What is it Wendy Cope wrote? “Bloody Fallout 4 patches are like bloody buses. You wait half a decade for one, and as soon as that one breaks everything, Bethesda releases another just days later.” Yeah, pretty sure that’s it. Anyway, Fallout 4 will get another patch for the near decade-old game next week, presumably to help fix a lot of the problems its long-awaited “next-gen update” introduced two weeks ago.
Bethesda’s announcement of a patch for the 2015 RPG across all platforms simply states that it’ll add new options for graphics and performance settings, along with “further fixes and improvements”.
That last bit sounds like a gentle way of saying it will hopefully fix the complaints about its “next-gen update” – which took over a year from announcement to release, just in time to break a load of years-in-the-works mods and seemingly underwhelm on a lot of its other touted graphical and performance improvements, such as ultra-widescreen support, Creation Kit fixes and various quest updates that have seemingly gone unchanged for nearly 10 years. (“Thanks for your continued feedback and support!” Bethesda’s post adds, in that modern definition of “feedback” standing for “thousands of angry comments and forum posts”.)
The update also added a new quest, the fittingly-titled Echoes of the Past, and some weapons and gear to play with. It also Verified the game on Steam Deck, albeit at the apparent cost of removing the launcher needed to easily tweak the new graphical settings.
Of course, it’d be nice if those things are all smoothed out, but I can’t help but worry that releasing another update so soon after the last – which came over four years after Fallout 4’s previous patch – just risks moving the target once again for modders already reeling from the enormous upheaval of the last update. We’ll see come Monday, when the new patch is due to arrive.