Fallout 4's 14.4GB "next gen" update dropped at the end of the month, neatly dovetailing with the very popular Fallout TV show on amazon. It promised all sorts of bells and whistles to bring the latest (almost a decade old, my God) games to the standards we expect from video games in 2024.

And forgive me, it bombed. Hard. Few things were visibly changed, mods became haywire, and the noticeable changes were mostly parts of the game where the patch was broken. But now that bethesda has announced the Next Gen Update2, it features "fixes and improvements to address some of the feedback we've provided to us in previous updates."

But, well, it's all about the good news I have for you. In most cases, the community responds to patches with a shrug of emphasis: most of the problems introduced by the first next-generation patches are hanging, with relatively minor tweaks and changes for those of us still playing on the pc (tellingly, a hefty chunk of patch notes means they only apply to the console). (Specify that it will be used.)

"They really just fixed some visual issues related to HDR (more or less), performance options and the Creation club stuff that they added the last update to," wrote Reddit user diegodamohill. VATS is still broken, ultrawide is still broken, there are no fixes to many day 1 issues, etc."

Since Bethesda released its next-generation patch, ultrawide players have had to consider the absurdly stretched UI that I can only describe as "big Chungus-esque." Despite promising ultrawide support, the next generation patch did not provide a UI that could comfortably accommodate ours on the ultrawide screen. It looks pretty awful and is a regular cause of complaints about patches.

Has not been fixed, along with several other bugs. There are also a lot of new bugs, glitches, or weapons debris crashes that have plagued the game since (perhaps worst of all) the RTX Gpu became an issue

So many disgruntled players can use the Fallout4Downgrader tool instead of accepting this patch. It is no wonder that we still recommend it. I think we can take some comfort in that: even if everything goes wrong, you can still rely on modders to fix bethesda games.