Hello folks, Kelvoran here with another Fallout 76 post. This time though, I’ll be giving my thoughts about the game and I will be creating another post later today detailing how I feel the game could be improved.
Before I begin though, just a note to anyone reading this hoping to see a rant about the canvas bag mess, or the atomic shop, or the recent customer support data leaks, you’re not going to see that here. This post is going to be focused on the game, it’s performance (from my perspective) and generally how it plays. I will also be including an honest rating based on my own experiences. There will be minor spoilers ahead as well!
So first things first, what is Fallout 76? Well unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few months, Fallout 76 is Bethesda Softworks attempt to use the Fallout universe to get into the multiplayer survival genre. You start off as a member of Vault 76 and you are released into a portion of West Virginia 25 years after the nuclear war which ravaged America in the Fallout universe with the goal of rebuilding America from the ground up. To assist you in this endeavor you are given a Construction and Assembly Mobile Platform (or C.A.M.P for short) which you can place down in the world and when you do this you are allowed to build a base in a radius around the camp using materials which you’ve salvaged from nearby areas by scrapping just about anything you can pick up, just as you did in Fallout 4.
Speaking of Fallout 4, if you enjoyed that game, you’ll find Fallout 76 remarkably similar, because it looks and plays the same way. Many of the staple enemies will be familiar to you (including feral ghouls, super mutants, mole rats, mutated hounds etc) and the terrain and structures also use a similar style. There’s no point beating around the bush on this, Fallout 76 reuses many assets from Fallout 4 and let me be clear for a moment here. There is nothing wrong with that! I am sure that there are plenty of gamers out there who would like nothing more than to see game developers create all game assets from scratch when they create a new title in a series, but this is not feasible from either a time or financial perspective, which is why assets are reused in game development as much as they are. After all, why recreate a ruined house when you have the model for one already built in another game that uses the same engine?
But I’ve gone off track.
Anyway, as a member of Vault 76 you emerge from the Vault and begin to explore Appalachia, which is the first ‘zone’ so to speak that you’ll fight enemies in, most of which being between levels 1 to 10, and one of the first quests you get is to head to the Overseer’s Camp and find her. Unfortunately, you don’t find her, but you do find a holotape she left behind, and this sets the theme for the entire game as far as quests are concerned. Listen to holotapes, listen to repeating radio messages, talk to robots with personalities etc, because as Todd Howard stated during the reveal of Fallout 76 at E3, every human that you encounter is a real player.
Unfortunately, this statement from Todd and what it means for the game does spoil a lot of what made the Fallout games under Bethesda so good, because one of the key features of the Fallout games has been, at least to me, seeing the survivors who did not get into a vaults do the best they can in the now ruined America by constructing their own settlements whether they be civilians trying to get by, or Raiders trying to assert dominance over a particular region. Knowing that the only human that I will see will be players not only makes entire areas of the game feel empty and lifeless (quite literally in the case of the latter) but it also ruins certain quests. Here I’ll give you two examples of what I mean:
Example 1 – The Town of Flatwoods: This is the first major destination that you’ll go to if you follow the Overseer’s instructions on the second holotape you find of hers. She encourages you to go to the town of Flatwoods if its still standing, and meet her there. When you arrive you’ll see signs from a faction called ‘The Responders’ and many of the buildings are intact. Unfortunately, as you explore Flatwoods there are no surviving human NPCs. Every single one of them is dead and has been for a short while, and you’re tasked with listening to more holotapes and completing objectives assigned by computer terminals.
Example 2 – The Order of Mysteries: The Order of Mysteries appears as a small faction which you can become a part of a short while after starting the game after you locate a deceased member of the Order and clues found on the body lead you to their headquarters. After you arrive at the secret headquarters, you’ll get your first mission, to find your handler and receive your training. Unfortunately, because of Todd Howard’s statement about the only human characters that you’ll see being players, you already know exactly what you’re going to find when you arrive at the last known location of your handler. She’s dead, you’ll get no training, and because she can’t exactly stop you, you pinch her holotape from her body and give yourself a promotion to a higher rank which gives you access to more quests.
See what I mean? Because you know that every human you encounter will be dead, there are no humans to interact with and get a story from, nor are there living raiders to kill or spy on as you hear them rant about enemies they’ve fought in the past, meaning that even the raider outposts and fortresses are empty, or filled with Scorched who all look identical more or less, which is a shame because even the feral ghouls have more varied looks in this game.
Everywhere you go, all you’ll find are dead human bodies, and sure, you can piece together how the humans may have been killed by looking around and trying to ‘solve the puzzle’ but ultimately it doesn’t really matter because there’s no real bonus for doing so. Unfortunately, in my opinion, this really does drastically impact what makes the game fun and it also hurts the developers as they are limited in what quests they can add to the game.
