When it was announced that Fallout 4 would be getting updates again, the community received the news with extremely mixed responses. Console players welcomed any improvement, but PC players dreaded the updates' probable effects on the modding ecosystem. Both groups' responses were largely justified; Fallout 4 had become largely unplayable on the oldest console systems for which it had been released, but it was going strong on the PC where third party modifications to the game had addressed most of the concerns adequately. As a PC gamer, for me the question was, would Bethesda actually fix the problems that we needed mods to address, or would they do more damage than good?
To answer these questions, I started a vanilla playthrough, after leaving time for a few sequential updates. These days I'm using Linux, because Windows has become such an absolute train wreck. Most of the games I want to play work at least as well on Linux as they do on Windows, and some even better. Until recently, Fallout 4 was one of those titles. I had it working well using a combination of Proton-GE and SteamTinkerLaunch, and the usual collection of mods like the Unofficial Fallout 4 Patch, Boston FPS Fix, and so on. The game still crashed occasionally, but it was much better and more reliable than I ever had it working on Windows.
Now that I'm coming to the close of my playthrough (I'm at the point where I need to pick a side and start exterminating everyone else) I can report that Bethesda has made significant improvements, especially in the reliability department. Even in the crowded areas downtown that typically cause slowdowns and crashes, the updated Fallout 4 ticks along with relatively little drop in frame rate. Crashing is down to 10% or less of what it used to be, with multi-hour sessions with no crashes now being common rather than rare. A few quests' logic seems to have been cleaned up such that they actually work correctly and can be completed without resorting to console commands. But these are not truly fundamental changes. The engine has been made more resistant to crashes due to too much going on at once, but it is not immune, and these type of crashes still occur. I've still run into quests that would not progress without console command intervention, and all of the other problems still occur regularly. Getting stuck is still very easy, for example. You still get your foot stuck under a nonexistent tree root or something and can't jump. You will still find yourself passing through walls, glitching through doors without opening them, and so on. When building, pieces will refuse to place in your chosen orientations even when there is nothing in the way, but will work when rotated, etc etc.
These updates, of course, break many mods and unofficial patches, without addressing the problems that they fix. As such, it's hard to see this as anything other than a cynical attempt to cash in on the show by driving more users to the Creation Club, in part by deliberately breaking competing mods. Modding is what has kept Fallout 4 popular all this time, making it possible to profit from the release of Fallout 76, which is based directly on it. And that, in turn, is what made it possible to make a Fallout show, and profit from that. Treating the mod community in this way is hardly a surprise, but it's poor payment for keeping the franchise relevant during the years where they were the only community the game had at all.
This brings us back to the title. The updated Fallout 4 is a scab (irritating) over an unhealed wound (the gap between the mod community and the game's publisher) which fails to deliver on its promises. The user experience is no doubt superior on consoles, but the updates are otherwise user-hostile. As PC gamers, we should be concerned that this is where the video game industry is headed in general. The heavy hitters would like us to be playing on more locked down platforms which decrease our freedom of choice. And as the industry continues to consolidate, with players like Microsoft buying up studios, shutting down projects and firing developers simply to reduce competition, they are likely to be largely successful with this goal. How long can we have a healthy PC gaming ecosystem while antitrust is simply not enforced?