TL:DR, DO NOT BUY FALLOUT 4 AE

Bethesda just charged $40 for recycled Creation Club junk, broken menus, and decade-old bugs they still haven’t fixed. Load times are worse, mods are broken, and the “new” content is shallow loot filler with zero story. Even if it were free, it’d be an insult.

TL:DR, DO NOT BUY FALLOUT 4 AE

Bethesda just charged $40 for recycled Creation Club junk, broken menus, and decade-old bugs they still haven’t fixed. Load times are worse, mods are broken, and the “new” content is shallow loot filler with zero story. Even if it were free, it’d be an insult.

They’re out of ideas, but not out of ways to charge for them.

If this is Bethesda’s idea of “value” in 2025, then The Elder Scrolls VI is doomed to launch as another hollow sandbox, all scope, no soul.

While studios like Larian, CDPR, and Obsidian are evolving, Bethesda is still living off nostalgia, re-releasing their old games, breaking mod support, and ignoring fan feedback. The Next-Gen Update was bad enough, but this Anniversary Edition makes it clear:

And they had the BALLS to charge $40 for DLC owners and $60 for newcomers.

You’d think after Starfield’s mixed reception, they’d use Fallout 4 AE as a chance to rebuild goodwill. Instead, they dropped what’s basically a paid bug bundle.

Same crashes.

Same broken quests.

Same decade-old texture bugs.

New loot reskins and cosmetic junk.

And in the meantime, Bethesda’s “content roadmap” is to keep milking a ten-year-old Fallout with $40 updates and “new” Creation Club junk that modders already did better for free

Todd Howard literally said The Elder Scrolls VI is “still a long way off.”

Translation: it’s not coming this console generation.
That means:

TES6: earliest 2028–2030.

Fallout 5: well into the 2030s.

Instead, they keep shipping broken updates that undo community work, forcing modders to repair the same mess all over again.

and that brings me to TES VI

modders have been patching, cleaning, optimizing, and enriching Fallout 4 for years. Bethesda could’ve just folded those fixes in official, like CD Projekt did with Witcher 3’s Next-Gen patch

Bethesda gone from pushing RPG boundaries (Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, New Vegas, Skyrim) to reselling broken games and ignoring fan trust.

Every time Bethesda touches Fallout 4, it’s the same story:

Mods break.

Old bugs remain.

New bugs appear.

And the “new content” barely justifies it

The “Become a Bounty Hunter” questline tries to be more, with animations and structure but the dialogue is recycled, and the design is mechanical and repetitive.

The bulk of content is the same soulless loot-chasing that’s plagued Fallout 4 since launch:

No characters, no voice acting, no new areas, just “find note, kill enemy, get loot.”

all terminals and ghost hunts.

its designed to trick casual fans drawn in by the show, not flong-time players

Even after the “Next-Gen” update, the game:

Loads slower than Starfield, sometimes taking a minute to transition between interiors and exteriors

Has a buggy creation menu that can hang or crash while loading

You can say these two things at once:

Steam earned its position by being the best

Steam still dominates the PC market to a monopoly-like degree

Valve won because:

They treated customers well
They built features others ignored
They didn’t chase shareholder exploitation

That makes Steam a benevolent monopoly or earned monopoly, but still a monopoly.

“Steam has no real competition.”

That sentence alone is basically the definition of monopoly.

“Steam isn’t a monopoly, the others just suck and everyone uses Steam.”

you literally described monopoly conditions.

If 75%+ of all revenue comes from one storefront
and devs depend on that storefront to exist?

That is monopoly-like control, regardless of whether it’s “deserved.”