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General / Multiple Games
- Like The Elder Scrolls, the character creation, despite its complexity and the time expected for some players to perfect their custom faces, lacks save preset functionality to save one's created models or even to share it, despite older games like The Sims 3 and Saints Row: The Third allow players to save and share their designs. Thankfully, Looksmenu
, at least for Fallout 4, exists, allowing players to save presets and even share them, although sharing is not in-game due to engine limitations. - Hacking minigames in Fallout 3, New Vegas, and 4. It's excruciatingly tedious as it also function as Double Unlock (reach the required skill in order to interact with hackable terminal, and then play the word-matching minigame based on Mastermind that increase in difficulty depending on the lock difficulty). Failure to do the minigame will cause the terminal to be permanently locked (in Fallout 4 it simply locked for 10 seconds). It can be worked around in 3 when there is only one mistake limit left, simply back off and the mistake limit will be restored. However in New Vegas if you did that, the terminal will be locked for 30 seconds. It got to the point that there is mods for each respective games that remove all the words except one that matching.
- Shared with The Elder Scrolls are the Essential NPCs, characters who have Complete Immortality and serve only to break immersion and railroad the player, which are prevalent across the Bethesda-made titles. New Vegas is the only 3D game that averts this, as the only Essential characters in that game are the children, the robotic vendor of a weapon store behind an impenetrable wall, Yes Man, and companions currently in the player's party (and the latter are fully killable if playing in Hardcore Mode).
Fallout 3
- The weapon-degradation system in Fallout 3 moved in this direction. On paper, there's nothing wrong with it; weapons degrade or break over time, reducing their effectiveness, and you can use other weapons of the same type to repair them. The problem is that the game also loved to make the best weapons around be found in borderline-unusable condition, especially early on - and since said weapons were also rare, repairing them was almost impossible. Instead of giving you A Taste of Power, this resulted in guns that have very limited ammo, require special training, and are actually worse than your starting pistol. A good chunk of the fanbase is still under the impression that Energy Weapons are useless, because of this; they're not, but their introduction to them was just that disastrous. New Vegas thankfully rectified this by making rare guns usually be in decent condition, and altering repair mechanics to be more accepting as well as introducing the awesome Jury Rigging perk.
- The conversation system was largely reviled for making speech checks dependent on a percentage. Not only for being a Luck-Based Mission, but one that's incredibly easy and a bit tedious to abuse (just reload the closest save whenever you fail one and try again) and one that doesn't really make any sense (apparently, you can say the exact same thing at the same time in the same situation to the same person and get completely opposite results). Largely fixed in New Vegas and 4, where it's a guaranteed success or failure depending on whether you have enough points in the skill (and you can even try anyway, for a joke fail answer), though this had the side effect of making a 100 in Speech something of a Game-Breaker.
Fallout New Vegas
- The inability to mod most Unique Weapons. Want to add a scope to the Mysterious Magnum or a silencer to A Light Shining in Darkness? Nope, sorry, you can't. There's some justification with a few of the weapons because they're slightly different models than their generic counterparts, so it would be logical that the same modifications may not fit, but this is true only for a minority of cases. This also results in the irony of some fully-modded weapons being preferable to their unique counterparts because said mods make them more effective in spite of the fact that unique weapons usually have better stats.
- That multiple mods exist (each with tens of thousands of downloads) that either mitigate or remove annoying aspects of the Dead Money DLC should demonstrate how numerous the examples are. The DLC, while lauded for its story, is chockful of controversial mechanics:
- The DLC begins with the player character being told that they have been fitted with an explosive slave collar that will detonate if it gets within range of a number of unseen radios and loudspeakers screwing with its signal. What's even more irritating is that the damn thing is stuck on you the moment you start the questline and doesn't come off until you finish it. There are very few options for dealing with this, save for a companion perk that increases the grace time needed before the collars threaten to explode or simply finding the radios and loudspeakers, which are often hidden in out-of-the-way areas and seem to have been strategically placed by the developers to see how frustrated players could get (under counters, high up on walls, etc). That's not counting the "unbreakable" variants that can't be broken, no matter how much you try shooting them. The constant beeping within the Tampico Theater towards the end of the mod may make you turn off your volume altogether.
- Save for a handful of perks acquired in other DLC missions that can come in extremely handy, there is no real recourse for dealing with the toxic cloud (which deals constant damage), and very limited healing options available. Some online guides even recommend taking advantage of these loopholes (like the Auto-Inject Stimpak / Super Stimpak from Lonesome Road or Them's Good Eatin' from Old World Blues) to merely survive in Hardcore Mode, as the damage factor is so high that trying to go for any of the well-hidden secret stashes is downright suicidal otherwise.
- The gold bars, which are supposed to represent the theme of the DLC (letting go), but to do this are arbitrarily set to a weight of 35 pounds eachnote . You're only meant to take one or two with you as you exit the DLC, but various tricks are available to escape the vault with all 37 bars. Not helping matters were the devs attempting to short-circuit these exploits, only to fail when it was discovered that you could use chems and a certain implant to dash out before the collar detonates. This mechanic was so infamous (and even admitted as such by Josh Sawyer) that when gold bars were re-introduced in 4, they weighed much, much less and had a much lower marginal bottle cap value (especially as most Commonwealth wastelanders are unconcerned with things like gold anyway when water, food, and defenses are more important).
- Ulysses' dialogues with you in Lonesome Road, as well as the Courier Duster you get at the end of the DLC, are based on your reputation with The Strip (for Mr. House), New California Republic, and Caesar's Legion. The problem is that reputation with the three has nothing to do with which of the three you may have actually sided with in the main questline; in fact it's quite possible to have a mediocre reputation with your faction of choice, while you can rather easily rack up a high reputation with one of the others. For example if you help Vault 21 but you kill House (both were tied to the Strip reputation), the dialogue will proceed as if you support House. This mod fixes it so the faction-related dialogue is tied to faction-based quest progression.
