Disclaimer: I’ve mostly been reviewing games that I loved, so it felt like time for a bad one. I also want to say that I actually have a few good things to say about FO76, buried in all the garbage. Additionally, I’m a Fallout fanatic. New Vegas was the first ever shooter, open world game, or RPG I played. Big deal for me. I’ve played Fallout 4 for over 600 hours, because I can’t stop managing and building settlements. It’s a disease.
This is one of those games you can’t talk about without mentioning the industry and online community surrounding it. I’ll get into the game play later down, but a bit of history first. If you don’t care about the context surrounding the game, skip this next section.
The History
E3 2018. Todd’s up on stage, making beautiful promises once again. Fallout is back, but it’s entirely online. 16 times the detail! Distant weather systems! 4x the size of Fallout 4! Surely it’s too good to be true. Or course, it was. Some say it’s a tough competition for 76 and No Man’s Sky for “Worst Launch in Gaming History.” NMS was a small indie company making their first game. Yes, Hello Games directly lied about what was in it. Committed actual fraud. They’ve fixed it now, and people love NMS in 2019. It’s a wild world. But Fallout 76 was made by one of the most celebrated studios in the world, published by one of the 5 biggest publishers in the industry, and, well, yikes.
Todd Howard, pictured here, is a rather well known figure in gaming circles. Director of Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, and now 76, he had a lot of clout to his name until this launch. Sure, Bethesda kept putting out buggy messes of games, but they were wonderful. There’s no other sandbox world you can mod to your heart’s content and use as a base for your own role-playing adventure in the same way. No one else has ever or likely will ever make a “Bethesda RPG.” I am going to break up these launch problems into “Incidents.”
Incident #1: Bethesda opened up a closed BETA to only those who pre ordered the game. This was widely regarded with some disdain, however a good number of people, myself included, bought it immediately in June. Fast forward to early October, the game is a month away. The BETA finally begins. The problem is that you have to play this game through the Bethesda launcher on PC, and while I am OK with installing new launchers to play new games, this one DOES NOT WORK. At the very least, it didn’t a year ago. Oh yeah, and the BETA is only running in 6 hour sessions on random days of the week that are horribly inconvenient for Europeans (1AM — 7 AM). I’d be surprised if they got to play the BETA at all.
Incident #2: On the evening of the BETA launch, many PC players, myself included, suddenly found themselves without a license for this game they had purchased. I spent over an hour on the phone with Amazon, who I purchased it through, getting it sorted. But at last, at 11 PM i was ready! I logged in to the Bethesda launcher to open my pre-loaded game and … no game. The files were still in my computer, but the launcher couldn’t read them. I had to manually delete the game files through file explorer, uninstall and reinstall the launcher, and wait for the servers to go up so I could download the game again. About 50% of PC players had this problem. Good launch, Todd. I wasn’t able to play until a few days later.
Incident #3: Canvasgate. You may know this one because it made actual news in some places. Ordering the deluxe edition of 76 for $200 got you a Power Armor helmet (admittedly cool looking) in a high grade canvas bag, as stated in the description of the item. Youtubers and reviewers were invited to a luxury setup in a recreation of a vault in West Virginia to test the game and were given these canvas bags and helmets, so we know they existed at some point. About 3 weeks late, the deluxe editions finally arrive. Lo and behold, the bags the helmets are in are actually plastic. An email from a Bethesda CS rep revealed that “Canvas was too expensive” so they went with plastic. $200. Needless to say this did not go over well. I’m actually getting very exhausted remembering this, so if you want to know more about this drama and legitimate commercial fraud, please watch this video:
The Game
Some of you may want to know just about the actual game, and that’s fair. I’m going to try and do this as a compliment sandwich, except there’s so many bad things we’ll have to do a reverse compliment sandwich.
This game’s cardinal sin is that it is boring. It’s just boring, boring, boring. There is almost literally nothing to do. It’s astounding how little there is to do, considering how big and diverse the world is. Walking between map points yields nothing, except maybe an encounter with the Liberty bots if you’re lucky. With a short main quest line featuring NO PEOPLE and like 3 robots, there’s very little reason to keep logging on.
The map of Appalachia (spanning the entire state of WV) is incredible. It is absolutely the most beautiful and well crafted open world map in gaming history. It is an artistic and technical achievement. And it is wasted on this game. 4 had a nice map as well but nothing like this, and I feel okay saying that neither 3 nor NV had a particularly impressive map. This is the first time we see a place that was not bombed in 2077 in series history, so nothing is destroyed. The trees are green. Nature is reclaiming the land, a la Breath of the Wild. It’s gorgeous in the forests and I love the toxic valley and ash plains.
