Is Fallout 4's Automatron DLC Worth Playing?

[Music] when it comes to downloadable content all things are not created equal DLC can run the gamut from utterly fantastic and amazing like the blood and wine DLC for The Witcher 3 or soulless money grabs like in the case of oblivion's horse armor DLC 18 years later and Elder Scrolls fans are still salty about that one whether you love it as a means of getting more content for the game you love or hat it as a business practice that encourages game studios to release incomplete games and sell the missing pieces separately the simple fact is that DLC has long since proven it's here to stay with Fallout 4 having six major dlc's released it can be difficult to determine which ones are worth adding to your gameplay experience and which ones to leave behind so having already reviewed far Harbor in Nuka world I figured I'd take a stab at the last remaining story Focus DLC automatron to determine if it's any good before you go actually yes I get that there is a story to the vault tech Workshop DLC but the story isn't the main focus for that one and just look at the name as with the previous videos I will be using the Grays is it good score to rank this DLC four key categories story line explorable area new item usefulness and expansion to gameplay mechanics will be rated on a scale of 1 to five leaving a final possible score of 20 points and there will be spoilers for the main story you have been warned our Story begins when we receive a caravan distress call or venture too close to Watts consumer electronics or try to take the Tucker Memorial Bridge or you know what there's a lot of ways this Story begins in any case it's usually because you probably ventured close enough to find a caravan under attack by some very Strang looking robots by the time we're able to come to their rescue the only survivor of the Caravan is a robot named Ada a is not an off-the-shelf pre-war model instead she is primarily an assaultron with protectron legs and a Sentry bot arm while it would appear that a has just been jury rigged with whatever working parts her owners had available a claims that these were intentional modifications to her chassis for practical reasons yeah I always put slower less maneuverable legs on my robot that used to have the same basic agility of a human anyway Ada was part of a caravan of traders that specialized in Mechanical Services and supplies they traveled the waist fixing up whatever Machinery people still had in Need for from robots and generators to water purifiers and kitchen mixers after they entered the Commonwealth they been set upon by strange robots like the ones we defeated here cobbled together from parts from many different robot models even from dissimilar manufacturers like robco and general atomics a holotape recovered from an iBot in this group reveals a cryptic message from someone who calls themselves the mechanist supposedly these robots are here to save the Commonwealth not exactly a decent start if they're attacking trade Caravans Ada a little more emotionally aware than your average assaultron probably due to significant meddling and her programming is dead set on avenging her Caravan who she repeatedly refers to as her friends and enlist the Soul Survivors help to do it in exchange she agrees to provide schematics for a robot workbench A specialized fabrication unit designed to modify robots in much the same way that she was so naturally the Soul Survivor agrees and we're ready to begin as far as Quest starts go it's not terrible the trigger definitely needs work though I think it would have been much better to have it take place in an internal cell so you can't accidentally trigger it as I have several times before for instance adding a warehouse to the back of Watts consumer electronics so we have an internal cell where the Caravan was trying to set up a base camp out of the elements and became trapped by the mechanist robots wait this isn't a five easy fixes video critique gray don't correct critique okay fine now it's not like you can't ignore the battle between a and the scrap Bots as a companion character and being essential to the automatron storyline AA obviously can't die so you can just run off in another Direction and the fight will be decided in a few in-game days seriously these these robots can't hit Jack but it just feels weird to come back after the battle has long since been decided and have AA greet you like you just came to her Aid and destroy the robots yourself all right we have to track down the mechanist so we have to start making moves against their mechanical minions so we make for a manufacturing center for General atomics where some scrap Bots had been spotted a few days before the Caravan was attacked you can take AA or leave her somewhere but she'll voice her displeasure if you don't bring her along and with her protector on legs she's slow clunky and obnoxiously loud however you're free to build a robot workbench and upgrade her a bit at this point in the DLC your modification objects are limited but at least you can bolt on a Mr handy booster which makes her much more endurable to bring along when you enter the general atomics Factory you fight your way through a whole bunch of scrap Bots and have the option to go through a series of logic puzzles meant to test the problem solving skills of Mr handies and Miss nannies rolling off the assembly line there's not much point to it especially in late gameplay since the reward is just a few Fusion cores but it's an interesting glimpse into how these robots were tested before they shipped out once you reach the boss chamber you come face to face with an