Fallout 4 Then Versus Now: A Very Unscientific Screenshot Comparison

Call me gullible, or curious, or something in between, but thanks to the new Amazon Fallout series, I have joined the throngs in returning to the Fallout games’ various wastelands. The TV show, enjoyable as it is, however, is only one part of the bandwagon equation. The other is that Bethesda released last week its next-gen upgrade for Fallout 4. In addition to general graphical improvements and such, a bevy of new, mostly Enclave-related content was added, including, most notably, an Enclave quest. Well! That new quest alone was enough for me to want to revisit the Commonwealth. But, because I’m, uh…I don’t know…me, I couldn’t just pick up with my former lone wanderer with whom I had recently conquered the game’s DLC for the first time. Nope. I started over from scratch; even deleted all my old save files so I wasn’t even tempted! With the PS5 upgrade ready to go — it’s free to owners of the game — I set off with my new guy, Stuart, to conquer the wasteland once again.

Well…maybe do a little conquering, I’m not sure. While I do at least want to play the new Enclave quest at some point, in jumping back into the game this past weekend, my primary goal was to see just how “next-gen” the game looked. When I returned to Fallout 4 after the years-long slog it took me to just complete the main story once, the already game looked much better than I remembered. (At that point, the bright, autumn landscapes of Fallout 76 were my main visual comparison.) Reviewing screenshots I took over the game in 2019 and 2022 backed up this notion. Fallout 4 was indeed much more colorful and varied than sickly green stomping grounds of Fallout 3 and tawny deserts of Fallout: New Vegas. The question in my mind was: did the next-gen update make Fallout 4 even more colorful and varied, and alive, to a degree? What follows here is a quick, unscientific, and totally take-with-a-grain-of-salt comparison of screenshots I took of the game in 2015 (on the PS4, some of which were used in my Screenshot Theater video) and those I captured on the PS5 mere days ago. These will be in order with the 2015 screenshots first, followed by the 2024 ones.

What, if any differences, do you see?

The bombs drop and our protagonist, spouse, and kid hightail it to Vault 111.