Fallout 76

As the title says, I really wanted to like this game as a HUGE Fallout fan, New Vegas and 4 being in my top 5 and over 2000 hours put into both games. I recently gave this another shot after playing it a couple of years ago and dropping it at level 39. That was before some of the major updates that included things like NPCs and such, and I thought it was decent, around a 5/10. This time I made it to level 18 before giving it up completely.

First off, 76 runs like complete garbage on any hardware with random fps drops, bugs and glitches, bad lighting, you name it. Your character will randomly stagger in pain for no reason. Enemies will glide around at sanic speed, freeze in place, and not take damage when they should. Some interior lighting appears completely flat and devoid of shadows, while exteriors can look blown out and blinding.

As for positives, I do like some of the changes from 4 to 76, funny enough I noticed the inclusion of a few mechanics that were previously mods for 4. Being able to consume items without picking them up, radial favorites menu, additional aid items such as diluted versions, weapon and armor durability, I think these are good updates to the gameplay. In addition, the setting and exploration are enjoyable, especially as someone not from larger cities and more of a rural southern area. Smaller features like the New tab in the Pip-Boy and the separation of armor and apparel are nice as well.

That said, I feel like the pairing of Fallout and MMO-lite is a very poor match and would be increasingly difficult to pull off successfully. I've seen others compare 76 to GTAO and I feel this is an apt comparison. The world feels like a single-player area that's been converted to a playground to mess around with friends. Fallout is known for its memorable characters, dialogue, and stories, and unfortunately there is little if any to be found here. You're tasked with looking for 76's Overseer, for some reason, and that's meant to be your driving force forward on your journey. But why should anyone care? Following the main story has you following the trail of another more important person, doing things because holotapes suggest you should. There are other NPC quest givers but you never feel convinced of why you should help them or what goals you even want to accomplish. Most of the quests in my experience involve going on inane treks and accomplishing random things for robots who suggested you should, or holotapes from people long dead. 76 relies heavily on using notes and tapes to tell its stories, which gets old very quickly. It's not my idea of fun to explore a building to find 4 different notes to read and 3 different holotapes to listen to.

Many of the core mechanics and gameplay elements I found to be a negative as well. Repairing gear is fine, but you cannot use similar gear to accomplish this as in NV, instead relying on repair kits obtained through the cash shop. Perks being in the form of cards you can swap is an interesting concept, but since enemies are so bullet spongy with weapons having the range of a water gun and carry weight being limited, I gravitated towards raw damage increase and item weight reduction. Since many of the other cards are useful like lockpicking, reduced item wear, increased aid effects, party bonuses, crafting, etc., you constantly have to switch out your cards to fit whatever you need to accomplish in the moment. If you want to craft better items, you will suck at combat. If you want to do more damage or have increased AP regen, you can't carry much or hack/lockpick anything. It feels very limiting on what you can and can't do coming from earlier games where only your skills and SPECIAL determined which perks you couldn't take. Enemies quickly respawn so traveling through areas you've already been in results in the same exact combat encounters over and over. Some of the enemies themselves seem really goofy, like chickens, frogs, squirrels, and floaters. I'd say my biggest gripe is the levelling system of items. You'll run across many of the same items from level 1 to 50, so you can have godly leather armor and shitty combat shotguns. While looting you have no idea which items are better or higher level unless you pick it up, go to your inventory, and manually compare the level and condition. Item progression made perfect sense in 4, with armor types being distinctly better than the previous as you gain levels, and small increases in each type (light, medium, heavy).

I will say unlike GTAO, at least the quests are completely solo-able and don't require additional party members. As much as the game wants me to, I don't want to play with other people and I can do that. It's been suggested that the best way to experience the game is to party up and do random events that occur so higher level players can powerlevel you to 50 and get you a ton of legendary loot. If the best way to enjoy the game is to boost your character to max and not experience the game levelling organically, then yeah this game isn't for me chief.

