The Anniversary Edition of Fallout 4 has brought with it the usual problems, with fans complaining of corrupted saves and broken mods.
Bethesda has a long history of making things worse with its patches, with fans often pleading with them to stop updating their games. Before the launch of Starfield, fans were already getting ready to fix it themselves and following last year’s next gen update for Fallout 4 the two most popular mods were to get rid of the update.
The Fallout 4 Anniversary Edition was only released 10 days ago and features very little new content, but it’s been so disruptive to fan communities that they’ve been marking the decade old game down on Steam, to the point where its recent review rating is now Mostly Negative.
Overall, the rating is still Very Positive, and it’d take a lot more negative reviews to make a dent in that verdict, but it’s clear the would-be celebration of Fallout 4 has not been a happy one.
The Anniversary Edition is mostly all existing content, including the six official expansions, over 150 pieces of Creative Clube content, and fan-made Creations. There’s a very small amount of new extras, to celebrate the anniversary, but that seems to have been enough that some people now can’t even launch the game and are being told they don’t own it.
Fallout 4’s Steam score has fluctuated a lot over the years, going down when a new patch is released and then rising back up once it’s fixed, but this is the lowest it’s been in over eight years.
Apart from trouble accessing the game, the main complaint is a familiar one: the update has stopped existing mods from working. This has been a consistent problem over the years, and caused a lot of problems for Fallout London, but somehow Bethesda never seem to anticipate it.
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‘Anniversary Edition has bricked my game. Unrecoverable crashes, corrupted saves, all the stuff we’ve come to expect from Bethesda. I uninstalled after nearly 700 hours in this game since this ‘update’ broke all my saves. Probably not going to play it again,’ says MordTheReaper on Steam.
‘For the love of all things holy, Bethesda, stop updating games that are over a decade old. We saw this with Skyrim where you morons decided to cram an anniversary edition update down everyone’s throats in 2021, breaking everyone’s mods that required things like SKSE [Skyrim Script Extender], and you did the same thing again with this game last year and then you did it again this year,’ opines shinra33459 ‘NO. MORE. UPDATES. There is no need to update a game that came out in 2015 except for a cash grab.’
‘Modders built the soul of this game. Bethesda keeps trying to sell it back to us,’ adds SkinnyFish. ‘Sell the franchise to someone who cares,’ suggests an angry RipandTearer.
It’s clear that fans now expect this sort of fallout (we’re not sure whether to pretend that pun was intended or not) from every update, no matter which game it is. But this one seems particularly bad, especially compared to how little has actually changed.
As well PC, the Anniversary Edition is also available for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5. A Nintendo Switch 2 version is also planned for sometime next year, which will the first appearance of the game on a Nintendo system.
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