Why is it so difficult to play Fallout games on PC right now?

Like so many other people, after I finished the Fallout series on Amazon Prime, I wanted to jump into a Fallout game again. I lived in the Boston area — where Fallout 4 is set — in 2015, when that game was released, so I clocked in almost 70 hours there, but I couldn’t resist the temptation to boot up my favorite game in the series: Fallout: New Vegas. Unfortunately, that was easier said than done.

My copy of the game is on Steam, and while the console versions have fared better over the years, long-term support on PC has been abysmal. I knew going in that I was going to have to install a ton of mods just to get it to work, but I had never installed mods before. However, it became abundantly clear that I had to dig into modding when I booted up an old save file. My character’s model had almost completely vanished from the scene, and I was being hounded by enemies I couldn’t fight against.

My final count for installed Fallout: New Vegas mods was 102. That’s not actually a lot for this game, but as somebody who doesn’t install mods unless they’re absolutely necessary, this was a whole endeavor. Bethesda games always have large modding communities, but because New Vegas has been tough to play on PC for years, the number of mods you can install is staggering. While there are way fewer hurdles for console players, it’s still extremely disappointing that Fallout games have suffered from a lack of support over the years.

Thankfully, there is a great beginner’s guide called Viva New Vegas that walks you through all the steps for getting New Vegas up and running. It’s called a “modular vanilla-plus” guide, which means you’ll be playing a version of the game that’s close enough to the original but with big improvements to visuals, frame rate, and the general quality-of-life experience. You don’t have to install all the mods, either (although it’s helpful to do so, since a lot of them need other ones to run). Despite the guide being easy to use, though, it still takes hours to install the proper software, get it all set up, and start installing every mod in the guide one by one. There are resources on Nexus Mods that cut that time down, but as somebody who never installs mods, I wanted to ensure everything went off without a hitch. It didn’t anyway, and I still needed to do even more hours of troubleshooting to get rid of all the errors, but in the end, I could finally play this nearly 15-year-old game.

Granted, it’s not out of the ordinary for a studio to phase out updates for older titles with smaller player bases — and a lot of Bethesda’s efforts are going toward its online multiplayer entry, Fallout 76, and Fallout 5, and there are other franchises for it to worry about, like Elder Scrolls and Starfield. But for a series this massive, and a highly anticipated and promoted show, more effort should’ve been put into at least making it clearer how these games would run on PC.

Bethesda knew that it would see a huge influx of players, which is why it most certainly timed a series of game updates and promotions for the launch of the Fallout show. The largest of these was a next-gen update for Fallout 4. This brought big performance gains for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X — including the much-sought-after 60 frames per second — but PC players also got the update, which included platform-specific features like ultrawide support. With Fallout 4 being the most recent mainline Fallout game, it was a good call to make it more modern for the expected new players looking to check out the game series after the show.

Unfortunately, many reports suggest that the Fallout 4 update has been disappointing on all platforms, and especially so on PC and Steam Deck. While the game got the coveted Steam Deck Verified badge right before the update hit, PCGamesN found that it doesn’t play all that well on the handheld, with frame rate issues. The biggest part of the update is arguably the removal of the Bethesda launcher for Steam Deck, which multiple outlets reported made it difficult to update graphical settings (it seems to be affecting Steam Deck OLED users a lot more than original Deck owners). So players have been stuck with the default settings, which has caused the game to crash.

Image: Bethesda Game Studios/Bethesda Softworks via Polygon

If you play on a regular PC, you’ll still get the launcher to adjust graphical settings, so its removal was likely a move to help the game become Steam Deck Verified. Separately, players have reported that mods broke after the update, which is common with massive game updates; the creators of the gigantic community-driven Fallout: London expansion also said that the next-gen improvements “screwed [them] over” and forced them to push back their release.

I installed the Fallout 4 update and booted up my old save file on my desktop PC, and the game ran well. I was able to take out a group of super mutants that had infiltrated a local hospital after taking some time to become readjusted to the control scheme. I was playing on 1440p with ultra-high settings turned on (it’s an older game, so it’s going to run decently well on a PC with less-than-modern specs), and while I couldn’t confirm the frame rate, animations were smooth for the most part, with occasional stuttering going in and out of VATS and in combat. So people who’ve never played Fallout 4, don’t have a Steam Deck, and have never installed mods probably won’t notice any issues and will have a decent time exploring post-apocalyptic Boston.

However, if potential players want to check out anything older than Fallout 4 — and according to Steam charts and sites like SteamDB, they most certainly do — they’ll be experiencing the games in unfortunate states, with little indication that this would be the case. Let’s just be thankful that Steam has decent refund policies.