Well, we’re still seeing new ideas in games today, but what’s perhaps more common are promising ideas that end up flopping. Whether it’s overpromising, poor execution, or trends chasing monetization, these games prove that a great idea alone isn’t enough.

Here are 15 revolutionary gaming concepts that sounded incredible on paper but then folded like a deck of cards with its execution.

Exploring A Full-Sized Galaxy – Starfield

Everything that Todd Howard presented to us about the then-upcoming open-galaxy Bethesda RPG seemed too good to be true. Skyrim in space was enough to get most of us in pre-order lines, but the promises went much further than that. There’s the hundreds of explorable solar systems with thousands of planets, sure, but the customizable space ship and ability to fly your ship and recruit crew members excited me the most. Unfortunately, when the game released, it was apparent that Todd’s promises really were too good to be true. There were practically no memorable characters, nearly every planet was devoid of interesting content, and ship navigation was frustrating and under-utilized. The game sold well enough due to initial hype, but a 97% player drop-off after six months and the broader damage to Bethesda’s reputation paint a clear picture of Starfield’s shortcomings..

Pirate Live Service – Skull and Bones

Just about everybody wanted a large open-seas pirate game where filled to the brim with tense ship battles and sea shanties, but the developer somehow managed to screw that up completely. The biggest failing with Skull and Bones was that it was a $70 title with a predatory live service model tacked on top of that. You had to grind for what seemed like hundreds of hours obtaining the ‘pieces of eight’ just to upgrade your hard-sought pirate ship equipment. The whole experience was just so bogged down in incremental monetization that even the few fans that were left had a hard time sticking with it for long. So much for the first ever AAAA game.

Hunters vs Hunted Multiplayer – Evolve

I wasn’t exactly the biggest Left 4 Dead fan in the world and even I was pretty excited about Evolve in the 2010s. Evolve pitted a group of hunters against a horrific Godzilla-like human-controlled opponent, differentiating Valve’s team-based shooter with an asynchronized matchup. The big distinction with Evolve is the colossal prey is just one human-controlled creature, resulting in a lopsided 4 versus 1 scenario. Matches were novel and hilariously fun … for the first couple hours. Running around as a hulking horror monster in search of four helpless little humans makes it hard to frown. But the novelty wore off pretty quick. The balance issues, very thin post-game offerings, and hefty price tag for what was essentially a repetitive game loop contributed to Evolve devolving to the husk it is today.

Open World Parkour – Forspoken

I remember being pretty hyped for Forspoken right before its demo released. It was made by the Final Fantasy XV studio using their in-house engine, all of which I’d been a big fan of. And the open-world parkouring just looked absolutely mesmerizing to top it off. Well, after playing the demo, I found myself frankly appalled. The best thing I can say about Forspoken is that it looks nice and has a serviceable soundtrack. The dialogue is perhaps the biggest culprit behind it’s failure, but the repetitive enemy encounters and throwaway isekai story don’t help sell the game either.

Your Choices (Don’t) Change Everything – Mass Effect 3

A lot of gamers want a good choice-driven narrative and plenty of games have attempted it over the years. Yet, carrying over those choices for a meaningful endgame remains an elusive accomplishment for many titles. Mass Effect 3 is perhaps the best example of this. Mass Effect 2 was noteworthy for carrying over key decisions made from the first game and branching those off into even more scenarios into the third game. Yet, Mass Effect 3 ended on a whimper with originally only three endings. The worst part about the narrow endgame funnel was just how paper-thin the different endings were. It’s like all the player-driven choices throughout the three games came to the same uninspired conclusion, albeit with a different color tacked on.

Mandatory Crafting – Metal Gear Survive, Fallout 4

I’m all for looting abandoned houses in open-world games, especially when paired with a robust crafting system. Yet, some games rely a bit too much on crafting to advance the main story. In the case of Fallout 4, crafting is absolutely essential no matter what you plan on doing in the game. The game’s big draw, other than being another Fallout, was its settlement creation system. Yet, to properly build up your settlement, you had to grind for loot and craft like crazy. And then on the extreme spectrum, you have Metal Gear Survive, which made crafting the core gameplay loop, and by extension, the only loop the game had to offer. Crafting is a fun aspect of gameplay, but there’s such a thing as too much of it, as is the case with these two games.

