Bethesda
The Fallout 4 update isn’t as expected; it’s full of issues and isn’t free on PS Plus
The Fallout 4 Next-Gen update has arrived, but far from being a massive upgrade to the game it’s been riddled by issues that essentially broke the game for many players.
It’s like launch day all over again. April 25th saw the release of the long-awaited “next-gen” update for Fallout 4 that was meant to bring the title to modern consoles as a native application (as opposed to through backwards compatibility of previous versions), as well as bugfixes and new content for the game. However, the result is not exactly what players expected, with reports of issues, bugs, poor performance and more.
The update originally announced back in 2022, was supposed to bring stability and compatibility fixes to the game so it would run better on current consoles. At the time of writing, there are several issues, like for example PlayStation 5 players being unable to get the update for several reasons. The game was available for free for PS+ subscribers for a time, as well as part of the PlayStation Game Catalog that was discontinued some time ago. While the upgrade was announced to be free for owners of the game, PS plus users were instead met with a $19.99 purchase option instead, which Bethesda has since admitted is an unintentional bug.
Their messaging is still quite confusing though, as no explanation of whether the free PS5 version nor the PS Plus Essentials version get the upgrade was given.
Problems abound in Fallout 4′s “next-gen” upgrade
For players on other consoles, there are many other issues as well. Digital Foundry’s Thomas Morgan found out that players on Xbox don’t have a working “Quality Mode” in their version, with only the “Performance Mode” working at the moment, which locks the game at 60 frames per second.
By far the most negatively impacted version of the game is the PC one, with the Steam forums exploding with complaints about how the patch fixes basically nothing, instead breaking mod compatibility, and in doing so breaking fixes made by the community to all of the issues Bethesda promised to fix with this patch.
“Damn, the bugfix list is SHORT” said one user on Reddit. “I had very low expectations but this is MUCH less than I expected. They didn’t fix almost any of the bugs that annoyed me the most (VATS crash and perception bug in Survival, for example).” Comments like this can be seen in the game’s subreddit and the Steam community forums, with complaints going from VATS being broken, a poorly implemented Ultrawide graphics mode that simply stretches the UI, all new bugs, and much more.
If you were waiting for this new update to arrive, our best suggestion is for you to wait just a bit longer for some of these issues to be fixed. At the very least, modders should be able to fix their own modifications, which means that sooner or later they’ll get the game back to the state it was before (and we can’t believe we’re saying this) Bethesda broke it 9 years after its original release.
Or at least watch out for deadly exclamation marks.