interesting addition eagle-eyed players of earlier fallet games would probably recognize this as a heavily modified Robo brain a robot that before this DLC was never encountered in the Commonwealth but was somewhat common in military facilities elsewhere in the American Waste anyway this is a somewhat tough fight unless you're me playing on the lowest difficulty setting but we defeat the bot and Discover it has some sort of radar Beacon installed which is used to track the robot's prod press and can be used to discover the mechanist location yippe but naturally technobabble solution requires Layman friendly explanation and this DLC would be too short if we could just go right to the end so we have to install the beacon in Ada and we currently can only use it to track more robots with the beacon but if we get another Beacon we can track the mechanist okay if we were trying to triangulate the mechanist location that would make sense why you need multiple radar beacons but since all of the beacons are being installed in a single robot that can only occupy one point in space triangulation is SED impossible here so instead the explanation given here is something to do with decryption needing multiple signals which I mean encryption is definitely a weak spot in my techn knowledge it requires gross mathematics to truly grasp but something tells me this explanation would make zero sense whatsoever even to an expert in the field of cryptography it's pretty much just insert reason for fetch quest number two fetch quest number two is just robots traveling around the Commonwealth killing people so it's always going to take place in a different location since the robots are literally roaming the Commonwealth you can't just fast travel to them because they've already moved on by the time you reach a location it kind of helps ignore the fact that this is a simple Search and Destroy Mission a small group of robots need killed somewhere sounds an awful lot like a radiant quest to me but we'll get to that we Ed the second signal to track another robot insert fetch quest number three this one takes place in a location occupied by the rust Devils a Raider gang who distinguishes itself from the common Raider by wearing armor made from robot casings okay that actually sounds pretty cool they also also sometimes get robotss back in working order they don't mix and match Parts in the same way that the mechanist does but they go all out with raizing the crap out of their appearance welding Jagged pieces of metal or affixing human skulls to the frames to make them more fearsome in appearance their base is a secret armored vehicle maintenance Depot so they have plenty of scrap and workshop facilities to operate almost indefinitely so we fight our way through until we find Jezebel a call it an unhinged Robo brain just the brain though her body has been destroyed but she's willing to assist us in favor of self-preservation we NAB Jezebel's brain and fight our way through the rest of the facility finding a suit of x01 power armor along the way and defeating the Raiders leader in a customized suit of Tesla t60 armor we also find a number of jury rigged weapons fashioned from robot weapons we escape and return to some place that has a robot workbench because Jezebel has one condition for helping us she wants a robot body again so we head over spent tons of resources to construct a brand new automatron and attach her head to it you may be tempted to go all out and build her a like new all original trim Robo brain or really deck her out with the highest protection mods out there but she'll insult your craftsmanship no matter what so rather than waste all the materials I usually just give her the default stripped down protectron body you get when you build a new automatron and call it good maybe that'll teach you a bit of gratitude [ __ ] before we head out Jezebel does give some crucial information the mechanist ibots playing recording stating that the mechanist is trying to help the people of the Commonwealth are in fact genuine but the robo brains have having overanalyzed the mechanists orders to help the Commonwealth have determined that despite their best efforts humans will inevitably suffer and die anyway so their solution is simply to ease the Commonwealth suffering by euthanizing Everyone by their logic they are simply reducing the suffering to a bare minimum while reaching the same inevitable conclusion it sort of comes out of left field and adds a nice twist to the story and it explains why the mechanist now thinks the sole survivor is a super villain bent on destroying them the reports coming back to the mechanist from the robots just state that their mission is being interfered with but doesn't really State what they're doing out in the Commonwealth and the mechanist simply can't see what's going on the character of Jezebel is filled with logical inconsistencies like she brags that the rust Devils believe anything she tells them but then she repeatedly tries to reassure you that she's incapable of lying which is it were you misleading the rust Devils or are you misleading us either way you've clearly lied to someone also after you give her a new body she just roams around the settlement somehow forgetting her prime directive to help the people of the Commonwealth Jezebel becomes a non-interactable non-companion NPC which I think is a huge Miss opportunity given her comically abrasive personality gray yeah yeah I get it critique don't correct although rude is Hell Jezebel does give us the information we need to reach the mechanist which will require some sort of specially modified automatron to accompany us it can be