Detective Vision – Batman: Arkham Series, The Last of Us Part 1

Batman: Arkham Asylum made many of us fall in love with detective vision gameplay. Turning on the infrared goggles and snooping the environment for clues just added so much to the setting and gameplay. But then, it seemed like every other game out there started implementing it, and the novelty didn’t quite stick. The Witcher 3 had Geralt investigating hundreds of trails using his witcher sense, but fans generally like it there because of his fun banter. But the later Arkham games and The Last of Us Part 1 tended to overuse detective vision to the point where it slowed down not just the gameplay but story as well.

Procedural “Infinite Story” Generation – No Man’s Sky Launch, Daggerfall

I remember how skeptical a majority of gamers were when Sean Murray talked up his infinite galaxy filled with procedural generation in No Man’s Sky. The game released and, well, a majority of gamers felt correct in their initial skepticism. No Man Sky’s launch lacked the touted multiplayer component that it now enjoys, but it also felt barren and void of meaningful content, something procedural generation often struggles with. An earlier example of empty fields of infinite procedural generated content was Bethesda’s Daggerfall. Daggerfall boasts a staggering 62,000 to 80,000 square miles of traversable land with well over 10,000 towns. It was simply the largest game at the time of release, dwarfing most modern open-worlds today. Yet, the dungeon design was … well, absent. And the actual content within such mammoth maps were repetitive and shallow, even if other systems were novel and fun at the time.

Memory Editing — Remember Me

On paper, Remember Me’s mix of third-person action combat, platforming, and puzzles in the form of Memory Remixing should’ve been the beginning of a new hit franchise. DontNod had the budget and concept for a longlasting series and rewriting people’s past to influence an outcome in the plot was the big selling point. And you don’t just rewrite memories in cutscenes, you actively re-arrange objects called glitches in the subject’s mind like a puzzle. It’s a truly terrifying ability, and one that would’ve rivaled the Animus from Assassin’s Creed if it was used more fully in the game. In the end, Remember Me was known for its subpar combat encounters and underbaked story. If only Remember Me could’ve remembered the Memory Remix mechanic enough for gamers to remember it.

Possess Enemies On-the-Fly — Mindjack

Who remembers the Japanese cover shooter game from the early 2010s, Mindjack? Yeah, probably not many. Besides the generic third-person shooting mechanics and forgettable sci-fi story, it had an innovative mind-hacking mechanic thrown into the mix. Being able to possess enemies and convert them to your side on-the-fly sounds pretty dang fun, until you realize the AI is awful in Mindjack. The repetitive level design and bland missions didn’t help the promising mind-jacking concept either.

Open-World Live Service Campaign — Anthem

Bioware is still chugging along today even after lukewarm releases like Dragon Age The Veilguard and Mass Effect Andromeda, but Anthem was the signal that the  studio just wasn’t the same anymore. Despite building a reputation for rich storytelling and immersive character interactions, EA made Bioware go the live service multiplayer route with Anthem. That decision didn’t go well with longtime fans or newcomers. The launch was plagued by glitches, bugs, and crashes galore. And the long-term looter-shooter loop didn’t do enough to keep players around. This is alll despite a genuinely fun jetpack system that allowed players to fly around with their mechanized soldier through the environment with ease. It’s a fun game to fly around in, but was a chore to actually do anything else.

Superhero Looter-Brawler – Marvel’s Avengers

Marvel’s Avengers was another game that cashed in on the live service looter band-wagon, with the advantage of having the Marvel IP tied to it. There was actually quite a bit of hype building up for Crystal Dynamics’ huge new AAA superhero game. It came out during a time of Avengers high and within a game industry that hadn’t capitalized on it yet. Needless to say, many gamers desperately wanted to pick their favorite Avenger and fight some baddies in a high quality action game. But the aggressive repetition within the mission design and lack of a post-game severely hindered what was supposed to be an ever-evolving game. If you’re going to make a game with the kind of structure of Marvel’s Avengers, at least build it around a compelling story and interesting gameplay.

AAA Episodic Storytelling – Telltale Games

Where’s Telltale Games been, by the way? Episodic interactive game dramas just aren’t the same since Telltale’s reign in the 2010s. Telltale’s The Walking Dead fomented a revolution in the episodic potential for smaller-scale video games. But it seems that ever since Telltale’s Game of Thrones, the formula just hasn’t seen the same kind of success. The stagnant cell-shaded art style contributed to gamers just getting tired of Telltale games, but the realization that choices were largely illusory or at least highly bottlenecked also likely played a role in the genre’s decline.

