Try playing it without an internet connection. If it cannot call home, it won't work. Found this out the hard way at my cabin.

How do we get this fixed? It is quite annoying.

Note I could be wrong on this. It may be the installation on my laptop. I will see if I can fix it.

I found it... It is my firewall. If this thing detects a network connection, but is unable to reach api.bethesda.net, then it crashes or hangs. Basically, if it is not allowed to call home to the mothership, it is going to cause you a problem.

Dishonered 2, another Bethesda title, has the same result / problem. There is something weird going on here.

If you have no network at all, then it will play.

Going to see if I can find a workaround, but I am not holding my breath on this one. I need it to work as I have a small network of devices, but no internet where this is going to be the biggest problem.

This is not what happens for me. I've blocked Fallout (and Dishonored too) in my firewall and both play perfectly fine offline. I do use a basic hosts file too so maybe that may be it?

That is what I did... Full block. That solved it. Partial block and it crashes.

Thx for helping.

Last thing on this one... You cannot let it see you have a network at all so you must block it with the firewall entirely.

Tried to block via the hosts file as a potential workaround, but that still caused a crash and exit. It cannot see a network at all, period.

Glad you've got it sorted :)

Sorta! Skyrim is even worse! If I have my firewall active at all with Skyrim, no joy regardless if I am even connected or not.

It is what it is. I have no workaround for this one other than to shut down my firewall for Skyrim. Not exactly the plug an play I want.

Thanks though.

I played FO4 on an old offline PC (win7) and it starts and launches. I installed on an offline laptop (win10) and it installed, but never launched (i already uninstalled because i thought it was the old graphics card and minimal memory),
As Pajama said, i too used the offline installers.