Ada or some other automatron we've built I haven't tested whether there's any benefit to bringing some of our other robot followers like codsworth or cirri along instead of ADA but probably not this was quite obviously a rush DLC and voice acting is pretty sparse so we head over to a robco service center at first it just looks like a place you would take your terminal to get it fixed and some of the records sitting around bring back not so fond memories of my days working in a computer repair shop and some of the ridiculous things we' encounter when trying to work on a customer's computer tucked in the back we find an interesting device hanging on the wall and when we askar automatron to interact with it we opened the greatest super spice security door system ever and discovered a secret underground facility as it turns out this was actually a joint venture with General atomics and robco an interesting proposition considering they were rival companies but the military kept extremely tight control of the facility in order to maintain secrecy the deeper we go we discover an underground robot Factory with the service center serving as a front scrap Bots are everywhere and some are being moved throughout the factory by overhead Conveyor Systems dropping down on you when you least expect it or if you happen to play Shooting Gallery but when we reach the depths of the factory we start to uncover the horrors that occurred here during the development and manufacturer of Robo brains a prison facility filled with psychological profiles of prisoners shows that the facility housed mentally unstable individuals murderers arsonists or worse if they were deemed to be physically healthy they were taken deeper into the facility and effectively executed in the cruestv in a preservative fluid and kept active and Alive they were then interviewed even taunted at times subjected to Consciousness without the agency to do anything but voice their objections to an irreversible process that had already been performed only then were their memories erased and the Brain sent to be fitted with sensors and programmed meanwhile their bodies had already been sent for incineration this grotesque mistreatment of the criminally insane is made worse by the facility's automation the carts that retrieved prisoners from the cell block and moved them throughout the harvesting and testing facility and moved harvested brains to the manufacturing line are all operated by the program's earliest victims in a sick twist of fate murderers and torturers were not only allowed to continue assisting the torture and mass murder of others but were even forced to do so after effectively being tortured and executed themselves the use of brains from the psychologically unstable explains the ability for robo brains logic to stray so far from the socially acceptable and forther callousness towards human life okay this is a huge gut punch in some of the best storytelling we've seen from Bethesda in a long time the logic of getting us to this point is shaky at the best of times but damn if this sort of evil and ends justify the means mentality doesn't suit The Enclave perfectly our own little Mariposa right here in the Commonwealth so we reached the final chamber the mechanist spout some superhero nonsense if you were a weirdo who wore the silver shroud outfit you can spout some superhero nonsense back a nice touch and then you go through a a final boss fight as the room fills with scrap Bots from all over dropped from conveyors overhead lifted from elevators emerging from charging pods it's chaotic and difficult to plan around and even on the easiest difficulty settings it's easy to get swarmed and overwhelmed but the facility runs out of power and it's clear that the mechanist has exhausted their stock of combat ready robots when the final ones that are sent against us are missing pieces unarmored and unarmed the mechanist can finally be convinced to talk this out during which time we can either approach them under understandingly and calmly explain that their robots are terrorizing the Commonwealth or we can be an ass and just kill them if you take the Paragon route the mechanist can give you a final Twist by revealing the mechanist who we assumed was a man up to this point especially those of us that played Fallout 3 and have already experienced this character before is actually a woman named Isabelle she's socially awkward not well spoken kind of a tech nerd sort of the exact stereotype we'd expect from someone who dresses up like a superhero she found this Factory and after discovering that it could be restarted decided to use this chance to make the world a better place by unleashing a legion of robots whose entire goal was to protect the Common Man essentially trying to succeed where the Minutemen had failed she knew the horrors that had been inflicted on the victims of the robo brain project and that Robo brains had a reputation for being unstable at times but with so many of the brains still sitting in storage still being intact those victims would have died for nothing if they were allowed to rot away underground it was a calculated risk that unfortunately just didn't pan out she surrenders gives you the mechanist Armor for good measure and agrees to shut down the facility for good but there are always more robots she Unleashed yay radiant quests that look identical to fetch quest number two see I told you we had come back to it AA is satisfied that the mechanist has been stopped though she's conflicted with how the mechanist was dealt with regardless of how you end it she wanted Vengeance for her friend's death but the mechanist though ultimately