Bethesda just announced that Fallout 4’s newest DLC, Automatron, will roll in on March 22, and players everywhere are overjoyed. Automatron is the game’s first add-on release since its launch back in November — and with hack-saws, pink Mr. Handys, and teddy bear donning Sentry bots — looks to bring back the iconic “Fallout Goofiness” that the base game had lacked.
I’ll say this — Fallout 4 was not a bad game. As a huge fan of the series, I have invested hundreds of hours into each game. In Fallout 3, I can vividly recall my hours spent exploring the Capital Wasteland. In New Vegas, I remember meeting Mr. House and his army of Securitrons, shooting down Roman Legionnaire lookalikes, and donning the infamous NCR Ranger combat armor. But when it comes to Fallout 4, all I remember are two things: Super Mutants and Raiders.
And I’m sick of them both.
Don’t get me wrong though, Fallout 4 improved in a lot of ways. Bethesda gave us an impressive crafting and settlement building system, an immersive world filled with cool locations, and a fully-voiced protagonist. But the final product was a game more akin to Borderlands than any of the other previous titles. It had the graphics, the gameplay, and the level design that set it miles above its predecessors, but it lacked the content so unique to the Fallout series.
Compared to the enemies in the previous titles, you spend most of your time in Fallout 4 fighting Raiders. And as you level up, you don’t encounter scarier monsters, the Raiders just become more resilient bullet-sponges. The quests you’re sent on are repeatable, and get repetitive once you realize that you’ve been sent to the exact location that you were sent to three quests ago — and that the Raiders you gunned down and cannibalized have all mysteriously reappeared. Things may look bleak for the longevity of Fallout 4, but I believe Bethesda’s upcoming DLC can change that.
From the looks of it, Automatron will be adding in:
- an intricate robot crafting system (complete with voices, paint jobs, and parts)
- robot companions
- an all-new lightning chain gun
- and an old friend from Fallout 3.
But most importantly, the DLC is adding in content that we’ve already come to expect from a Fallout game.
Automatron will be available for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC on March 22. With the help of DLC like Automatron, Bethesda can turn the Boston Commonwealth into the Fallout setting that we all imagined. I dream of a city filled with colorful robots and ostentatious weaponry, new groups of enemies in place of your standard filler enemies, and goofy quests that a player can complete to their heart’s content.
That’s not too much to ask for, is it?
