fallout 4 far harbor frame rate ps4

What a disappointment this turned out to be. Fallout 4 is easily the best performing title that Bethesda has ever released on a PlayStation platform, but its first big expansion, Far Harbor, is in a real state right now. We're just a few hours into the highly anticipated add-on, and we're honestly finding it difficult to keep playing. It's not that the content is bad – we actually quite like what we've seen so far – it's that Far Harbor has some unforgivable framerate issues on Sony's console.

As many of you will already know, the expansion takes place on an entirely new landmass. Near the start of the add-on, you travel North of the Commonwealth by boat to a remote island. The isle itself is big – it's apparently the biggest DLC location that the developer's ever crafted – and as you'd expect, it's full of detail and home to plenty of secrets. It's a shame, then, that exploring this fresh environment is so unnecessarily frustrating.

fallout 4 far harbor fog ps4

You see, the island's coated in a radioactive fog. It isn't the same weather effect that you find in the Commonwealth; this is a dense fog that floats in clouds around the island, and the game's engine seems to have a real problem with it. Whenever you step into this fog, or even go near it, the framerate plummets to unacceptable levels. If we had to take a stab at a number, we'd say that things tend to settle around the 10-15 frames-per-second mark.

Admittedly, this wouldn't be a huge issue if the fog only appeared in certain areas, but sadly, that's not the case. The irradiated fog covers the majority of the island, making it impossible to avoid as you go about your business. Annoyingly, this means that most of your time on the island will be spent jogging from place to place as the framerate constantly falls over itself. It's just not on.

Far Harbor is currently a wreck on PlayStation 4. Whatever the cause of its consistently bad frame rate – be it some sort of bug or the result of a graphical oversight – it's simply something that players shouldn't have to deal with in paid content, expansion or otherwise. As it stands, we can only hope that Bethesda patches things up sooner rather than later.

We would have loved to bring you our full hands on impressions of Far Harbor, but there really isn't much more that we can say at this point. If you've had similar problems with the expansion, feel free to rant in the comments section below.