responsible had the best of intentions and never really wished harm against anyone you unlock the final boss fight chamber of the mechanist layer as a settlement site and that's automatron so let's get to ranking the story line I'd say everything prior to the Final Act is shaky at best as I stated the initial trigger for the quest line could use some work the second main quest is quite simply a radiant Search and Destroy Mission which is really cheap but the mechanist layer is fun to navigate through the lore is sufficiently Fallout level horror show and though the end in typical Bethesda fashion flows directly from congratulating you on a job well done to foisting radiant quests upon you I'd say it does an okay job of tying a bow on the story as a whole but there's also this weird thing where if you want extra background from Isabelle you have to repeatedly strike up a conversation with her she'll answer your question and then walk away without continuing the conversation which actually makes a ton of sense now that I think about it being that she's socially awkward and probably not very good at knowing the appropriate time to cut off a conversation but still it's annoying and easy to miss out on some important background info if you don't have the patience or persistence to keep engaging with her overall I'll rank the story line as a 2 points out of five it's quite apparent that they had a Clear Vision of the final setting and how they wanted the story to end but just didn't know how to get there if you're enjoying the video so far I would really appreciate it if you could flip that like bit from a zero to a one viewer engagement is the primary metric I use to determine the sort of content that provides the most value to you a random person on the internet who has the power to determine if I can afford to keep my gaming slw workk PC running smoothly this month please thank you and now on with the video the first story expansion to Fallout 4 unfortunately doesn't bring with it a whole lot of new explorable area unlike NC world and far Harbor which both introduced entirely new maps to explore automatron takes place entirely within the confines of the Commonwealth with the exception of the campsite used by Adas Caravan all new area is added in the form of internal cells to the Commonwealth the general atomics Factory Fort Hagen satellite station and robco Service Center to offer a complete list while Fort Hagen and the mechanist layer are both very cool cool the general atomics plant is just another boring generic Factory with the exception of the completely skippable testing battery there's absolutely nothing here that can't be encountered anywhere else in the Commonwealth but that doesn't mean that the locations that did add new stuff are all that great either I don't know who is responsible for the level design at Fort Hagen but it is terrible Jezebel can be found in less than 2 minutes which is immediately preceded by a boss fight unless you know what's about to happen in which case you can just fire at Ahab and kick it off before you even find Jezebel making her encounter seem pretty anticlimactic but then the rest of Fort Haagen appears after that so you pretty much start the level with a boss fight then you proceed to make us delve through a dungeon of predictable boring characters until we reach the final boss who's really only tough because she wears a unique set of t60 power armor but because we also have a very strong chance of having picked up a complete suit of x01 power armor along the way the final boss is effectively neutered who in their right mind designed this level I've already had to get after myself multiple times times now for proposing ways to fix this DLC already so I'll keep my opinions to myself for now and save that for a five easy fixes video but I just have to say this level feels really poorly laid out and it just didn't need to be there's also this really weird boss fight skip that was added to the mechanist layer pretty early into the dungeon dive we find a locked elevator that requires three holotapes to unlock to find them we have to explore the entire length of the mechanist layer right up to the final Robo brain mini boss and then run the entire length of the layer back back to the elevator which allows us to surprise the mechanist and avoid the final boss fight altogether so let me get this straight your shortcut requires you to explore 95% of the layer anyway and then run about 90% of that distance back to the start just to avoid a 2-minute mini boss a boss that's pretty easy to sneak past anyway and a fairly fun 10-minute boss battle why was this even an option I can think of no better way to suck all of the fun out of this level and render the best part of this DLC mon mess and boring sure the elevator is a great shortcut to the start of the facility as a reward for finishing the DLC but as a shortcut it sucks so hard I wish I had more to say regarding explorable area but I mean there's just not all that much to this DLC I can't give it better than a two out of five I really want to give it a one but again the mechanist layer itself Demands a certain level of respect and the ridiculous doors that segment out this dungeon are so mesmerizing I could sit here and watch them open for hours this is also going to be a fairly short list disregarding the robot workbench and automatrons which I'm reserving for expansion to gameplay mechanics this DLC doesn't add a lot of new objects to the game the rust devil armor I mean if you're looking for a Raider aesthetic and you don't have the NC World DLC I guess it's good but higher level combat armors are way better if