I love this game to death, and the truth is that while it is not a game without serious flaws, it is overhated by the majority of the player base or at least compared as not even as great as any of the previous entries, but the truth is that while you can compare previous Fallout games, this one give something rather unique in comparison, and while I like this game a lot, I am not a Fallout fan myself, and I would not recommend it to other Fallout fans who are looking for a comprehensive CRPG experience.

The game does offer three types of gameplay loops, each loop being different than the other and it is what has helped keep the game so fresh for me and allowing me to spend so many hours in it, Fallout 4 was designed to be as replayable as possible and this game takes things a little bit further.

The three game loops are:
1. World Exploration in a vast, huge and hand-crafted Open World like previous entries of Fallout, or Elder Scrolls games since Morrowind (do not confuse it with their previous RPG aspects).
2. Looter shooter events and sections as well as quests and combat focused gameplay, like Fallout 3, 4 or Borderlands.
3. Building and crafting in your own bases and without any instances required, you can build on the world itself, like Minecraft, but its building system can be compared more with games like No Mans Sky or The Sims where you are limited to a certain amount of assets.
If you want me to rate each type of gameplay, they would go as this, 8/10 to 1, 6/10 to 2, and 5/10, respectively. My overall rating though, does not add up an average for these qualification, but it represents my emotional connection to the game and how it comes together with the sum of its parts.

There are also several aspects that affect and influence severely these gameplay loops, the main two being

1. Use of RPG stats to build a character that is better a certain type of combats than others, being faithful to the Action RPG label (Not the CRPG or Western RPG label).
2. The use of online gameplay. Most quests can be played solo, but every public event will require the participation of several groups of people, like in MMOs, people can visit your camp in the wilderness as well, whether is casually or teleporting there.

I will describe the two gameplay loops that I like less but I still enjoy quickly, and go a bit deeper into my favorite type of gameplay at the end.

First is the looter shooter aspect and the public events. Every 20 minutes a public event will pop up in every player’s screen and anybody can participate, the events range from taking some brahmin to their farms, to collect radiated ore and destroy ghouls and shoot a wendigo colossus monster for around 20 minutes while you get attacked by other creatures in the deep parts of a cave and your character can end up running away from the fear.

The enemies drop loot that varies from junk to build in your camp, to aid items and legendary and rare weapons, as well getting something as a reward for being in the event at all. Legendary weapons can be exchanged into a currency, scrip, to get legendary modules and upgrade your own weapons with effects that you get through RNG like 40% Power Damage or 250+ Damage Resist while reloading, so on and so forth. In this sense I would recommend Fallout 76 as your grind game. The events can be really fun, and can get very intense at times, my favorites being Radiation Rumble and my Test your Metal, but if you keep playing after 100 levels or so the loop becomes repetitive. You cannot pick a specific upgrade for your weapon, you have to collect the currency, either by exchanging the weapons you got on events, or getting seasonal rewards, and use that currency to get modules to roll upgrades for your weapons, every weapon gets 3 effects, getting one effect you want a lot is rare, so to get all 3 affects you want is going to take a long while. There are a lot of rare weapons you will need to pay a lot of caps for or other rare currencies the game introduces, like stamps or gold bullion. I feel this is designed to encourage you play the events over and over and make the game replayable, but if you aren’t into such mentality and want to avoid grind, you might not have a good time after a while. You can minimize the defects and maximize the strengths of your character, but a weapon with the right level and stats can be a long way in efficiency.

The second gameplay loop is the building and crafting part of the game. In this sense, the game excels itself allowing you to build anywhere you want as long it is not close to an already built location, like a place with a quest, a player can go wandering around through the world and simply find your house, which makes building a lot more worthwhile. This is where all the looting for junk comes place since you will use all the resources you find to build your own house and you can unlock a lot of plans to find something that you might like. You can farm and craft resources such as adhesive using vegetable starch, it takes a lot of time but you will find more joy in the craft if you are into building. There is a limit as how much you can build to avoid lag, but you can also build a shelter to build there as well, the difference is that shelters are instanced, and you will need to go through a loading screen to enter to them, which makes them less appealing.

