Unlucky Fallout 4 Player Finds Preston Garvey in Terrible Location

Highlights

• A Fallout 4 player finds Preston Garvey dead, soft-locking the game due to an essential character’s demise.
• The community speculated if mods caused Preston’s death, as he’s supposed to be invincible according to game mechanics.

A Fallout 4 player online has suffered from a poor stroke of luck, after finding the Minutemen leader Preston Garvey in the worst possible location for their save file. The unique sandbox of Fallout 4 frequently produces unpredictable moments just like this one.

Preston Garvey isn’t exactly a fan favorite among Fallout 4 fans. Players meet him at the start of the game, and he sends players out to save a seemingly endless number of settlements from trouble, thanks to Fallout 4‘s radiant quests system. When players approach Preston, he will always have a comment about how another settlement needs help, to the point where it has become a constant meme among the game’s community. Despite this, he remains important to Fallout 4‘s main story, meaning players have to interact with him for the duration of the game.

Redditor Accomplished_Dig3699 shared the clip in which they discover the corpse of Fallout 4‘s Preston Garvey in the Glowing Sea. This is particularly problematic in this instance, as they’ve already started the Minutemen quest line, essentially soft-locking their game thanks to Garvey’s death. Interestingly, Preston Garvey is supposed to be considered essential in Fallout 4, which would make him unkillable. This led to some speculation in the thread that this was actually Preston Garvey’s impostor who appears in-game, although this was shot down due to the quest marker pointing towards the dead body.

Fallout 4 Player Soft-Locks the Game via Dead Preston Garvey

Most in the thread seemed to agree that the issue was likely caused unintentionally by a Fallout 4 mod, although Accomplished_Dig3699 didn’t confirm whether they had any installed on their game. However, there are plenty of mods across all Bethesda games that make essential NPCs able to be killed, offering a more hardcore experience, so it’s definitely possible that they have had one installed for Fallout 4 here. Since Preston Garvey is supposed to be invincible, the game simply doesn’t know how to handle his death, hence why the quest marker remains on his corpse.

Bethesda remains coy on when players can expect another Fallout game in the future. The studio is currently busy with The Elder Scrolls 6, making a new Fallout game difficult to handle at the same time. It’s possible that the series will be handed to another developer to capitalize on the success of the Fallout TV series, although this is purely speculation. It was even recently revealed that Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian was interested in making a Fallout game, and it would definitely be interesting to see the franchise return to its turn-based RPG roots via the Belgian studio. Only time will tell what Bethesda has planned for the franchise going forward.