Time-Manipulation Shooter — TimeShift

Everyone loves a good bullet-time Matrix moment in movies or TV, especially so when we get to control it. TimeShift leaned into the slow-motion cool factor and then cranked it up a notch with full control over time itself. Centering a first-person shooter on time manipulation abilities just seems limitless in its potential. But despite the ability to freeze time in the middle of firefights, the game just felt lackluster to play. Like Anthem, the game had one cool thing going for it: the time-bending abilities, with nothing else to compliment that. The story, while told within a cool dieselpunk setting, was awkwardly paced and surrounded by forgettable characters. And the enemies were bullet-sponges without much thought put into their encounter design. We all love a good time-bending mechanic, but TimeShift just didn’t make a good game around it.

Cloud-Powered, Fully Destructible Cities — Crackdown 3

Gamers were surprisingly delighted by the chaotic sandbox that Crackdown 2 provided and hyped up the next game beyond what it was capable to deliver. The third game executed on the sandbox action hero concept about as well as MindEye did the GTA formula (okay, maybe not quite that bad). Where the second Crackdown delivered on laughs and mindless fun, the third drilled repetitive urban landscapes and bland mission design into our tired hands. Even the advertised cloud-powered destructible environments didn’t make the final cut into the game, except for the now-dead multiplayer mode that nobody played. Crackdown 3 failed to iterate or improve on the chaotic sandbox formula that fans loved about the second one, so much so that even Terry Crews couldn’t save it.

“We wanted to do something grand and American: that’s New York for you,” he said. However, the team ultimately decided to go with another city because of how well-represented New York had already been in other games. “At that time, other games were being set in New York, one of the Crysis games just came out, and that was set in New York, then there was another game,” he explained. He recounted the team essentially deciding that, “You know what? Maybe New York’s not the right call.”

As for how Boston became the main setting of Fallout 4, Pagliarulo said that while he didn’t push for it, he was approached by lead artist Istvan Pely and director Todd Howard about using it for the game. “I didn’t want to push for Boston, even though I thought it would be a great location,” he said. Pely, however, recalled that Boston was in fact a suggestion by Pagliarulo, since it also happened to be his hometown.

“I remember when it came time to do Fallout 4, Emil’s like ‘can we do it in Boston? Can we do my hometown,'” he said. “I don’t know, maybe he got a kick out of that, blowing up his hometown.”

Fallout 4 has been seeing a resurgence in recent times thanks to Bethesda having released the game’s Anniversary Edition on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S back in November. However, immediate reception to it  was quite negative, thanks to several bugs that caused Creations DLC breaking. This would eventually lead to its Steam reviews falling down to “Mostly Negative”.

At the time of publishing, however, opinion on Fallout 4: Anniversary Edition seems to be turning around, with its Steam reviews aggregate having climbed up to “Mostly Positive”. This was likely helped by Bethesda’s continuous support of the release, including a patch that hoped to address “DLC installation issues, occasional crashing, and general user experience”.

Among the improvements brought along with the update, which came out in December, were improved UI/UX visibility for smaller displays like those on the Steam Deck and ROG Ally handhelds, and fixes for crashes related to the Creations menu.

For more details about Fallout 4, check out our review from back when it first came out. Also check out our more recent review of its PS5 release, as well as that of its major overhaul mod, Fallout: London. In the meantime, Bethesda is noted to be “working on a whole bunch of stuff” for the Fallout franchise. Details, however, haven’t yet been revealed. The title also got a boost in player numbers thanks to the success of the second season of Prime Video’s Fallout series.

The Creation Engine first debuted as the game engine powering the incredibly-popular The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. Later, the same engine was also used to develop Fallout 4 and Fallout 76. The development of Starfield saw updates to the engine, with it being dubbed Creation Engine 2.

“I’m really worried that they’re gonna keep going with the Creation Engine,” said Carter when asked about what new features could show up in Fallout 5. “I understand that it is proprietary. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of pluses to it. I’m not just someone that’s going to sit there and lie and say it’s a terrible engine. It could be better, yes, but it’s not a bad engine but I do think it started to show its age. It needs to be overhauled somewhat.”

The idea fundamentally comes down to the fact that it might be difficult for Bethesda to add in new features to the engine that support new kinds of gameplay. For example, drivable vehicles would be a major addition that would require quite a bit of development on the Creation Engine.

“If they can overhaul it, then there’s no reason why they couldn’t push its limits and start adding things like drivable cars, maybe even metro systems like what we built in Fallout: London,” Carter continued. “I mean, if we found a way, I’m sure they could bring some of this stuff back into Fallout 5.”

