Fallout 4's overall rating on Steam is "very positive" but its recent rating is "mixed," with user reviews languishing well under 50% positive. If you're wondering why, you can thank the recent Fallout 4 Creations Menu update.
Released earlier this month alongside the Creations Bundle (which is struggling under a "mostly negative" rating) to celebrate Fallout 4's 10th anniversary, the intent was to simplify the process of finding and accessing externally-developed content—the Creations in question. Instead, however, it made a rather big mess of things: breaking existing mods, introducing new bugs, and causing crashes and performance issues.
With Fallout fans decidedly unhappy about the whole thing, Bethesda now says it is "actively investigating" issues with the troublesome Fallout 4 update and Anniversary Edition, and that players "should now see faster load times of the Creations menu, game menu, and redemption of Creation Club items."
A hotfix is planned for early next week (so, not all that hot, really) that aims to address other issues, specifically:
- Fixing stability problems particularly on XB1/PS4.
- Fixing an issue causing creations that rely on DLC to not work.
- Fixing an issue causing DLCs to become uninstalled after updating the game on PlayStation
After that, Bethesda has a pair of patches planned, the first slated for the week of November 24 and the second sometime in the first half of December. Details on those will be provided later.
The reaction to the new announcement is, well, not exactly overflowing with positivity. It's not often you see gamers asking developers to please stop updating their games, but that's the general vibe here: It works, it's fine, leave it alone, or at the very least put it on a separate Steam branch so existing installs won't automatically update. Steam user Cope Overlord may have summed up the mood most aptly: "For Christ's sake, stop butchering old games!"
Because, as you may recall, this isn't the first time Bethesda has stepped in this particular pile: The Skyrim Anniversary Edition and accompanying 1.6 update released in 2021 thoroughly screwed up that game in a very similar fashion, and then it happened again with a subsequent big update in 2023. As PC Gamer's master prognosticator Joshua Wolens put it when he predicted exactly this outcome last week, "If Bethesda has a singular passion, it's releasing updates that break your mods." Hopefully they'll have it all squared away by the new year.
