10 years ago this week, Fallout 4 launched across console and PC. It’s a big milestone for the open-world RPG. And Bethesda has decided to celebrate it by pushing out a new update that seemingly breaks the game for a lot of people and releasing some overpriced and confusing DLC. Yay?
First announced in October, the Fallout 4 Anniversary Update is now live across all platforms. This update fixes an old issue in VATS, makes a few other tweaks, and, more importantly, adds Creations to Fallout 4. This is Bethesda’s cross-platform mod solution that is already present in Skyrim and Starfield. It lets people create content for Fallout 4 that can then be downloaded on consoles and PC. Some of this content costs money, but a lot of it is free. It’s a fine system, but when the Fallout 4 update launched on Monday, it was completely broken.
Over on Reddit, players began sharing screenshots of the Creations menu in Fallout 4 failing to load anything or just spitting out error messages. This is a problem for content that costs money, like an $8 Pipboy skin that had a broken preview window, making it impossible to actually see what it looked like before buying. Not great! Thankfully, Bethesda seems to be aware of the issues with the Creations menu and has reportedly fixed things, according to an official comment from the publisher on Discord.
However, the update itself is still causing lots of players headaches. People are reporting that Fallout 4 save games are being destroyed. Others are reporting that after the update, they can’t play because Fallout 4 requires the installation of previously purchased DLC, even though it’s already installed. My brother had this happen to him when booting up Fallout 4 on Steam and gave up trying to play. Others are dealing with new bugs, glitchy menus, and more. And these problems exist on both PC and console.
Fallout 4‘s new DLC is being trashed by Steam users
Beyond the bugs, the Fallout 4 Anniversary Edition is also causing some confusion. There are now three versions of Fallout 4 that you can buy: The base original game, a Game of the Year Edition, and now the Anniversary Edition. But, despite the name of that last edition, you don’t need to buy it to access the new Anniversary update, which is free to all Fallout 4 players. And confusingly, there’s an Anniversary Edition upgrade for people who already own Fallout 4 and its DLC. But you can also just buy the newly released $20 Fallout 4 Creations Bundle separately from all of this and gain access to the new content included in the Anniversary Edition. Does any of this make sense to you?
Yeah, somehow, Bethesda has made buying a 10-year-old video game a complicated and confusing mess that now requires research and a fucking chart. And even if you figure it all out, some players are reporting that Fallout 4 might not even load the new bundle properly due to various bugs.
This all likely explains why Fallout 4 on Steam has seen an influx of negative reviews. Meanwhile, the Creations Bundle on Steam has a completely negative review status, with people furious over the price tag, how broken everything is, the fact that the new update broke many mods, and the confusion around all of this.
“Hot garbage. My advice is to avoid buying this out of spite. Not only is this going to break your game, but the content itself is broken,” says one negative Steam review.
And making all of this more frustrating is that just last year, Bethesda broke Fallout 4 in a whole bunch of different but similarly annoying ways with the controversial “next-gen update.” At this point, I think Bethesda needs to just fix Fallout 4‘s current mess, say sorry, and never, ever, ever update the game again. Just move on. Let it be.