Going into further detail about what kinds of technical issues could be fixed if Bethesda were to move over to a more modern game engine, Carter responded by saying “load screens and optimization, without a doubt,” before going into the painstaking work that the Fallout: London team did in its attempts to reduce load screens.

“That was our biggest complaint, rightly so from the public, that our game wasn’t optimized, and that’s because it was far too late in development to be able to change it, and it was because we as gamers did not want load screens,” he explained. “So we built things like the East Minster, which is in the Trafalgar Square area and is notoriously one of the more unstable areas in the mod, and we were just trying to literally slap down walls on anything to optimize it by the end.”

“That’s just because we didn’t want to have load screens. It would have really taken away from the vibe and we paid the price for it because the engine wasn’t suitable for what we wanted to achieve. If they have to upgrade it, that’s what they need to solve: get rid of the load screens and allow better optimization.”

In the same interview, Carter has also expressed his thoughts on the current state of the Fallout franchise, and how it might be better off if Bethesda were to sell the IP to a new developer.

“I had in my mind that TES6 was going to be like The Empire Strikes Back,” he said, going on to explain that the elven supremacists among the Thalmor would eventually be built up as the main antagonists for The Elder Scrolls 7. This build up would largely take place throughout The Elder Scrolls 6, and would involve the group’s ambition to gain control over the entirety of Tamriel.

He acknowledged that this kind of ending wouldn’t really be allowed in a Bethesda game, referring to a cliffhanger ending as being “completely unfeasible.” This is especially true for a studio that has incredibly-long development cycles. “That’s not a good way to end a game and say, yeah, we’ll see you in 10, 15 years,” he said.

Further in the interview, Kuhlmann also spoke about how the culture of game development at Bethesda had changed since the release of The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. He noted that, while the senior developers were working on the game directly back then, over time, these senior developers would start taking more managerial roles. Kuhlmann described it as feeling “more bureaucratic,” going on to say that: “The expectation was… your job can’t be also making content if you’re actually managing that scope of the project.”

His eventual departure was a combination of this culture shift, along with the fact that he wouldn’t get to work as the lead designer on The Elder Scrolls 6. Director Todd Howard had previously promised Kuhlmann that after wrapping work on Fallout 4, the studio would then start the development of The Elder Scrolls 6. However, it would instead follow up on Fallout 4 with multiplayer title Fallout 76, which would then be succeeded by Starfield.

“I was obviously one of the old-timers there and had a lot of experience. Bruce [Nesmith] and I had been the co-leads on Skyrim. I think most people would call it a successful project, so I thought that it wasn’t unreasonable for me to think that I could be a successful lead on TES6. It wasn’t just my expectation—I had been told that that was going to happen,” he said. “And they made the decision, no, you’re not going to be the lead.”

While no new details about The Elder Scrolls 6 have been revealed since the game’s original announcement back in 2018, Howard had said back in December that development on the title has been “progressing really well.” Design director Emil Pagliarulo acknowledged the “time pressure” that the studio has been facing from its fans, and has asked these fans to be patient.

When asked how Bethesda could potentially freshen the Fallout series up by changing its formula, Carter said that it might just be time for the company to sell the IP to another developer. “With the greatest respect to Bethesda, I feel like they’ve probably gone one game too far, if I’m honest,” he said.

“I feel like it’s time to go off into the sunset and look at selling off your IP because people like the franchise, I’m just honestly not sure it’s in the right hands, and it really hurts me to say that because I love Bethesda.”

Chief among his complaints about Bethesda’s run at the Fallout franchise has been the downward trend of the quality of its writing. He similarly also brings up The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, noting that he doesn’t think it’s the “best game of all time like some people,” and that instead “it’s a very, very good game.”

“I reckon if they could inject in the quality of some good writers, then the next Elder Scrolls game will be great and the next Fallout game will be great but they need better writers, honestly,” said Carter. “Everything has its own pros and cons but the one thing we agreed on with Fallout: London is that we wanted to make it more dark and gritty because that’s what Fallout actually is, and I think Bethesda are taking it in the opposite direction.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Carter also spoke about the Fallout franchise revisiting the settings and atmosphere of the original Fallout. Noting that, while he enjoyed Fallout 4, he prefers the approach that the 1997 classic took to its setting and tone to the more slapstick style that Bethesda has taken since Fallout 4.

