Hello everyone, hope you're all doing well, and welcome to my Fallout 76 Game Report! So instead of a full on review of the game, this time I'm going to do something a little different. I haven't had a chance to finish playing this yet, nor do I really intend to, but I wanted to give my thoughts on it, and discuss the whole scandal surrounding it's shaky launch. The Fallout series is one of my favorites, and has been ever since I first played Fallout 3 back in 2008. After my experience with that game I've been excited to play each new entry as they have been released. Fallout New Vegas, and Fallout 4 were also incredible titles that I sunk hundreds of hours into through multiple playthroughs. I never thought I'd see the day where a new Fallout game was being released, and I had zero excitement, or interest in playing it. But when Todd Howard announced 76 earlier this year at E3, my reaction was less than positive. Now that it's out, and in the hands of players all around the world, let's talk about what it is, and if it's worth your money.
Fallout 76 is the latest entry in the series developed by Bethesda Game Studios. It isn't a full fledged sequel, but instead a multiplayer spin-off set in the same universe. Right off the bat this sounded like a bad idea to me, because all of Bethesda's games have been hard core single player experiences. They are great at developing massive open worlds for players to explore that are full of interesting characters to interact with. Not only has Fallout been a huge success for them over the years, but their other flagship franchise, The Elder Scrolls, is just as popular. They have made quite the name for themselves by making wonderful single player games, which makes Fallout 76 seem like an obvious misstep. The fact that nobody asked for this, or expected it, meant that this would have to be something really special to convince their loyal fanbase to trust them, and give this new direction a chance. Unfortunately the game had a disastrous launch, and has failed to impress anyone.
The whole premise of Fallout 76 is that there are no NPCs in the entire game, and the only other human characters you'll encounter are other players. This game always needs to be online, and there are twenty-four people in your game at any given time. The game world is four times larger than that of Fallout 4, which is pretty huge, so even though there are a lot of people running around with you, the chance of actually seeing any of them is slim. If you do run into somebody you can be nice and play cooperatively with them, or you can attack them for a bit of PvP. To cut back on griefing Bethesda made it so you can't really do any damage to another player unless they fire back, and willingly engage in combat with you. This is an effective way to stop people from messing with other players, but it also makes the PvP element kind of useless. Also, I don't really understand what the point of attacking another player is anyway, so the whole thing is lost on me.
What that leaves you with is a massive open world to explore, that happens to have twenty-three other players in it, where you can take on missions, gather loot, and build up your character. I've always loved Bethesda's open worlds, so I was interested in seeing what 76 had to offer in that department. Not only that, but they added a lot of new enemies into the mix that looked really cool at first glance. Even though I was skeptical of the always online, multiplayer only aspects featured in the game, I thought there would be enough going on to keep me engaged, and having fun regardless. That is, until the BETA was released, and it was evident that this was not the Fallout experience I was hoping for. If they would have made this in the same style as their other games, but added an option for co-op so you could play through it with a friend, I think that would have been a much better idea. But as it stands today, there's really no good reason for making the changes they did, and it seems like nobody is happy with the end result.
It's not a full on battle royal style game, like Fortnite, so there's no actual reason for attacking other players. I can't stand battle royal games anyway, so I'm glad they didn't do that. But with absolutely no NPCs anywhere to be found there isn't anything else to do either. The world just seems empty, and it's impossible to immerse yourself in the game. Missions are given to you via holotapes, and they mainly consist of fetch quests that get old very fast. There are no characters to root for, no factions to join, and without these staples that every other Bethesda game has, it becomes very apparent that whole thing was a bad idea. On top of all that Fallout 76 is packed full of bugs, glitches, and gameplay mechanics that make it hard to enjoy what little this game has to offer. I wont bother getting into all the specifics of that because I'd end up writing a novel, but a quick look on Youtube will supply you with more than enough evidence of this.
The West Virginia map is pretty huge, and there are some interesting places to explore, but everything is so spaced out it just adds to the empty feeling of the game. You can build yourself a portable base, but I'm not sure what the point of that is. To me 76 feels like a stretched out, watered down version of Fallout 4, with all the interesting characters removed. It's buggy, boring, and not even close to being worth full price. I'm trying to stay somewhat positive, and hope that Bethesda will fix some of these issues. Maybe in the future they will add a bunch of new things into the game that will make it worth your time, but right now this isn't something I'm going to continue playing. This sounded like a bad idea from the start, but I had faith that this company knew what they were doing, and that the game would turn out alright. After this whole disaster, I'm not sure what the hell Bethesda was thinking here. This has become a huge blemish, on their otherwise stellar record.
It really sucks that I didn't enjoy this new Fallout game, especially since we probably won't get another for many more years. Bethesda has always made games that were buggy, and kind of a mess at launch, but we always gave them a pass since everything else in their games were so good. They got away with not fixing reoccurring problems, and using the same outdated engine for far too long, but this was pushing things beyond what longtime fans would overlook. This turned one of the most beloved development companies into a bit of a joke, and put a spotlight on a myriad of problems that plague their games.
Going forward Bethesda is going to have to do something big to earn the trust of their fanbase back, and I hope they do. I hope they eventually make 76 into a great product, and I hope whatever comes next is of high quality, but for now this isn't worth your money. That's my opinion on the subject, but what do you think about all this? Are you having a good time with Fallout 76, or do you think it's the worst thing ever? Feel free to let me know in the comments, and have a great day!