You can also sell items at your camp, from aid items, to junk and even weapons and plans, which are the most purchased items between players. If you get a plan you already knew in a quest, you can sell it to someone else and get caps for it. Some players have reported getting so many caps that they don’t know what to do with them, but from my side I always run out when I buy a resource I can’t find in the map at the mall.

If this game was as great as it was in this sense, I would have rated it higher than the looter shooter section of the game, but the truth is that it gets a 5/10 from me because most of the crafting section of this game is hidden behind a paywall. If you want more than two camp slots, you will have to buy atoms for them. If you see a specific construction set you like, like an organ, haunted house walls, a well, certain type of stairs, if you want a bigger shelter, you will have to pay for it, no way around it, you will be subjected by what you find on the game and what it is on the shop, which makes construction discouraging in a certain sense, and even more when the building system is not as robust as with other games, you can’t make a diagonal wall or build a circle, unless using some very well practiced exploits.

As a side note, there are utility items that you can also buy with microtransactions, like repair kits or experience boosts lunchboxes that last for an hour, which do fall in the category of pay to win, but you can absolutely do without those in the game, and I can say that while I have spent a lot of money on the game, I can calmly say I never paid for any paid to win items at all, and I never needed them.

Now, what I like most of the game is its world. The first game-play loop I mentioned and the third one we are going to discuss. The truth is that most Fallout world building ends up really depressing for me considering all the post-apocalyptic nature of it, but this game is slightly different in its presentation.

I found previous Fallout worlds not that visually appealing, but Fallout 76 has a beautiful map composed of green areas, foggy swamps, radioactive red plain areas, several trainyards, ghost towns, castles, white valleys that look like snow, and zones covered in ash where everything is dark and brown, it is a beautiful world, and it is fantastic to explore it and sight see.

While I understand the point of the public in saying not having NPCs simply didn’t allow for any illusions for roleplay with the story itself, I have to disagree that it made the game boring. I like the idea of surviving on your own, and the environmental storytelling is incrediblyy rewarding. People will call Fallout 76 creatively bankrupt but will never get the chance to learn about all the characters hidden in the terminals and holotapes of this world. There is Lewis, the mad scientist that loved Nuka Cola and created a nuclear alcoholic beverage to continue with his obsession to get Nuka Cola merchandise. There is Shannon Rivers, the former voice actress of a comic character that formed a sisterhood with abandoned girls to fight against the raiders, there is Lucy, the ghoul that was killed by her husband when ghouls just had started to appear and people were still afraid of them, there is Jesus Sunday, who couldn’t deal with the fact that his brother was in love with a woman, and there is Cheryl, who had to escape from the bunker of her husband as he lost his sanity. I can draw a direct comparison with Bioshock, Portal 2 or The Phantom Pain, games that also uses a character that can be heard only through prerecorded audio, and the difference in reception is abysmal. In Fallout 76 you have a world for yourself, and you have to explore to find the tapes and every story, but that's what makes everything rewarding, it is an open world game, and every moment you find is a treasure.

There are just an endless number of wonderful stories you find in the world and make you feel so many things, you feel sadness, because all of the people you are listening to are dead, but you feel at least some happiness, for being at least for a moment in a part of their lives, you feel their pain, and you feel what they had to go through when the world ended in a nuclear apocalypse, it hurts, but it inspires you to survive. There is a beautiful quest where you get a list of places an old grandad wanted to visit for his daughter in her honor, and you find the list on his corpse. You can build a camera and take a photo of every place they wanted to visit. It is really beautiful and soothing in a way.

Traveling is not as impressive, since you depend on fast travel which is not only immersion breaking but also very monotone, walking through the wasteland is not as interesting as using a hookshot in Just Cause 2 and 3, or take a silt strider in Morrowind, but you can get a jetpack which allows you to climb and glide and makes the world exploring a lot more fun, you will still depend of fast travel when you are going to an event or going to an incredibly long distance, but exploring by yourself is still very enjoyable.

