Tell me if this has happened to you. You’re playing Fallout 4. There’s an enemy, let’s say, a super Mutant. You press the button that slows the game down, so that you can shoot directly at its head — AKA, the VATS system. It displays a percentage. It’s a really high percentage! You … miss?
Anyone familiar with statistics knows that just because something has a high likelihood of happening doesn’t necessarily mean it will happen. Game designers will tell you, though, that players do not process numbers in a literal way, but rather emotionally. To account for this, games like XCOM 2 will outright lie to the player by presenting one number and calculating a different one. An 85% shown to the player, for instance, is processed by the game as 95% — because the player expects to not miss.
For years, this was how most people squared away the strangeness in Fallout 4‘s shooting. You would go in and know that whatever number VATS would display was probably not congruent with how often you’d actually land a shot. Maybe you’d rationalize that the action in Fallout 4 is incidental anyway, and you’re playing for the RPG elements. So you’d end up using VATS anyway, because inaccurate or not, it’s still better than Fallout 4‘s busted third person shooting. But underneath it all, many of us suspected something was amiss.
“VATS accuracy is garbage,” declares one Steam 2024 thread where a player recounts missing a 95% shot somehow misses four times in a row. Statistically, that outcome isn’t impossible. But really, it’s not very likely, is it? Discussions like these have been abundant on the internet since Fallout 4‘s 2015 release. And an entire decade later, Bethesda has revealed that it was never in the player’s head.
VATS was, in fact, broken. We now know this because Bethesda is releasing Fallout 4 Anniversary Edition, which streamlines the modding experience, adds a few quality-of-life features, and fixes some issues. VATS is one of them.
“VATS hit chances are now consistent across platforms and no longer drop to 0% or show incorrect values,” the patch notes read. There’s no commentary or anything about this wild revelation; the patch notes just move on. Players in the comments aren’t really remarking on it either, instead mostly focusing on the fact that the patch will break existing mods that aren’t compatible with the new version of the game. It’s funny, too, because this also means that playing Fallout 4 was apparently a worse experience on some platforms than others, as the game was not consistent with its VATS percentages.
For many of us, this change won’t mean much. We’ve already explored the Commonwealth, from its irradiated fields to Preston Garvey’s settlement, possibly multiple times. Still: Mind blown?
