And how about this: Your Pip-Boy doesn’t consistently tell you what time it is. In addition to the tiny screen size, the font is an awful Apple IIe approximation, and the screen is slightly curved. With a different, full-screen UI, Fallout 4 could convey so much more information so much more cleanly than it does. I’m a fan of games that take this approach, but not when it’s done so ineffectually, and not when it’s so ugly and hard to read. The Pip-Boy is hobbled out of the gate by Bethesda’s desire to present it as an in-game “thing,” a screen within a screen. Look at this (actually fairly generous) illustration:Ī couple of readers have noted that you can press the back button to zoom in on the Pip-Boy, which increases the screen size a touch.Įven with the zoom, however, there’s still a huge amount of dead space: The Pip-Boy interface is just completely fucked from the very start, because it uses screen space so inefficiently. Like most things in Fallout 4, it is amazingly counterintuitive and difficult to use. It’s how you keep track of everything in the game, from quests to navigation to inventory to radio stations. The Pip-Boy is a chunky portable computer that your character wears on his or her wrist. In the interest of space, I’ve focused only on the controller interface, though I gather that the mouse & keyboard setup is just as confusing, if not more so. This article is based on the PC version of the game. Still, there’s almost certainly something to be gained from taking a closer look at the many ways the menus and interfaces fail to perform even their basic presumed functions. I really like Fallout 4-I’ve played an ungodly number of hours over the last couple of weeks, and my feelings on the game mostly line up with Patricia’s review. In other ways, the game’s creators have tried to streamline various systems and menus in order to make them more appealing and user friendly… but they’ve mostly just made things more confusing. In most ways, the new game uses the same interface as its predecessors, with the same problems carried over more or less intact. The fact that Fallout 4 has cumbersome, counterintuitive menus won’t come as a surprise to anyone who played Fallout 3 or Fallout: New Vegas.
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