So what else in the game is there to do aside from robot quests and collecting the holotapes? Well, you can capture Workshops. Now, for those of you who played Fallout 4, you know what a Workshop is. A workshop is a small building which exerts control over a larger area and if you control the workshop you can build within a large area. Now in Fallout 4, Workshops were the only way you could build settlements in the game, and the number of workshops was limited (compared to the number of locations you could visit at any rate). In Fallout 76 this changes somewhat. Workshops still exert control over a large area, but this time they are controlled by whoever captures the workshop and other players can come along and ‘steal’ your workshop from you if you leave it unguarded. Additionally, if you log out, either because you’re done with the game for the day or because of a crash/server disconnection you lose everything including control over the zone, and any structures you built in the workshop area. This makes building in workshop areas seemingly pointless, save for defensive buildings (such as turrets and traps) and resource collectors for the unique resources that are found on workshop sites. This doesn’t mean that the Workshops aren’t worth trying to get control of though, because the resources you can gather from these places are much harder/slower to obtain if you try to get them elsewhere.
And finally, I have to mention PvP. Now, PvP is in an interesting spot in Fallout 76, because in all the reviews I’ve read about the game, none of them talk about the PvP mode, but rather, how PvP is initiated. Now how PvP is initiated is fairly simple. You just attack other players. However there are caveats to this, and that caveat is that unless the player you’re targetting starts attacking you, they take greatly reduced damage, meaning that they can’t be killed by you even if you have some of the most powerful weapons. If they, however, decide to unload on you, the attacker after you’ve already engaged them, they will do full weapon damage to you, easily allowing them to kill you, especially if they have high powered weapons equaling your own.
But that is not the PvP mode that I am going to highlight. The PvP mode is called Hunter/Hunted and it is accessible starting at level 5 when PvP is enabled for your character. To access it? Go to your radio and turn on the Hunter/Hunted channel. This triggers a quest which tasks you to hunt down another player who also has Hunter/Hunted turned on. Additionally, anyone with Hunter/Hunted radio turned on is automatically ‘flagged’ for PvP, meaning that you’ll do full damage to your target without them needing to fire back. Unfortunately due to the fact that this is hidden away as a radio station, and there are no real indicators to point out that it exists (with the exception of a loading screen hint which may, or may not appear depending on how long your load times are) there aren’t many players openly using it to engage in PvP with other players.
But what about technical issues and bugs? Well, the game has plenty, not going to lie, and this is part of the charm that is Bethesda game releases. It’s an ‘expected norm’ at this stage. Unfortunately one far less accepted this time around, but still an expected norm. There are performance issues with the game, but these vary depending on the rigs of each player being used. In my time playing the game I have encountered only a few bugs/technical issues. Notably a few CTDs, some framerate tanking and a few invisible enemies which I had to melee the air to kill effectively. None of which are completely game breaking. That being said, some of the other bugs and glitches that other players have experienced are more severe, and the prevalence of these bugs has contributed to the poor rating that the game has received on multiple platforms.
So if I had to give a rating to the game based on the 48 or so hours I’ve sunk into the title, what would I rate it? Well, I don’t generally like the singular X out of X number system, whether it’s out of 5 points or 10 points because I don’t really feel like that gives the game justice. Rather, I prefer to rate each individual area of the game, so here is my ‘score’ for Fallout 76.
Graphics: The world of Fallout 76 looks amazing, and the way the zones of the game look so different from each other allows for some rather amazing experiences and photomode screenshots. Rating: 8/10
Audio: The audio for the game is similar in many ways to Fallout 4, but there are quite a few new audio tracks to listen to, and the radio stations that play music can be interesting to listen to from time to time (but not all the time, need to hear the enemies sneaking up on you after all). Rating: 6/10
Gameplay: The gameplay for Fallout 76 is much like Fallout 4 but with some new changes here and there to bring some fresh elements to the game. The introduction of the C.A.M.P and being able to build a settlement anywhere in open space is great but hampered by the inability to place it in or around structures. Overall depends on the player as to how entertaining or boring it will be. Rating: 5/10
Performance: While my personal experience with glitches and bugs is minimal, I cannot pretend that other gamers are not experiencing their own issues which are much more severe. Performance for the title drastically needs to be improved if the game wants to have any significant longevity. Rating: 3/10
Story: The lack of living human NPCs has really impacted the story of Fallout 76 severely. In addition, while the Fallout series has always played fast and loose with the lore (even going back to the original games made by Interplay) there are a few lore changes here which don’t make much sense. Rating: 3/10
So there you have it folks, my thoughts on Fallout 76. I will be writing up another post later today concerning how I feel the game could be improved. So stay tuned.
Until next time!
Fortress of Solitude 