There’s no shortage of things to do in Fallout 4. Main quests, side quests, and all the random skirmishes you get into along the way. There’s exploration, gathering and crafting, and—if you opt to take Preston Garvey’s nagging advice—lots and lots of settlements to liberate and manage. But hey, no matter how long your to-do list already is, there’s no reason not to add a few more items to it, right? The Missions Committee mod for Fallout 4 is perfect in that respect. It allows you to volunteer for challenging combat missions of several different varieties, which can take place nearly anywhere in the Commonwealth.
Think of the Missions Committee like a group of shadowy overlords sitting in a conference room with their fingers on the Bat Signal. Via a holotape you pop into your Pip-Boy, you can register as sort of a hero on duty. If the Missions Committee needs you, they’ll send you an alert and some instructions on where to go and what to do. You can also request a mission at any time by using the holotape, and soon after your request you’ll get a new mission alert. It’s not instantaneous, which is something I really like about the mod. You never know when you may be called into action—though you can fiddle with the options to make missions more or less frequent depending on your tastes. And if you know you’re going to be busy with other tasks for a while, you can simply switch it off until you’re ready to start accepting more missions again.
Control point
The mod can assign you several different types of missions, though they are all centred around combat as opposed to story-based quests. When I first activate the mod, I’m running around near one of my settlements in the north gathering up crafting resources. Eventually a message comes through from the Committee on my Pip-Boy: there’s an enemy faction trying to take control of an area of the map near my location. Following the marker on the radar, I quickly discover the problem: a bunch of fedora-wearing gangsters are clustered around the edge of a lake, up to no good.
This is an area capture mission, not unlike a control point mode in a multiplayer game. You have to wipe out the baddies and then get close to a flag until the area has been fully conquered, at which point the mission ends. This first taste of the mod isn’t too much of a problem for me—the gangsters are pretty lightweight and it doesn’t take me long to bring down the half-dozen or so that are trying to move into this swampy section of the map. But this is just a skirmish, the easiest type of mission you’ll receive from the Committee—area control battles can get much, much bigger.
Case in point, a little while later I get another notification for an area control mission. This time the bad guys are heavily armed and armoured Gunners, and there are scores of them. Luckily, I’m not alone this time. On the Missions Committee holotape, you can choose to align with a faction (or you can remain solo as a freelancer). I’ve registered as an ally of the Minutemen, which means I’ve got some backup.
Over a dozen Minutemen swarm on my location, and the landscape erupts into a massive firefight as my allies and I clash with the Gunners. It’s genuinely surprising—when I think of Fallout 4, I generally don’t think of huge battles between large groups. It’s usually just me, maybe with a sole companion or a few helpful settlers. It makes for a pretty intense fight.
Capturing an area doesn’t mean it’s forever safe from your enemies. When you and your allies have cleared out a location and taken a flag, it will remain under your control and your allied faction will continue to spawn there. But there’s a chance that later on an enemy faction will attempt to regain control, so you may be called back to fight them once again. It’s a nice touch, and it helps give Fallout 4 a sense of a dynamic, ongoing struggle, a sort of turf war feel, which is fun.
In addition to these control point style missions, you can also opt in for rescue missions. While I’m running back to my settlement a while later I get a notification that a group of slavers are transporting a prisoner nearby. They are, in fact, beating the hell out of that prisoner, which gives me a little extra motivation to kill them quickly and free the captive. I fail my first rescue mission—they kill their prisoner before I can take them all down—but on my second rescue mission I manage to bring down all the slavers and save the poor person they’ve captured.
Then there are artillery destruction missions. An enemy faction has dragged a massive cannon out into the Commonwealth and they’re bombing the hell out of a target, something the Committee is none too happy about.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to either destroy the massive gun or kill the artillery crew—but since you’re headed all that way into the wasteland you might as well do both, right? Artillery crews are really tough and can take a major pounding, but battling them is fun with the massive cannon periodically blasting into the air to remind you what you’re fighting for.
Blowing up the giant cannon is satisfying, too, especially after a long and brutal fight with its operators.
On defence
There are also defence missions, in which the Committee basically needs to use you as bait for some of their enemies. These are fun because you don’t need to kill all the bad guys. They’ll swarm your location, looking for you, but to complete the mission you can also just escape safely without so much as firing a shot. It’s up to you how to handle it.
Best of all, there are assassination missions. The Committee has decided they need one particular scumbag in the Commonwealth dead, and they’re calling on you to do their dirty work. This is a good chance to use a bit of stealth and approach carefully from a distance, because not only is this target typically very tough, but they’re also not alone. In the elimination missions I’ve completed, my targets have always been surrounded by raider bodyguards or other tough packs of goons. You don’t need to bring all the protectors down, just your assigned target, but that’s easier said than done. I’ve always wound up in a full-on war and had to wipe everyone out. Not that I mind! It’s a welcome distraction from my junk collecting, and sometimes your target will drop some high-end legendary loot. Bonus!
Missions from the Committee can take place just about anywhere you happen to be wandering in Fallout 4. I’ve had them happen while I was on the furthest reaches of the map as well as when I was simply puttering around one of my settlements. One time I got a call to take out an assassination target, and he was so close to my base that even my settlers got to pitch in to help. I appreciate when a bad guy makes my job easy by spawning close to my bedroom.
The Missions Committee mod is also highly customisable. You can opt in or out of any kind of mission you want by just clicking them on the list on your Pip-Boy. Don’t enjoy area control? You don’t have to do them. Restrict yourself to just rescue missions or target elimination missions if you want, or opt in to everything and see what you get. You can also tweak the mission timers, which will probably take some tinkering. Receive mission alerts too often for your tastes and you might get annoyed by the interruptions, but if you don’t get missions often enough, you’ll forget you even have the mod installed. Once you find the right balance for your playstyle, though, the mod feels great. Like I say, it feels like the Bat Signal summoning you for a dangerous task that only you can handle. And there don’t seem to be any punishments for failing or disregarding a mission, except for a notification.
The factions you align with can be any that appear in the game but if you’re keen to create your own custom faction, you can do it fairly easily using the Creation Kit. (There are instructions on the Missions Committee mod page at Nexus Mods.) If you’re using the game’s factions, be aware that you should only side with a faction that you have a good or neutral relationship with. If you choose a faction that doesn’t like you, well... let’s just say you don’t want to call in backup if the people arriving to help are much more interested in killing you as killing your enemies.
