The first patch for Bethesda's busted Fallout 4 next gen update leaves its biggest problems intact, and you're still better off downgrading the game

Fallout 4 next-gen update screenshot - nail gun

(Image credit: Bethesda Softworks)

Fallout 4's 14.4GB "next gen" update dropped at the end of April, dovetailing neatly with the very popular Fallout TV show on Amazon. It promised all sorts of bells and whistles to bring the (nearly decade old, my god) game up to date to the standards we expect from videogames in 2024.

And then, forgive me, it bombed. Hard. Very little visibly changed, mods went haywire, and the changes that were noticeable were mostly the parts of the game the patch broke. But fear not, because Bethesda has now put out Next Gen Update 2, featuring "fixes and improvements to address some of the feedback you provided us with on the previous update."

But, well, that's about all the good news I have for you. For the most part, the community has responded to the patch with an emphatic shrug: Most of the problems that were introduced by the first next-gen patch are still hanging around, with only relatively minor tweaks and changes for those of us playing on PC (tellingly, a hefty chunk of the patch notes specify they only apply to consoles).

"They only really fixed HDR (more or less), a few visual issues related to the performance options and the Creation Club stuff they added last update," writes Reddit user diegodamohill, "That's it, that's this update in a nutshell. VATS is still broken, ultrawide is still broken, no fixes to a lot of day 1 issues, etc."

Ever since Bethesda released the next-gen patch, ultrawide players have had to reckon with an absurdly stretched UI that I can only describe as 'Big Chungus-esque'. Despite promising ultrawide support, the next-gen patch didn't deliver a UI that could comfortably accommodate those of us with ultrawide screens. It looks quite awful, and is a regular source of complaints about the patch.

It, along with several other bugs, hasn't been fixed. Nor do there seem to be many new fixes for the game's new bugs, glitches, or (perhaps worst of all) the weapon debris crashes that have plagued the game ever since RTX GPUs became a thing.

So no wonder that many disgruntled players still recommend using the Fallout 4 Downgrader tool instead of accepting this patch: Rolling the game back to its functional, pre-"next gen" state. I suppose we can take some comfort in that: Even when everything is going awry, you can still rely on modders to fix Bethesda games.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.