“I would love to see the Fallout 1 setting again. I think it would be great because that’s where it all started and to really go back to it would be something,” he said. “I actually like the Fallout TV show. I know a lot of people were saying that the second season isn’t so good or whatever but I feel it’s definitely got a Fallout 4 vibe to it, which is fine.”

“I like Fallout 4 but I would like more of a Fallout 1 vibe and I feel like if you want a Fallout 1 vibe in terms of a show, you should probably watch Silo. I think Silo is a good shout for that. It’s a bit darker and grim,” Carter continued, bringing up comparisons between Prime Video’s adaptation and Apple TV+’s Silo.

“I prefer Fallout to have that sort of tone rather than going all slapstick. It’s a bit more humorous but the humour in the first series was dark humour. The slapstick stuff needs to stop because that’s not what Fallout is.”

Fallout 3 might have seen the smallest rise, going from peaks of up to almost 700 concurrent players to almost a thousand since the second season of the Fallout show. Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 4 have been seeing much more drastic upticks in players. Where Fallout 4 would typically see around 22,000 concurrent players before December, it has been hitting almost 33,000 players daily. Fallout: New Vegas, on the other hand, usually saw around 8,000 players, which has now gone all the way up to around 15,000 since the show’s season two premiere.

While the single-player titles have been seeing more players, Fallout 76 isn’t being left behind either. The multiplayer game’s typical average of around 20,000 concurrent players has been rising since December, peaking at almost 30,000 earlier this month. The popularity of the Amazon TV show has likely played a major role in this rise in player figures, but the fact that its season two premiere coincided with Steam’s Winter Sale also likely helped in getting the games into the hands of more players.

Rush had spoken about players hopping on to these classics last year, noting that Bethesda plans to continue supporting players in the live-service Fallout 76. The subject had come up in light of the multiplayer title getting its Glow of the Ghoul update, which allowed players to turn their characters into Ghouls.

Looking ahead, reports have indicated that Bethesda might be working on a remastered release of Fallout 3 in the same vein as The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered, which will likely mean improved visuals and more polished gameplay. A recent report noted that, despite its silence, the company still plans to release the game. However, when it will make the announcement is still currently unknown.

As for what we might see in the future, Fallout director Todd Howard has said that Fallout 5 will take the events of the Amazon show into account for its story. “In short, yes. Fallout 5 will exist in a world where the stories and events of the show happened or are happening. We are taking that into account,” he said.

Howard had also noted that Bethesda had been “working on a whole bunch of stuff” for the Fallout universe back in December. In his statement, he acknowledged fans asking for remasters of Fallout 3 or New Vegas, and asked them to wait until Bethesda is ready to make an announcement. While you’re at it, also check out what he thinks about the Fallout: London mod for Fallout 4.

In the interview with IGN, Howard noted that he had only seen Fallout: London through some videos, and that he hadn’t yet played it. He did, however, go into detail about how difficult it is for a modding team to convert one game into something else altogether.

“I would say we look at a lot of the modding that’s going on, and when you have those total conversions – I just want to say how hard that is,” said Howard. “And so, the fact that it came out, first of all, because most of those never come out, and the fact that it came out… It seems a lot of fans love it. It’s just – I need to express to everybody out there how difficult and what a journey that is for some of these big mod teams to do stuff like that.”

Fallout: London, as you might have guessed from its title, converts the setting of Fallout 4 into England’s capital city. The story behind the mod’s central campaign revolves around the protagonist’s loss of memory, as well as the mysteries surrounding Smythe. The mod is a fully-featured one, and includes all of the gameplay mechanics you know and love from Fallout 4, from combat and VATS to base-building.

The team behind Fallout: London—Team FOLON—didn’t quite call the mod itself finished, however. The team has since released a major new DLC release for the mod, dubbed Rabbit & Pork. “SOOOO Big things are coming,” wrote Team FOLON on social media before Rabbit & Pork was officially released. “Fallout London‘s first DLC is getting closer, and the team at Team Folon Ltd has been working non-stop to bring the ‘Rabbit & Pork’ DLC to you all. Maybe some more surprises, too. Exciting times ahead. Stay tuned!”

Fallout: London was released back in July 2024, and a large part of the effort behind the total-conversion mod was in accurately and artistically depicting its setting of post-apocalyptic London. Alongside a new setting, the mod also brought an extension to the dialogue system, as well as a host of new quests and companions.