There are no human NPCs in this game (as of yet). They will be added in the Wastelanders free update coming soon, along with some other great features. “How can you make an RPG without NPCs?” you might ask. Bethesda clearly does not have the answer. Fun anecdote, I texted my friend about Wastelanders during E3 (he’s never played Fallout) and i excitedly told him “They’re adding human NPCs, factions, dialogue trees, decisions that affect the story, and a main quest line!” His response: “So what is in the game now?” Kind of drives home how little there is to do. Other players were intended to role play, but with no private servers there’s no way to set up an RP server so… you can be RPing a vendor with someone, trading goods at a shop you’ve set up, and be interrupted by xxxDongSlayer69xxx running by with “Sandstorm” playing loudly through his mouth right into your ear in incredibly low quality. This was a real experience I had.
The new monsters in this game are A+ design. They’re threatening, well balanced, scary, but realistic all at once. The monsters are probably the one piece of this game that retains that “Fallout charm” people wanted. The Grafton monster is awesome, the Mothman is scary, and Scorchbeasts finally puts dragons in the Fallout universe. Enemy variety is plentiful as well, as almost all monsters from previous games are back (still no centaurs?). The game pays tribute to West Virginia/Appalachian lore and lovingly crafts abilities for each of these creatures tied directly to their folklore origins. The big monsters are designed for group fights too, so it feels good to have a squad of 4 people team up against a Scorchbeast.
The grind is real here. Oh god, the grind. The main thing you can do in this game is build small forts. Not settlements, they’re nowhere near that big. Mini forts gives you a good idea of what it is. Here’s the gameplay loop: you go out, kill monsters, loot the place, come back, break down resources, and craft a better gun or armor or whatever, then go out and do it again. This is a similar gameplay loop to Monster Hunter World, which people love, but it isn’t satisfying. There’s no endgame here. You are grinding towards nothing, and the survival elements are only there to slow down your progress doing so. Thirst and hunger are easily fought by setting up a camp with a fire and boiling water and rat meat. In the 20 hours I played I only once ran out of water, and at that point a teammate tossed me a few bottles.
Perk cards are a great change to the Fallout universe! I love the customizability of changing your perks on the fly, breaking down and rebuilding your character for each quest. This is a feature not found often in RPGs, but I’d love to see it more. The group I was playing with (some people I found on Reddit) had a moment that could have been a commercial for the game. We were trading around perk cards for each of our specific builds for an upcoming mission. “I have some extra strength I’m not using.” “Cool, I don’t need lead belly, why don’t you take that and does anyone have any agility? We need a stealth person for this?” “Yeah I got some, I’m loading up on energy weapons.” It was actually awesome. I hope this system makes it into Fallout 5 in some form, if there’s a way to make it work with single-player. Perhaps vendors buy and sell perk cards?
PVP is abysmal. For the first 5 levels you cannot engage in PVP, which is a good idea. Let people adjust before getting absolutely fucked by DickDragon420 and his Gatling laser. When you shoot another player, it does 1 HP of damage to them as a “challenge.” If you shoot back, PVP is opened up, damage goes back to normal, and you will fight to the death. The loser will drop their junk (for crafting) and caps but respawn nearby mostly unhurt by dying. Another point — dying means nothing in this game. If you store your junk away somewhere you can just die 100 times with literally 0 repercussions. Now if you don’t shoot back, the challenger can keep shooting you for 1 HP of health. Bethesda figured “no one would shoot someone 342 times and chase them around the map just to be annoying,” and to them I say, “Have you met people?” Of course, they do just that. Griefing is not as bad as some other online games, but it’s still bad. The only thing is that griefing again has no discernible reward, so why are people doing it? If you do manage to get killed by DickDragon420, a wanted alert goes out to the map telling everyone where he is and that he’s wanted for murder. The first person to get him gets a sum of caps as a reward and his junk. I participated in hunting down a wanted guy once, and it was fun, but the wanted guy was having way more fun than me. If anything it encourages these idiots to become murderers because they love the spotlight and going down in a hail of bullets. Idiots.
Final Verdict: 3.0/10 — For the Love of Todd, Don’t
Literal commercial fraud, constant server problems, horrifying microtransactions, no NPCs, half-assed survival and base building mechanics, and an unrewarding gameplay loop prevent me from recommending this game to anyone. The most beautiful open world map in the history of gaming is trapped in this hellscape of a game, populated by some of the most imaginative monsters in series history. Is it worth shoveling through the garbage to get to the good stuff? Not at the moment. Could it be after the Wastelanders update? Sure. Will it be? Eh.
