Fallout 76 (PC, 2018)
Perhaps a decent MMO for some, but not a good Fallout game.
Nostalgia Factor: High. The Fallout series is one of my all-time favorites.
Difficulty: Easy to medium. It’s fairly easy to solo through the first 20 levels or so. Some sections or bosses may require a group, or at least a powerful solo build.
I gave Fallout 76 the old college try. After dumping 220 hours into Fallout 4, I guess I wanted more Fallout, so I gave FO76 another go. I stuck with it for much longer this time around. I nearly gave up on the game several times, but I ended up putting in 30 hours and making it to level 21. They’ve added a lot to this game since its disastrous launch, but it’s still a very imperfect, niche experience. If you’re just looking for another MMO to try out with friends, you may get some enjoyment out of FO76. If you’re looking for more of the single player experience that you loved in FO3, NV, or FO4, you will be disappointed. At least FO5 will be ready by…2030? *Cries in a corner.
The greatest flaw of FO76 is the lack of compelling story content. The gameplay brings back the classic shooting, looting, lockpicking, hacking, and exploring, but the lack of an intriguing narrative to pull everything together makes the whole experience feel pointless. Many times while playing, I thought to myself, “Why am I doing this? What is the point of this?” Most RPGs have at least some filler quests — go here, get this thing, kill stuff, come back. However, the best RPGs have generous portions of the “good stuff,” quests with memorable characters and rich story content that don’t just feel like another chore. You feel like you’re working towards something meaningful, advancing a captivating story. FO76 does not really have that. Much of what I experienced in FO76 was very forgettable. The best RPGs keep the repetitive fetch quests to a minimum, but with FO76, nearly all of the quests feel like boring filler.
Many of these quests require long stretches of walking. I felt like I was playing Morrowind again (I do love Morrowind, but I can only play it with a mod that greatly increases walking speed). The FO76 map feels very empty. There are very few encounters or interesting locations or easter eggs to discover. In FO4, there are many sections of the map that are densely populated with interesting stuff to discover and explore. Not so in FO76.
Being an online game, there are many ways that your immersion can be disrupted. Within the first hour of gameplay after creating my new character, I heard an odd audio message, “Attention citizens. Nuclear strike imminent. Please exit the area at your earliest convenience.” Wait, what? I checked my map to see a big red circle over this place called Cranberry Bog. I heard the explosion from a distance and carried on. Turns out, part of the end-game requires triggering a nuclear launch in that particular spot to fight a big boss. This launch happened twice more during that two hour play session. I just left Vault 76, and nukes are being repeatedly fired at poor Cranberry Bog for reasons I won’t discover until first finishing a thousand fetch quests. I must’ve heard this launch message more than two dozen times in my 30 hours playing FO76. Shouldn’t a post-war nuclear blast be a rare and significant occasion in the Fallout universe? This just really cheapened what would normally be an epic turn of events in any other Fallout game, and this strange quirk soured me quick on FO76.
The premise itself has been another immersion killer for me. FO76 takes place only 25 years after the bombs fell in the Great War. This does open up some interesting possibilities for characters from the pre-war era that survived the bombs, but I can’t help but wonder if 25 years is a long enough time period to allow for all of the crazy mutations and post-apocalypse mayhem that Fallout is known for. How have giant radioactive mirelurks developed from humble sea critters in less than a generation? It doesn’t help that they’ve reused a lot of assets from FO4, a game that takes place more than 200 years after the bombs fell. This disparity can be noticed. In the other Fallout games, there’s something about the mystery of that lengthy passage of time that makes some of these outlandish mutated creatures seem much more plausible. Of course, I know this is tongue-in-cheek sci-fi, but 25 years does not feel like a long enough period of time.
After the backlash they received from launching one of the loneliest games ever (even with friends tagging along), they’ve added NPCs into the game. However, many of the NPCs are just cookie-cutter templates with uninteresting dialogue. They don’t bring much life or immersion to the game. “Oh, you want NPCs? Here, have some NPCs.” Most of the voice acting is fine, but some of the writing ranges from “a bit off” to just bad. There are glimpses of Bethesda genius here and there, but for the most part, FO76 feels like the forgotten stepchild of the franchise. That wit and special touch that make other Bethesda games great is lacking, and any scraps of good storytelling are buried within a pile of seemingly endless filler quests.
Clearly, Bethesda’s best people have been working on Starfield all these years, and the FO76 team has been left with a difficult task — trying to shoehorn grindy MMO content into a game universe known for immersive single player experiences. This experiment has not been a success, in my opinion. However, I should note that there are still 6-9 million players logging on to FO76 servers at least once a month that might argue otherwise.
After five years and more than 16 major updates, there are still plenty of bugs in the game. I got stuck in the "infinite loading screen” a few times. A few quests were bugged and required a “server jump,” which is exiting the server you’re currently in and joining another one. Since there’s no console to fix broken quests, the best you can hope for is to server jump repeatedly until it (hopefully) works. Sometimes, NPCs that you should be able to interact with are completely non-responsive. It’s not uncommon for enemies to be frozen in place (usually, you can still attack and kill them). NPCs and enemies are often stuttering and glitching all over the place. Some early game quests kept re-appearing in my Pip-Boy over and over, even after I completed them several times.
The visuals in FO76 are nothing to write home about. The lighting effects are solid. The environments, creatures, and weapons are well designed, but some of the textures look very poor. The leaves on trees in particular look worse than Oblivion when you get up close (see below). This screenshot was taken while using the highest graphics settings available.
I’ve been unleashing a lot of criticism, but there are some positives about FO76. They’ve added some good quality of life fixes that I imagine we’ll see implemented in FO5. You can now fast travel from anywhere. Instead of being unable to fast travel when enemies are nearby, a simple 15 second countdown engages instead. If you make it to the end of the countdown, zap — you’re gone. It’s a game changer. Your character now lowers their gun when not in combat (instead of pointing directly at friendly NPCs during conversation). The “loot all nearby corpses” feature is a huge time saver (though still bugged unfortunately). Being able to scrap items at any workbench is a big plus.
The time I enjoyed the most while playing FO76 was when I was scrapping, crafting, and building out my mobile C.A.M.P. They’ve tidied up the building tools a bit, though there are still plenty of issues. They’ve added loads of new items, but many need to be unlocked via microtransactions. I really enjoyed foraging for copper, lead, rubber, and other materials in order to build enough generators and water purifiers to keep myself supplied. You will encounter shortages in supplies or materials, but the game gives you several possible solutions that you can work towards.
The gunplay is decent, about on par with FO4, though FO76’s enemy AI is notably worse. VATS no longer slows time since multiple players are sharing the same game world, but they’ve chosen a clever compromise. VATS now simply provides auto targeting with a percentage indicator of your chance to hit. I found myself only using it briefly when I needed to locate enemies since it’s more effective to just aim down the sight and blast away.
The soundtrack is probably the strongest feature of the game. It may not be as potent as FO4’s exceptional soundtrack, but Inon Zur has delivered another handful of gorgeous ambient tracks that fit the Appalachian environment perfectly. While taking those long walks through Appalachia to fetch who-knows-what for who-cares-anymore, at least these stunning ambient tracks will keep you company.
Overall, I’m glad I gave Fallout 76 a proper shot. It’s not the game I wanted, and I couldn’t stick it out for more than 30 hours, but I feel like I’ve gotten enough of the experience to check FO76 off of my list. As a massive Fallout fanboy, I had to see what FO76 was all about. My curiosity has been satisfied. Maybe some day I’ll revisit Appalachia to enjoy Zur’s great soundtrack while grinding out some more fetch quests.