you're still playing nothing but the base game and if you have far Harbor there's far better armor available in that deal DC it's actually a pretty weapons Light DLC as well with only the Tesla rifle salvaged assaultron head Mr handy blade and ass sutron blade added and they are all unique and super me never once have I felt the need to use any of these by the time you reach level 15 which allows you to start the DLC there are just much better weapons available not as unique granted but better damage there is the addition of the robot repair kit which is basically a stim pack for robots which I will say mix playing with codsworth and cure so much more bearable but otherwise just tend to sit in my inventory because the right perk selection makes playing solo so much better long-term anyway new object usefulness it's getting a one out of five I'm not even sorry about it expansion to gameplay mechanics is also a mixed bag it's definitely a tatron strong suit though of course the biggest expansion is the robot workbench that not only lets you modify existing robots but lets you construct new ones and name them you can Cobble together your own Fleet of junk Bots create brand new off-the-shelf models or mod the crap out of what you already have I love codsworth and curious companion characters but Mr handy and Miss nanni's are about as durable as wet tissue paper in a fight so usually my first step as soon as I have the chances to convert codsworth Kiri and yes Ada into full assaultrons for Speed maneuverability and that devastating head laser then kit them out with the industrial armor pack so that they can take a hit or two without dropping to the floor the ability to build as many new automatrons as resources allow can be pretty cool for Minuteman builds as armies of devastating robots begin patrolling the Commonwealth's arteries as provisioners but with that said the only new settlement location added is the mechanist layer and I've already written two videos about why it sucks so much A lot of people like to use it as a provisioner hub since it's almost never attacked and logically a robot Factory is the perfect place to unleash an army of robots but I'll reiterate the workshop menu is restricted at this location so you have no access to food simply no crops can be built here there's apparently a pile of dirt on an upper platform where you can put a water pump but if you make the mistake of scrapping it you also lose the ability to produce water which is pointless without food anyway and you might chime in but you can place garden plots those allow you to plant crops and place water pumps but garden plots also can't be used at this location either they simply do not exist in the workshop menu at this location they're restricted it's just a terrible Workshop location in pretty much every way the only thing that can occupy it are robots also since I can't think of a better place to put this gripe the loading screens in the Commonwealth get completely hijacked by this DLC the loading screens in games like Skyrim and Fallout 4 sort of serve double duty of explaining some in-game mechanics or doing out lore a single factoid at a time each story DLC adds additional load screens to the game but they only appear when you're interacting with that DLC so you have to travel to far Harbor to see the far Harbor load screens or n world to see the N World load screens but since a Omron only takes place in the Commonwealth the vast majority of load screens are now either the robot repair kit the rust Devils or the robo brain it takes a fun engaging approach to an otherwise tedious reality of playing video games and makes it exactly what it is a tedious reality of playing Fallout 4 expansion to gameplay mechanics all be nice and give it a three points out of five but you could make a case for a lot lower even though I'm quite certain you've been keeping score at home I'll go ahead and summarize automatron earns two points for story line two points for explorable area one point for object usefulness and three points for expansion to gameplay mechanics leaving automatron with a graze is a good score of eight points out of 20 a solid F paper minus 5 Points to griffindor now it's not all bad there are definite benefits to including automatron in your Fallout 4 installation package but those benefits are just outweighed by the amount of useless junk that accompanies it the less than enjoyable path to get to the good bits and just overall rushed feeling you get from the entire experience I don't know if development of automatron had already begun before the official release of Fallout 4 or if the team that developed it was working on the base game all the way up to release but with automatron releasing Just 4 months after the base game it does seem to suggest that this DLC was a rushed and hectic mess of a project from day one I'm quite certain that if given just a bit more time to properly plan out the story and level design automatron could have shined in much the same way that n world and far Harbor did I am a bit curious if you think I was too harsh on automatron or even if you think I was too kind in my ranking leave your thoughts in the comments and I'll read them as soon as I'm done converting codsworth into a nightmare amalgamation Sentry bought Robo brain assaultron to help him deal with those Fallout stains in my lolium once and for all until next time stay safe and we'll see you right here next time at gray gaming

Channel: Grey Gaming

Views: 83,905

Keywords: Fallout 4, Automatron, Fallout 4 DLC, Fallout

Id: cCx0_vKnLDY

Length: 25min 9sec (1509 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 17 2024