Why is it so hard to play Fallout games on PC right now?
Like so many other people, after I finished the Fallout series on Amazon Prime, I wanted to dive into a Fallout game again. I lived in the Boston area – true Fallout 4 takes place – in 2015, when that game was released, so I spent almost 70 hours playing there, but I couldn’t resist firing up my favorite game from the series: Fallout: New Vegas. Unfortunately, that was easier said than done.
My copy of the game is on Steam, and while the console versions have done better over the years, the long-term support on PC is terrible. I knew going in that I would have to install a bunch of mods to get it working, but I had never installed mods before. However, it became abundantly clear that I needed to look into modding when I booted up an old save file. My character model had almost completely disappeared from the scene and I was hunted by enemies I could not fight.
My last count for installed Fallout: New Vegas mods was 102. That’s actually not a lot for this game, but as someone who doesn’t install mods unless they are absolutely necessary, this was quite an undertaking. Bethesda games always have large modding communities, but because New Vegas has been difficult to play on PC for years, the number of mods you can install is staggering. While there are far fewer hurdles for console players, it’s still extremely disappointing that Fallout games have suffered from a lack of support over the years.
Luckily, there is a great beginner’s guide Viva New Vegas who will guide you through it all the steps to obtain New Vegas to work. It’s called a “modular vanilla-plus” guide, meaning you’ll be playing a version of the game that’s close enough to the original, but with major improvements to visuals, frame rate, and the overall quality of life experience. You also don’t need to install all the mods (although it’s helpful to do so, as many of them require others to work). Despite the guide being easy to use, it still takes time o’clock to install the right software, set everything up and install each mod in the manual one by one. There are resources on Nexus Mods that will shorten that time, but as someone who never installs mods, I wanted to make sure everything went smoothly. That didn’t happen anyway, and I had to spend even more hours of troubleshooting to get rid of all the bugs, but in the end I was finally able to play this almost 15 year old game.
Granted, it’s not unusual for a studio to phase out updates for older titles with a smaller player base – and much of Bethesda’s efforts are going into the online multiplayer entry, Fallout 76And Fallout 5and there are other franchises it has to worry about, like Elder Scrolls and Starfield. But for a series this massive and highly anticipated and promoted, more effort should have been made to at least make it clearer how these games would run on PC.
Bethesda knew it would see a huge influx of players, which is why it made sure to time a series of game updates and promotions to the launch of the Fallout show. The biggest of these was a next-generation update Fallout 4. This delivered big performance gains for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series Of Fallout 4 Being the most recent Fallout game, it was a good decision to make it more modern for the expected new players who want to check out the game series after the show.
Unfortunately, many reports suggest that the Fallout 4 update was disappointing on all platforms, and especially on PC and Steam Deck. While the game received the coveted Steam Deck Verified badge just before the update, PCGamesN found that it doesn’t play as well on handheld, with frame rate issues. Perhaps the biggest part of the update is the removal of the Bethesda launcher for Steam Deck multiple points of sale reported made it difficult to update graphics settings (seems to affect Steam Deck OLED users much more than original Deck owners). So players were stuck with the default settings, causing the game to crash.
Image: Bethesda Game Studios/Bethesda Softworks via Polygon
If you play on a regular PC, you still get the launcher to adjust the graphics settings, so its removal was likely a move to help the game become Steam Deck Verified. Separately, players have reported mods breaking after the update, which is common with massive game updates; the creators of the gigantic community-driven Fallout: London expansion also said that the next-generation improvements “ruined (them)” and forced them to push back their release.
I installed the Fallout 4 updated and booted up my old save file on my desktop PC, and the game ran fine. I was able to take out a group of super mutants who had infiltrated a local hospital after taking some time to readjust to the control scheme. I played at 1440p with ultra-high settings enabled (it’s an older game, so it’ll run pretty well on a PC with less-than-modern specs), and while I couldn’t confirm the frame rate, the animations were smooth for the most part, with occasional stuttering when entering and exiting VATS and during combat. So people who have never played before Fallout 4Don’t have a Steam Deck and have never installed mods before, you probably won’t notice any problems and will have a decent time exploring post-apocalyptic Boston.
However, if potential players want to check out something older than Fallout 4 – and according to Steam charts and sites like SteamDB, that is certainly the case – they will experience the games in an unhappy state, with little indication that this would be the case. Let’s be thankful that Steam has a decent refund policy.