Wastelanders and subsequent updates added human NPCs which were the answer to a popular criticism with the game, and while I feel these changes and updates break the world building and atmosphere of the game a little bit, I do not hate them, because you can also find interesting characters in them. There is Lou, the ghoul that keeps trying to kill himself because he is afraid to go feral, there is Polly, the friendly Assaultron that you have to rescue and get a body for, and that might be in a relationship with her human male friend, a character that did speak to me a lot, and there is Sofia, the astronaut that fell from deep sleep before the war and you have to help with. These human NPC quests do have a single purpose though, and is that they are mostly used to create enemies to kill and loot to get, so you will find them limited in a way, but they do serve the purpose of giving the players that like human interaction something to experience the quest with.

After level 25 you can change your special points as you please and reorganize any perks you have picked with, this comes with the side effect of making spell checks useless since you can just leave the interaction and get the points you need to pass a check, but it helps you get a better combat build, you can get a perk card every level, so even if you are at level 500, you will still have a reason to level up so you can get more perks for different builds, or scrap them to rank up your legendary perk cards.

In a way, I do not care about the side effect of making spell check useless, since while I consider the environmental story telling very rewarding, a lot of NPC quest stories are not very good or noteworthy, they tend to me more kitsch in this sense, and long time Fallout fans will only enjoy them in an ironic/self parodying type of way, and either way, it does not focus in the appeal of choice in storytelling, and it is absolutely not a classic Western RPG or CRPG.

I can't blame Fallout 76 for not being like Fallout 1 or 2, after change in several development teams, change in companies, change in gameplay, change in ownership, and 20 years of time. Franchises change just like people do, and a name is just a name, Fallout 76 might not be the Fallout game you are looking for, but it is a good game in its own way.

There is also the seasonal content, like any other multiplayer game, there are updates every certain time, like you can see with the scoreboard of each season, you can complete challenges every day and every week and that will give you a score that will unlock limited and rare items. While it does suck that you cannot get items from previous seasons on your own and that you have to grind experience leveling up to finish it, or at least play every single day to get enough points, it is a great excuse if you want to make of this your grind game, you can learn to maximize as much as possible your build to get that rare item that you want, or you can simply play the story on your own, and let it be after that since the world on itself is fantastic and the soundtrack is sad and cathartic on its own. I do think that since we are doing this with friends, the grind is fun and rewarding.

I heard Glitchwave doesn't usually rate live service games properly, and that is also the case here. Massive multiplayer games are often akin to a social experience or a competition and putting them through the same lens as single player games or standalone art pieces is non necessarily appropriate. We as players are part of the content, the people you meet and the players you interact with are part of the content. Sure, you will not find a deep socialization experience, that is for sure, but I do like the simplicity of the interactions when you play in games. It's like making friends like back when we were kids, "You like trains? I also like trains! Let's play together!" or in this case it's like "You like melee combat? Nice me too! Here is a cool gaunlet I found! Wanna do an expedition together? Wanna do Earl? Here is a heavy gun with heavy DPS that will help him melt in no time!" Yes, with small silly pastimes like that, when you stop doing missions, when you stop playing together at school, you will end up stop talking with a lot of people, but from all of those people you can end up finding a few you stay in contact with, you will even find someone that can turn into your friend, that's the kind of simple things where socialization just happen can give to you. In the game you can go together in missions like daily operations or expeditions and having people to do it together gives the chance of make it differently every time, say something different every time or mess around in a new way in every new iteration, and that's what makes the grinding work. In this community interactions are usually positive, there is no lack of negative experiences, but you will always find that person with so many items that will give you a super rare plan you didn’t have, or you will have a reason to pick up and do a new mission so you can continue over and over, this is a give it or take it thing, love it, or hate it.

I would recommend it to play it sooner rather than later, though. Updates also seem to be slow lately with us getting very little new content, probably with the company focusing manpower on Starfield or slowly moving on from the game at all, which makes me a little sad, but with multiplayer games it is hard to determine what is really the cost of keeping servers alive.

What I like about Fallout 76 is the sum of its parts, while the world building was taken over by the human NPCs, the looter shooter has to be taken with a grindy mindset, and the building and crafting is behind paywalls, you will still find new things to do and you can change the activity that you are realizing if you get bored, if you don’t want to do events, you can go explore, if you don’t want to explore, you can build a new shelter or base. If I want fast gameplay I can do fast gameplay, if I want to slow down, I can slow down, and this is all contained in one beautiful world full of eye candy and it is not a lonely experience, it has that kind of endless content I want the most: people. Overall, it just hits a lot of the itches I look in games, but it is not just that, but it is also the fact that it is online.