Shortly after its initial release, Fallout: London‘s developers had confirmed that the mod had seen more than a million downloads. Since its launch, the mod has also seen a host of updates, which have included bug fixes, performance improvements and even new quests. For more details about Fallout: London, check out our review. For more of our thoughts on the mod, check out why we believe it to be evidence that Bethesda needs to renew its focus on the future of the Fallout franchise.

In the interview, Howard also said that Bethesda has been keeping an eye on fan comments about Fallout 3 or New Vegas getting remastered, and that the company will show off what it is working on at some point.

“The first thing is we get it, right? We see all those comments,” said Howard when asked about remastering Fallout 3 or New Vegas. “I alluded to it when I was on the stream. And just to let people know, like we see it. We’re working on a whole bunch of stuff. And, you know, we look forward to the day that we can reveal them.”

“I would say, in general, I prefer to wait. I like the moment that you learn about something. So I would say to the fans that, yep, we get it, but I’m always thinking about the moment that you find out. When you launch a game, when you press play, when you download something and it’s all there, what are you thinking? What do you already know? So I start with that moment, and I back up.”

Howard is essentially referring to the idea that he likes to keep things surprising for fans of Bethesda’s works for as long as he possibly can. One example noted in the interview was the shadow drop of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered, which was released without too many people expecting it except for the few leaks leading up to its launch.

He also referenced his pre-recorded message to fans of the Fallout franchise during Fallout Day back in October, where he spoke about how Bethesda still has plenty of things that it is working on in the Fallout universe. However, even at the time, he noted that more details will only be revealed when Bethesda was ready to do so.

“Even though I am recording this — it’s not live — and I’m probably watching myself right now from my desk and I’m reading your chat and these… that thing you want and this other thing you want… Hey, we read it all. Just know we are working on even more. We are looking forward to the day when we can share that with everybody,” said Howard in his message.

Fallout Day saw the announcement of quite a few things, including Fallout 4: Anniversary Edition, as well as details about the Burning Springs update for Fallout 76. While the former launched to a largely-negative reception, with the company promising fixes with more updates, the latter was released on PC, PS4 and Xbox One earlier this month.

Though initially planned for November, it’s now releasing at a later time (most likely with December’s patch). For now, the current patch will help with fixing crashes while improving performance in the Creations menu on all consoles. Softlocking when entering/exiting the menu and the infinite loading that could occur when loading a save file with Creations will also be addressed.

But that’s not all. As a mea culpa of sorts, Bethesda is also providing the “first of several” free Creations. Out later this week, it adds a new quest where players venture down a manhole, solve puzzles and obtain the new unique Varmint Rifle.

While this sounds all well and good, fans aren’t happy about another update potentially breaking their mods, especially after the headache caused by the Anniversary Edition. “The modding community is the backbone of your games that keeps them relevant after all these years, and instead of paying respects to those who dedicate hours out of passion to their projects, you mock them,” commented one user on the post.

Another echoed a popular sentiment: “Just set up a separate public branch so we can choose whenever if we want to use the previous update or not, so we don’t have to worry about an update breaking mod compatibility. All it takes is a few minutes on your end via the Steamworks developer portal to set up a public branch containing the older version.”

Bethesda hasn’t indicated whether it will be doing this or not in the future, but stay tuned for further updates. In the meantime, Fallout 4: Anniversary Edition is available for PlayStation, Xbox and PC with a Switch 2 version out in 2026.

Among the currently 6,025 user reviews, about 33 percent gave it their approval, but why the sudden negativity? That would be due to the Anniversary Update, released to commemorate the title’s tenth anniversary. Of course, it also provided an excuse for Bethesda to re-release it, this time as the Anniversary Edition.

However, even those who didn’t upgrade were forced to download the update, which resulted in numerous performance issues, including crashes, broken textures, broken mods, and more. The fact that the separately available Creations Bundle has its own share of issues while lacking anything compelling doesn’t really help either.

As one review notes, “Fallout 4 was once a sandbox for creativity. Now it’s a treadmill for monetization. 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.” Another said, “If you’re trying to sell your paid mods of varying quality, maybe don’t then break your paid mods store.”

It’s all the more annoying since Fallout 4 is the only contemporary offering in the series (at least on the single-player front). Bethesda’s Todd Howard revealed that the studio is working on “even more,” but a rumored Fallout 3 remaster is allegedly still a way off. And if Howard’s statement from 2022 still holds, the same applies to the next mainline Fallout.