Picture this: you’re in Fallout 4 facing down a Super Mutant. You trigger VATS, slow time, aim for the head — the UI flashes a very high hit chance. You pull the trigger…and the shot doesn’t connect.
Anyone who understands probability knows a high chance isn’t a guarantee. Game designers, however, will tell you players interpret numbers emotionally rather than literally. To compensate, some titles manipulate what the player sees: as Jake Solomon explained for XCOM 2, a displayed 85% might be treated internally as 95% so outcomes better match player expectations.
For years that sort of reasoning was how many of us explained Fallout 4’s odd VATS results. You’d assume the on-screen percentage didn’t reflect the actual behind-the-scenes math, shrug it off—after all, much of Fallout 4’s appeal is its RPG layer—and keep using VATS because it generally outperformed the clumsy third-person aiming. Still, the nagging suspicion that something more was wrong lingered.
“VATS accuracy is garbage,” reads one spirited Steam thread where a player reports missing four consecutive 95% shots. Technically possible, sure, but improbably rare. Conversations like that have popped up since Fallout 4’s 2015 launch. Now, a decade later, Bethesda quietly confirmed those suspicions.
In the Anniversary Edition patch notes, Bethesda states that VATS hit chances “are now consistent across platforms and no longer drop to 0% or show incorrect values.” The update, which also smooths the modding workflow and adds some quality-of-life tweaks, fixes the long-standing inconsistency rather than chalking player complaints up to perception alone.
Curiously, the announcement itself drew little fanfare beyond concerns about mod compatibility; most comments zeroed in on mods that might break with the new build. The fix does imply that some platforms delivered a skewier Fallout 4 experience than others, since VATS percentages weren’t uniform across systems.
For many players who’ve already explored the Commonwealth multiple times, the change won’t alter much. But if you’re among those who once wondered whether the odds were really stacked against you—well, mind blown?
Source: Polygon
