A "next-gen" update for Fallout 4 players on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S was announced back in December 2022. It was delayed out of a planned 2023 release and finally saw the light of day just this week on April 25th.
Sadly, the long-awaited patch came out feeling like it still needed some time in the oven. Not only are some long-standing bugs not fixed (crashes related to weapon debris on Nvidia cards), but some of the features included in the update were extremely poorly implemented.
Though PC Gamer took the time to note some of the issues specific to the PC update for Fallout 4, the issues extend to the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S versions as well. As noted by PC Gamer, there are issues with using Fallout 4 mods, but this was to be expected with a new update. What wasn't expected were issues with a supremely poor implementation of ultrawide support, the lack of official support for framerates greater than 60fps, and the aforementioned lack of a fix for the weapon debris crashes on Nvidia cards. The ultrawide support is especially egregrious given how badly it's implemented into the game. In a best case scenario, the user interface is horribly stretched out horizontally, while in more extreme cases elements of the user interface don't even appear on screen.
Outside of PC Gamer, players noticed that loading times on PC have not been improved. On the next-gen consoles, the graphical mode toggle doesn't seem to do anything at all, keeping the game stuck in Performance mode. There are frame pacing issues on Steam Deck (reportedly now fixed in a Proton hotfix). Those who owned Fallout 4 through PlayStation Plus did not initially receive this update, but this has also since been fixed. An issue with high resolution assets failing to load was noted on Reddit.
Then there are other assorted issues, like the character creator missing an entire face. Or this issue where a player found their character locked in place while being killed by radroaches. Or even this issue that shows missing models and textures for the newly added makeshift weapons.
The kicker here is that there were several user mods that already "fixed" a lot of the issues that Bethesda either poorly implemented with this patch or outright ignored. There were several mods available for download that offered support for ultrawide resolution without stretching the user interface, something that Bethesda's official implementation failed to address. There were mods available that also sped up load times on PC, which is also something Bethesda did not implement with this update.
The Fallout 4 next-gen update, despite coming out a year after it was supposed to, just doesn't feel finished. If you were excited to hop back into Fallout 4 when this update released, I would strongly suggest you hold off until either Bethesda fixes the new messes they created, or mod makers yet again fix things on their own. The small bit of silver lining is the fact that if you own Fallout 4 through GOG, you are at least able to roll your game back to a previous version before this "next-gen" update was released.
(Top ultrawide image by Kochan31 on Reddit)
