How Fallout 4 Did Power Armor Wrong

Power armor has been a staple of the Fallout series since all the way back in Fallout 1 back in 1997. And since power armor is so important to the series, developers have to be sure that they use it carefully.

You can’t just give it away or else it will lose all meaning and would ruin the balancing of the game. You also can’t hide it away until the end, cause by the time you have it, you’ve already finished the game.

So if it wasn’t clear by the title and the lead up, I want to talk about why I think that Fallout 4 did power armor wrong.

In the past Fallout games, power armor is shown to the player in a way that displays how amazing it is. The best example of this is when you first meet Sarah Lyons and the Lyons’ Pride in Fallout 3.

They’re all decked out in nice T-45 series power armor and are able to carve their way through a blown out office building full of Super Mutants. They then face off against a Super Mutant Behemoth and only lose one member, but that’s because she was right next to an exploding bus.

With this show of how fantastic power armor is, they get you wanting it, trying to find the quickest way into your own suit. So you think, I’ll just loot some power armor off a dead body. You find a corpse sporting the latest in personal defence fashion, go into your inventory and attempt to put it on, but you can’t because you don’t have to proper training to use it.

This restriction has been in place from Fallout 1 up until Fallout: New Vegas. This roadblock stops the player from getting the best armor in the game simply by stealing from the dead. It’s a clever way to do it and is makes sense when you think about it.

Any schmuck from the wasteland shouldn’t just immediately know how to use this highly advanced military armor that essentially turns the wearer into a one-man army.

These principles that make power armor as renowned as it is were all thrown out in Fallout 4.

Before I start ragging on Fallout 4, I will say that I do love that they turned power armor more into a kind of mech suit that turns you into a walking tank rather than just someone in a fancy tin can.

Nothing beats leaping off the roof of a skyscraper, crashing down with a thunderous crash while taking no damage, and then reducing any enemies in the vicinity to ash with a laser rifle.

I also really enjoyed the collecting and customization aspect of it. Creating a sort of power armor museum where you display all the different models and paint jobs. But I’m also a borderline hoarder, so collection of any sort in games usually gets me excited.

But that’s pretty much where my love for the Fallout 4 remake of power armor ends.

Power armor isn’t shown to us in some amazing feat of strength and badassery. It’s just given to us as soon as we walts into the first town. Yes we then rip the minigun off a helicopter and jump down into the street to mow down a bunch of raiders, but this still goes against the idea of making us want it because we already have it.

While this sequence does make power armor feel awesome, it’s then immediately ruined when a Deathclaw comes out of the ground and tosses us around like we’re swing dance partners.

This reduces that important factor of awesomeness that power armor needs to radiate for players to feel like they are the god of war when wearing it.

And then there is no restriction on using it. There is no training required to use a suit of power armor, even though one could argue it’s now infinitely harder to use than the simple metallic bodysuit it was in previous games.

Well, there is the limiting factor of fusion cores. But the problem with fusion cores is that, even though they’re pitched as this scarce power source, they’re really now. At the end of almost every dungeon you get at least one while only using up half of the fusion core you’re currently using at most.

The fact that your character can just use power armor right off the bat can also be annoying when playing as the female character, Nora. With the male character, Nate, you can kinda explain away why he would know how to use power armor because he served in the military, but Nora has no such excuse. She was a lawyer before the war and would know nothing of operating power armor.

And yes, while one could argue that the very early inclusion and access to power armor is made possible by the fact that the different models are tied to what level you are, it doesn’t really help. All that means is that you can’t get super duper overpowered, just regular overpowered.

Because power armor essentially levels with you considering you get better models every couple levels, that means that you’ll always have a suit that’s more powerful than any enemy that is going to be scaling level alongside you.

So, since Fallout 4 abandons or tries to replace the cores principles of showing power armor off to make us want it, making it unavailable until just the right point for us to use, and making the lore and use of power armor make sense in the world, I think it’s fair to say that Fallout 4 did power armor wrong.