With some of the most immersive RPG storytelling ever, each title in Bethesda's Fallout franchise stands proudly on its own. That’s further bolstered by their exemplary DLCs. Fallout 4 featured several different DLCs as well, and we've decided to rank them from worst to best, based on our experiences.
Ranking All Fallout 4 DLCs
Below we've listed all six DLCs that have been released for Bethesda's Fallout 4 since its debut in 2015. They were originally provided in the form of two Season Pass packages, with the first costing $29.99 USD and the second costing $49.99 USD. You can now purchase each of them separately from your platform's digital storefront.
We've ranked them from worst to best, in terms of overall experience and whether it's worth downloading them.
6 - Contraptions Workshop
Our list starts with a DLC that frankly shouldn't be designated as a DLC. The "Contraptions Workshop" is one of Fallout 4's three workshop add-ons, and the fourth overall DLC to be released for the game.
This very basic DLC provides players with some manufacturing-themed items and blueprints to give their settlements a more factory-themed look. Structures like Warehouses, Conveyor Belts, and Scaffolding make up the biggest options while others like forges, power conduits, and armor racks are also included.
All in all, this made for probably the most underwhelming DLC of the bunch, with many of the items in question not proving very appealing or useful, even for settlement aficionados. Steam reviews for it are largely negative, emphasizing that such basic content should have just been a part of the main game itself.
5 - Wasteland Workshop
While legitimately interesting in concept, the "Wasteland Workshop" DLC sadly didn't follow through very well on execution. Along with another handful of decorative items for settlements, the main feature of this workshop add-on is capturing beasts (and even raiders) around the Commonwealth in crafted cages, taming and pitting them against each other in an arena-type setting.
As cool as that sounds, to be a purveyor of quality nuclear wasteland entertainment, the process itself is poorly designed, tedious, and ultimately anti-climactic. The materials needed to craft the cages themselves are ridiculously hard to come by, meaning you can't just go on a capture spree across the Commonwealth whenever you like.
Beast taming is finicky at best, as is the arena fighting itself. The allure fades fast when the AI doesn't act as intended and the entire process is more discouraging than motivating. That said, at least the mounted wall trophies make for good displays.
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4 - Vault-Tec Workshop
"Vault-Tec Workshop" is the third workshop add-on and the fifth DLC released for Fallout 4. It seemed like a surprising conceptual deviation from the game's previous DLCs, and just about everything else in the franchise thus far. Ultimately, that turned out to be half-true.
In this particular add-on, players have the opportunity to enter Vault 88 and rebuild the entire underground sanctuary from scratch. Likely intended to establish a new dynamic to the settlement-building system already in the game, this puts the infrastructure of a vault entirely in your hands, free to create your very own human social experiment.
On the surface, it seems like a very cool and engaging style of add-on content to get absorbed into for hours on end. However, like the game's other workshop-type DLCs, the idea falls flat once you start really digging into it. The payoff for meticulously cleaning and reorganizing an entire vault is surprisingly sparse and underwhelming, and the options for molding various spaces to personal preferences could be better.
Ironically, this was released in tandem with the FTP (free-to-play) Fallout Shelter mobile game, which was conceptually the same. It has since expanded to multiple platforms and grown to be one of the more successful Fallout projects from Bethesda. Basically, it needed to stand on its own rather than as a passerby quest in an already huge game.
3 - Automatron
"Automatron" was the very first DLC released for Fallout 4, and honestly it wasn't a bad start for the sequence of add-ons that would follow.
It's a rather unique type of DLC compared to the others on the list. At the forefront is the story content, with an entertaining antagonist known as The Mechanist. They decide to unleash "a horde of evil robots into the Commonwealth," which means it's up to the Sole Survivor to set out and deal with them and their robotic mastermind.
Perhaps the most exciting part of the DLC, however, is the creative payoff from pursuing and destroying fleets of rogue robots, from Protectrons to Assaultrons, Sentry Bots, and of course Mr Handys. Afterward, you can collect the scraps of your enemies and use them to build a customized mech bot of your own that can function as a trusty companion while traveling the wastelands.
While not super groundbreaking in terms of story or overall content, it's a fun DLC nonetheless that encourages creative crafting beyond just settlement building.
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2 - Nuka-World
"Nuka-World" was the sixth and final content DLC released for Fallout 4 (excluding the high-res texture pack released on PC in 2017). Visiting a giant Nuka-Cola-themed amusement park that somehow managed to survive the nuclear apocalypse is exciting in itself, and the DLC has quite a lot packed in to keep Sole Survivors busy.
At the same time, the experience you get with Nuka-World can be a very polarizing one, depending on what your endgame goals are. That's because Nuka-World itself is run by a big faction of Raiders, and navigating the park can be treacherous unless you choose to side with them. If you do, a bunch of colorful new options for settlement building will unlock and you can embark on quests that help you explore every corner of this new area more easily.
At the same time, however, aligning yourself with Raiders means that your reputation with settlements on the main map like Good Neighbor and Diamond City will suffer significantly. You may lose companions you built trust with, and be forced to ransack places that once gave you sanctuary.
It's a considerable risk if you prefer to play in Good Karma standing, but a jackpot if you opt for a devious life in the wastelands. Nuka-World is a crazed theme park where you can let your Bad Karma inhibitions run wild, and live in the moment with no consequences. It should probably be a disclaimer though.
1 - Far Harbor
As most veteran Fallout players would agree, "Far Harbor" is by far the best DLC that was released for Fallout 4, period. A mysterious new case from Nick Valentine's Detective Agency sees you traveling to Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine, an eerie new location that checks off just about every box you'd have for bonus post-apocalyptic exploration.
The case sends you to the Nakano residence in the far northeastern corner of the map, and then in search of their missing daughter. A boat ride then takes you to the fantastic setting of Mount Desert Island. Delightfully ominous and curtained in fog, quests in this new area take you through creepy oceanside locales and deeper into woods and swamplands.
The nuclear fallout hit this area especially hard and gave way to some frighteningly mutated crustacean beasts such as Fog Crawlers (seen above). On top of that, the Sole Survivor has to contend with ongoing conflicts between a synth colony, the Children of Atom, and the locals caught in between.
With a hard focus on story expansion, Far Harbor was the most immersive and well-constructed DLC for Fallout 4, hearkening back to the most acclaimed DLCs released in previous games such as Fallout 3 and New Vegas.
That concludes our list of all Fallout 4 DLCs, ranked worst to best. We hope that you enjoyed reading. Let us know which of the DLCs from this game you personally liked the most, or the least.
Be sure to check out all of our latest guides and news for Fallout, such as all Lucy MacLean Fallout 4 mods, ranked from worst to best, right here on Pro Game Guides.
Published: Apr 24, 2024 01:02 am