At first I was dubious about online games, but this game has won me over and I wish a lot more games did this with their campaigns, the ability to play alone if you want, to let you do your own thing, but still being multiplayer enough that you can casually meet others whereas is in the wasteland or in an event, I have had beautiful interactions with others, people that have giving me aid, people we keep killing each other with because is fun, someone who gifted me a Halloween Witch Costume when they saw my Haunted House camp, people getting dizzy at seeing my camp at the top of a monorail wagon, it adds the best elements of casual building gameplay in games like Animal Crossing or Minecraft, but now you can meet each other casually in the game itself, how beautiful is that? Not to mention the world is not cartoonified or simplified in its graphics to make construction more doable or save resources in a portable console. How beautiful would it be if you could meet with others while doing your own quest in other games? There are MMOs, sure, but having 24 people at most in a server, means it is a lot more possible someone will find you and see your camp, and the world is not split in sections you have to go around, it is all one big world you can travel on your own, and that is beautiful. There aren't any games like Fallout 76 anywhere, even when so many companies keep pushing live service games, I feel the only one that has had a chance to gain me over, is Fallout 76, allowing me to speed up and down the gameplay as much as I want, and immersing me the most in a new world I am thrilled to explore, that is why right now I want to give it 5 stars. F76 in a way, its unique, it will give you a pure single player experience with the change of meeting with others, but still not forcing you to, it is the heaven for introverted people that want to make friends in a subtle way! No need to ask someone to add you and start co op the two of you together, alone, without knowing each other. The fact that there is only voice live is an obstacle the game has but it is well complemented with the fan and official discords when looking for groups. Not to mention that this game is really overstimulating with every activity and event and that is really appealing to someone with such attention span like mine. I feel overcharged and I feel great. It is casual, over stimulating, beautiful to explore, it is funny, and it is single player but just multiplayer enough, this game is my jam, it is my heaven and safe space.

The community is really nice, and I can say that of every bad interaction I have had, I have had at least 9 great interactions with others, I love this game because aside of being very over stimulating and massive, it is a perfect casual game to make friends with, there are no leaderboards when events end, you did what you could, and you had fun, and while I know that AI generated content will change how we look this type of endless content genre of games in the future, this game as 2023 absolutely succeeded in being that massive, seemingly endless game I could sink myself in, and escape from the world, without being entirely alone. With Fallout 76 I can submerge myself in the feeling of having experienced the world end, but still finding something beautiful to go on, and a reason to live.

I want to end quoting the holotape of Miguel Caldera, one of the survivor stories that you can find in the Flatwoods.

“Even when you think everything is over... it's... it's not. It goes on. I mean it's awful too, don't get me wrong. All the people dead and hurt. But, well, those are things beyond my control, so I'm making the best of it. So, for all you future people... just know that we lived through something... horrible. But we did it. Somehow, we're alive... And if you're hearing this, then well... I guess at least some of us made it. Right? So hey, chin up, kiddo! You'll be okay. Okay?”

Could not initially play it. Apparently, it's the only game I ever played that will not run if not installed on the same drive as Windows and it never tells you this (instead you get error messages about "regionPing" and "profile permissions"). Lots of other grievances: Can't copy-and-paste password on login (ugh!). When the game crashed, it just closed with no message at all. Could not access the main menu first time I played and exit properly. The movement feels god awful but I got used to it. It's weird that it feels bad. But okay, game works now so how is it?

It's okay. I'm bordering on 6 - 7/10 but probably closer to 6. The solution to VATS here is bad. It makes me realize how core to Fallout VATS is and with it feeling a lot less useful the game is a lot less fun. The combat in general feels much worse than 4 there is this weird buffer when you try to melee an enemy. I guess this is all due to server-side scripting.

