This week’s big anniversary update to 10-year-old Fallout 4 did not exactly go well. As Kotaku reported Tuesday, the whole ordeal was a “shitshow,” where yet again Bethesda only succeeded in making the once-beloved open-world RPG worse. Once more breaking user-created mods, this latest update went even further adding a wealth of new game-breaking bugs, some of which were reportedly destroying save games, as well as a completely broken version of the company’s Creations mod-distributing feature. Well, the good news is patches are on the way.
The bad news is the PTSD Fallout 4 players will be experiencing when they hear the news that patches are on the way. Cast your mind back as far as April 2024 and you might remember the last time Bethesda decided to celebrate their decade-old game by breaking it, then promised patches to fix all that, followed by players begging the company to just leave the game alone as that lot of patches failed to help. Leave the game alone Bethesda will not, however, hence this week’s latest clusterfuck.
On paper, the addition of Creations is a positive. It’s the hub through which Bethesda lets people distribute mods for its games, previously implemented in Skyrim and Starfield, and given Bethesda’s propensity for releasing almost-great games that require a huge amount of modding to run sensibly, that can be much easier than trying to juggle it all on your own hard drive. But in Fallout 4 it was struggling, failing to display mods properly (even paid ones), and running incredibly slowly. And that was just one of the issues added to the game, alongside save games being destroyed, and a huge number of players reporting that the game was refusing to recognize the DLC they’d previously paid for. Happy birthday!
Today, Bethesda has announced it will have patches incoming in November and December to address a lot of this, with an emergency hot fix coming in early next week. The company also adds that the Creations and main game menu should already be working faster, and items should be appearing properly. Next week’s “hot fix” is aiming to address the following:
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Hot Fix: Fixing stability problems particularly on XB1/PS4.
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Hot Fix: Fixing an issue causing creations that rely on DLC to not work.
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Hot Fix: Fixing an issue causing DLCs to become uninstalled after updating the game on PlayStation.
Hopefully these will take care of the most immediately serious issues for players who simply can’t play the game any more since the Anniversary Edition, but it seems to properly address all the many new problems will take a lot longer. Bethesda has Fallout 4‘s update will receive its first full patch on “the week of” November 24, while a second is played for the “first half of December.” Exactly what they will address has not been revealed, which isn’t exactly helpful, but we’ll apparently know “soon.” One detail that has been revealed is that Xbox Series players should see their Creations local storage limit increased “substantially.” It will now grow up to 100GB if you need it. And for PlayStation? Bethesda is “also looking into” that.
Your other option is to brute-force the game back to its previous version, which is an ugly procedure against which it will fight you all the way. Or just play The Outer Worlds 2, I guess?
