I need to tell myself that I need to do more of this, but the balance is difficult when you're not exactly a spring chicken (but I guess that's debatable when you think about how old a young person can be).

There's job postings always popping up, but it's weird to use general news as a portfolio for games press (but we all gotta start somewhere). So I'm going to work on my games-of-the-year-end-blogstravaganza soon, and I'll be hopeful in getting more time into writing and making videos, audio things about this kind of stuff. In the meantime, I would say check out news friends, in the case that I may eventually just crack and straight up put video game content on that site. (We did record a podcast about Battlefront one time, but I haven't had the chance to put it up yet. Is it too late for that?)

Some questions before I go:

• How do we feel about this SMTxFire Emblem game now that it's out in Japan? The fact that it just looks like a Persona game with Fire Emblem on the back-burner really bums me out. Am I the only one that feels this way?
• Since thinking about end of the year game stuff, what are you having a hard time believing came out this year? Follow up: does anyone's game of the year lists increase with the playing of games that came out 1-2 years ago? (I'm finding a lot of my time was spent with nothing new. Is that just because of this years games?)