What’s the deal with Fallout 76?

If you’ve been anywhere near the internet lately, you’ve probably noticed that a lot of people are complaining about Fallout 76. The latest instalment in the revered series has been quick to draw the ire of fans, and it’s not without reason.

The premise of Fallout 76 is – at the heart of it – the same as it’s always been: you’re plopped down in a radioactive wasteland and left to your own devices. Of course, there are things to do in this wasteland, whether it be running errands for irate robots or simply exploring a map that’s four times the size of Fallout 4’s, but what you do is entirely your own decision. It’s always been a hallmark of Bethesda games, the freedom to effectively create your own adventure as you go along and make your own decisions. This is what has defined the Fallout series more than anything else.

So where did Fallout 76 go wrong?

Performance

We first need to address the elephant in the room: the myriad of bugs and issues that keep cropping up. I’m less inclined to focus on these because Bethesda has done similar things with previous games. Fallout New Vegas, in particular, was notorious for the immense number of bugs it contained on release – it still managed some exceptional critic ratings, but the game itself was, at times, a nightmare to play.

That being said, Fallout 76 is exceptionally buggy, primarily because of just how poorly the online element is implemented. Base building, for example, is one of the more frustrating aspects of the game – should you find yourself in a server where your current base would not be possible (i.e. someone else has built a base there) then it will be packed up into your inventory. That element would be fine if wasn’t disproportionately hard to line them up with the ground again. It makes you afraid to do anything more complex than a shack with the basics inside. Quests also have a nasty habit of breaking or disappearing entirely, making parts of the game frustratingly impossible to get past. Admittedly, nearly all the quest bugs are solved by logging out and in again but that’s tiresome, and it’s nowhere near the game-breaking levels that many seem to portray it as.

You’ll likely have to fiddle with the settings before you get it running smoothly. I was forced to lower the presets and tone back the lighting to get it up to 60fps, and that was with a GTX 1060 too! However, once you do get it going, the world is surprisingly beautiful – it’s a lot more vibrant than previous Fallout games, which favoured dull, rusted colours. Once you see some sunlight dappling the floor through swaying leaves, you’ll understand what I mean.

The story

I was initially planning on leaving this out, but the online side left me wanting for so much more that I decided to mention it. It may sound odd, but Fallout 76 feels… empty.

Fallout has always trodden a very delicate line. While you are undoubtedly in a wasteland, and there are few people left surviving, there are enough people around that it still feels alive. Fallout 76 just doesn’t – besides the many, many robots wandering around there are no NPCs, and the effect of that is a world that feels truly empty. Gone is the world-building, gone are the encounters that spiced up the otherwise bland landscape, and instead, we have a breadcrumb trail of notes and letters leading us along the main story. That’s not to say it’s a bad story; it’s just as good as the other Fallout stories, but it lacks the substance that came from interacting with other survivors.

Of course, Bethesda intended much of the game’s interaction to be with other players – real-life survivors as it were – but the map is so large that your encounters with other players are scarce. On top of that, when you do finally meet someone, the last thing on their mind is to teach you the tricks of game.

Similarly, the quests lack the character of other Bethesda games; a symptom of this lack of world-building. Normally, you’ll have a mix of dull go-and-collect-this quests and more interesting story-driven side quests, and the balance between the two is what tilts the game towards either fun or repetitively boring. 76 simply has too many of the former, with side-quests becoming quite dull after a relatively short amount of time. The main quests at least offer some actual story, and if there was more of it then I’d be less inclined to think so badly of this game. But no, once the main quest is done, you’ll have little else to distract you and keep you playing.

Online woes

The main bulk of the problem lies in the online-only nature of Fallout 76. On the surface it’s a great idea to share the wasteland with other players, but the implementation leaves much to be desired. For example, for a game that relies so heavily on online interaction, you’d think that communication would be high on the list of priorities. Instead, the voice chat is permanently open-mic with no push-to-talk option, so if anyone within a 10-mile radius of you happens to have someone yelling in the background, you’ll be forced to listen to it for the next hour while you collect empty bottles for a quest. Most players tend to use discord instead, and while it solves the problem you can’t help but feel like it’s a vital missing piece of the Fallout puzzle.

What’s worse is that grouping up with more than four people is surprisingly difficult. You can form small parties of up to four people by inviting your friends directly to your world and while you’ll have to deal with the entire party’s objectives list being pasted on the side of your screen, the process is quick and easy. The problems arise when you look to meet up with more than four people, because you cannot pick servers. Unless you are invited into a party you will always load into a random server, and it makes big meetups with friends almost impossible. So, if you had dreams of a 20-strong group of friends taking on the wasteland together, then good luck trying to randomly join the same server together.

It’s also affected the main gameplay as well. Logging in and out effectively resets the world, resulting in certain places become very fast item or experience farms (I’m looking at you, Whitesprings Golf Club). Simply kill the enemies, loot the items, and then hop into another server so they all respawn again and repeat until you’re either rich or bored… or both.

Should you get Fallout 76?

The simple answer is yes. You may think that’s a strange conclusion to an article detailing everything wrong with the game, but the truth is that this isn’t the first time Bethesda has done something similar. Nearly every one of their games has had similar teething issues – New Vegas was notorious for some horrifying graphical bugs and Skyrim’s wonky collision physics led to some strange interactions all over the place. However, Bethesda worked on both bugs, improving them over time. Although they were never perfect, they offered enough that eventually the bugs didn’t matter, because there was so much more to focus on. There’s a reason that Skyrim is considered one of the best role-playing games of all time, even though you can still go through nearly any wall at will.

Fallout 76 reminds me a lot of No Man’s Sky: a promising concept executed poorly. However, that does not mean the game is dead in the water. It’s got plenty of room to improve and I expect it to do just that in the coming months. Right now, it seems like you’re paying premium prices for an early-access version of the next Fallout, but good things come to those who wait. Already, patches are being rolled out with quality-of-life changes abound, and Bethesda is listening to the complaints of their fanbase.

Fallout 76 is not quite the wandering wasteland experience you were expecting. But it will be soon enough.