The world is still very empty and boring. I was shocked at how little there is to do and interact with. Very few enemies. The NPCS are lame. They come up to you and give you bullets for no reason. The main quest NPCS are also boring. I did the first main quest and it was filler in any other Fallout. Much worse is that the dungeons are a couple hallways and not a true dungeon like in Fallout 4 where they became very intricate and awesome.

As an online game, it stinks. There are no hubs and the player count is so low you never see anybody. What's even the point?

Still fun to level and I like the perk cards concept. The world is so beautiful and feels natural. I can see playing with friends being fun. If you are into building your own home that can be fun. As a lackluster Fallout, it's still okay and has most of what you'd want. Some have even praised it for having dialog checks that Fallout 4 lacked.

For myself, the lack of challenge, downgraded combat, and downgraded dungeons kills the game for me. But I can see others having a great time with it. In the very least, it's a good game but still seems like a misguided concept. If the world was more populated or challenging, it'd be a lot more engaging. I think Vilheim is a good example of how this could have played out: Attract a hardcore audience that will then attract casuals. Instead Bethesda went straight for casuals who are only midly interested and lost the hardcore crowd. I don't think this game will improve much from here on out -- just more stuff.

I don't regret the day I spent with it but it was kind of boring.

I wasn't a fan of Fallout 4, and I was completely and utterly ready to accept that the story for this game would probably be just as bad as 4's. However, not only was it bad, it was even worse.

The multiplayer switchover of the game makes it easy to realize what the goal here is, and it's that the game is an MMO. I'm all for games switching the gears on how things work, and when I heard that this game had multiplayer, I was excited and still expecting something that would complement the series. Instead, you are a man who wakes up from Reclamation Day on the search for holotapes after holotapes. There are no neat NPCs to remember, only empty ghost towns that may have enemies, and instead of an NPC, it'll always be a dead person with a holotape or some variation of that.

This is a failure to live up to what I would've considered the ideal multiplayer Fallout. The servers are too small for you to be able to find anyone that cares about you, and there's nobody doing anything interesting. I thought it'd be fun to consider the idea of a band of people acting as Caesar's Legion walking across the land, but even the PvP won't allow you to get all the damage in you want because it doesn't work right.

The only thing I can like about this game is that it looks like they did put some effort into the world design. Not like Bethesda has ever been bad at it, but there are some rather obvious lazy spots on the map that feel like we've seen them all already. I mean, if the game has a line of pointless quests going on and almost no NPCs to perhaps give the cities some personality, the game is bound to be a trainwreck.

And at the end of the day, it truly is. No patch or anything will fix the devoid ghost-like feeling of the game. Quite simply, it's just one of the worst games of the year, and probably going to remain to be quite simply the worst Fallout game.

I can't say I'm shocked, but I can say that this went even lower than the low expectations I had for the game.

keep in mind before reading this that I am a new vegas worshipper and absolutely hate this soulless, cheap direction. now that's over...
bought it the day it was released on steam because wastelanders gave me hope. it was the point for me where I just crave more fallout content and will take whatever comes, but it ended up being much more than just something for me to enjoy just for "oh, mothman. that's cool" value.
this game has a ridiculously kind MMO community to meet my jadedness. some people decide to roleplay, some just like goofing around, and some are the wonderfully kind lvl 300 players who will help you with anything. something about this element of good people playing a highly controversial game makes it much easier to love. the best random encounters exist with players.
I'm very much with you all for complaining about a game being released before it was ready, but reflecting on the parts of this review I wrote over a year ago now, rushed game releases are only getting worse. the microtransactions got way less scummy. thank you to the Bethesda devs who continue to attempt and add updates that make it a much more fleshed out game.
the wastelanders update feels so ingrained in what it is now that it's hard for me to imagine what it would have been like without it. these NPCs add so much more life to this game, and the Steel Dawn update adds even more. I manage to still hold out hope for this, maybe I am a Fallout cocksucker.
yeah, the bugs can be really shite. but they're FUNNY. funnies :)
ultimately, I think it's a game that pays out in exploration. but end-game content isn't strong. there is more coming I'm sure, but the game is its best for the first 30-50 or so levels.