The recent Anniversary Edition of Bethesda Game Studios’ Fallout 4 is not the celebration that fans deserved. Released earlier this month, the new re-release of Bethesda’s already-mixed Fallout sequel has not gone down well.
Fallout 4 Anniversary Edition includes the base game, all of its DLC, and 150 pieces of Creation Club content alongside some new HUD options and minor tech improvements under-the-hood. While this sounds all fine and dandy for some, the new edition came with some major costs: mods are broken, the game crashes for most players, and many old bugs still aren’t fixed.
While Bethesda has promised fixes for the re-release of its ageing FPS RPG, fans of the game are understandably miffed at the state in which the upgrade was released in. Alongside the outrageously high price for a minor upgrade, many fans who did upgrade are no longer able to actually play the game.
In response to this, gamers on Steam have left scathing negative reviews to warn others against buying Fallout 4 Anniversary Edition. While the game has gone between Mixed and Positve reception on Steam since its 2015 launch, the ten-year-old RPG is now sitting at a “Mostly Negative” rating on Steam with just 33% of reviews over the past 30 days showing a positive rating.
“Bethesda’s latest update cycle feels less like support and more like sabotage—breaking mods, forcing updates, and re-selling the same game with a fresh coat of monetized paint,” one player said in a Steam review.
“The Fallout 4 Anniversary Edition update is absolutely terrible. It broke mods that were previously running perfectly. And the Creation Club network is extremely hard to connect to—very unstable—let alone downloading any mods. Bethesda isn’t showing much genuine effort,” said another.
The majority of the game’s recent negative reviews aren’t from newcomers who don’t enjoy Fallout 4, but largely fans with thousands of hours who have now been pushed out of one of their favourite games.
One player, with over 2,500 hours in Bethesda’s RPG, said: “Dear Bethesda, thank you for breaking one of my favourite games,” explainign that the game now no longer starts up following the Anniversary Edition update.
“Thank you, Bethesda, for taking a game I love, with all its faults, and making it unplayable,” they continued. “Well done, I award you a gold star for effort. Sincerely, Me, an unhappy and frustrated customer.”
This isn’t the first time that a Bethesda patch has made mods unplayable, far from it. Both Skyrim and previous Fallout 4 patches have broken mods, with fans figuring out ways of downgrading their games to play older mods. However, Anniversary Edition does more than just break mods. For many, it breaks the game, and the sheer price of the bad update is enough to leave a sour taste in the mouth on its own.
For more Bethesda coverage, read about our interview with former lead designer Bruce Nesmith about why Starfield has been less popular than prior games from the studio. No, it wasn’t just “space is boring”, actually.