- A low reputation with either the Legion or the NCR will cause these groups to send assassination squads after the player. The squads are made up of four members pulled from one of three "tiers" based on the player's level, making them a rather challenging fight for nearly any character build, especially early in the game. They respawn every three days to come after the player, making matters worse if you rest or fast travel frequently. The "scrappiest" part of it all, though? They'll always come straight for the player to declare that the player has been marked for death, even if the player has a 100 Sneak skill and is invisible thanks to a Stealth Boy. The only way to get the drop on them is to see them coming from a long way off, which isn't always easy (or even possible). Thankfully, some game mods exist which change their respawn rate to a more reasonable 7–10 days and/or remove them completely from the game.
Fallout 4
- In Fallout 4, the new dialogue system was negatively received by just about everyone for being both unintuitive and needlessly simplified. In contrast to previous games, the game uses a four-option Dialogue Tree with one to three word descriptions similar to those found in Bioware games. However, the vagueness (even more vague than Bioware games) of the choice descriptions means that you rarely have any idea what's going to come out of your character's mouth (i.e. the "SARCASTIC" option apparently translates to anywhere from "affably snarky response" to "personal insult"). For the most part, the limited choices and lack of an Investigate option makes it harder to learn more about the world or gain the proper context. Adding to the over simplicity is that Charisma is the primary stat for swaying dialogue as opposed to the previous games allowing multiple different options. As a result, you're generally only able to manipulate conversation based on persuasiveness, rather than any other stat/perk like Medicine or Intelligence. And this is on top of a noticeable amount of Railroading which, while not always present, in many occasions turns all of the dialogue options into variations of "Yes"For example , which makes the whole system feel meaningless since they all result in more or less the same outcome with minor differences. Todd Howard even admitted in a post-release interview that the system had problems. Thankfully there is this mod which restore full dialogue choice options.
- Settlement building is clunky, rather sloppily implemented, and frustrating. "Snapping" to stick several objects is uneven, and there are no additional camera angles for a clearer view, restricted to the existing first person view mode which makes it difficult to actually see what you're doing. Further, collision does not always work properly, which leads to items clipping and making it almost impossible to add features like doors. Additionally, most settlements feature uneven terrain and non-removable objects, reducing each settlement's usable space. Not helping matters is that the mechanic is not optional, with one mission in the main quest forcing you to build something in order to advance the plot, though thankfully following a certain path gives you a large, spacious settlement seemingly designed specifically for the quest.
- The game offers fewer SPECIAL points during character creation than previous installments. On its own, it wouldn't be too bad, but it also includes prohibitively high requirements to unlock perks. The Double Unlock nature of raising a SPECIAL skill to the required level and then taking the perk also slows character growth. Additionally, past games allowed you to Min-Max certain skills to make them sky high right away if you so choose, at the risk of Crippling Overspecialization. The removal of skills in 4 means this is no longer possible, with high level requirements for the final perk levels in most perks forcing you into less specialization. For example, with the right set-up, you could max out a skill in 3 or NV within the first couple of levels. 4 prevents you from taking the final perk level until you are in the level 30 or even 40 range for some skills, such as Sneak and Lockpicking. Luckily, there are plentiful mods to fix it.
- The Minutemen radiant quests. How would you like to be given a quest to clear out feral ghouls from an area, doing so, and likely having some fun in the process? Well, you then have to go about establishing a settlement there with food, water, and defenses (often without adequate resources to do so) only to head back to the quest giver to get your reward and are thrust without choice into yet another quest doing the same thing with some other kind of enemy. This can happen multiple times. And you can't leave the quests for later because they're timed and they'll fail, so you find yourself stuck in an endless cycle of building and defending settlements which doesn't allow you to do any exploring or scavenging or proceeding with the main quest to find your kidnapped son and avenge your dead spouse. Patches would significantly reduce the frequency of these quests, remove the "timed" aspect for everything but the specific "Defend ____ Settlement" quests, and give settlements a percentage chance to defend themselves based on the ratio of defense to resources (though, still frustratingly, they never more than about a 66% chance of succeeding). Additionally, this mod fixes the aforementioned problems by making Preston no longer giving radiant quests after a certain point in the game that can be reached rather early.
- While the console versions support modding, only the XBOX One version supports user-made content. The Playstation 4 version can only serve mods that made using in game asset or modification of in game contents or stats only, due to Sony's policy against user-made content not made natively.
- The Creation Club in-game shop (a byproduct of Bethesda's infamous "paid mods" fiasco) did this to most players who had any interest in modding the game at all (and quite a few players). Intended to be a marketplace for community modders (and Bethesda themselves) selling... paid mods through an in-game system, the practice all but broke the PS4 (ironically, one of the speculated reason why Creation Club was made by the first place is to deliver user-generated content to the PS4, due to Sony's policy against external content, see above) due to causing underlying bugs with existing assets in the world. On PC, each Creation Club update adds additional armor and weapon options — but sends out each update with bricks of additional data being forcefully downloaded to the player's computer, whether they want it or not, and which could run into several gigabytes of data (or more) per update. Bethesda themselves have even admitted such problems in PR statements and interviews, but to date, have refused to fix the issue. As an admission of the controversial system, both Fallout 4 and Skyrim (which ran on the same online service to deliver cross-platform mods) stopped receiving content updates in 2019, while the Anniversary Edition DLC of Skyrim released in time for the tenth anniversary, bundled pretty much all of the Creation Club items with new minigames and side content.
