With the release of Fallout 76, we take an in-depth look at a game that's not the online Fallout we deserve, but could one day be the online experience we've dreamed of.
Ever since the first Fallout was released, the tagline “war…war never changes” has become synonymous with one of the gaming industry’s senior franchises.
For some fans, the years have not been kind to their series. When Bethesda Softworks released Fallout 3 way back in 2008, a vocal minority complained about the shift from the 2D isometric style of the first two games to the 3D format more in line with The Elder Scrolls, Bethesda’s other famous franchise. Since then, isometric style games have been making a comeback on the sidelines with Kickstarter projects funded by nostalgic gamers, but Bethesda has persisted since, continuing to churn out new games in the same model. From that perspective, my experience of Fallout 76 suggests that this is yet another major shift in direction for a franchise that, until last week, was considered a proud standard bearer for the cause of single player games.
War never changes, but Fallout certainly has. The question is: what has it become?
It’s difficult to pin down exactly what genre Fallout 76 falls into. It’s tempting to label it as yet another turn to the dark side, a game made by developers chafing at the hands of corporate executives who are looking to the future and seeing the only way to earn profit is to create always-online multiplayer games with a resource grind and microtransactions. 76 ticks all the boxes of the video gamer’s “unholy trifecta” but the truth is far more complicated. Even after several hours in virtual Appalachia playing both solo and co-op, I can’t seem to work out what Bethesda was aiming to make.
Is it an RPG? Perhaps, but the total absence of human NPCs and the fact that my character is essentially a blank slate with zero dialogue would suggest otherwise.
Is it a survival game? Maybe, but all I have to do is eat and drink every once in a while and lie down for a bit when I get sick.
Is it a co-op game? You can certainly play co-op, but I’ve been doing fine roaming around alone.
Is it a multiplayer game? Yes, I see other players on the map, but the server limits the number to between 24 and 32 players at a time, so actual unplanned encounters with other players are rare.
This is Fallout 76’s biggest problem: it doesn’t know what it wants to be. I take issue with Bethesda for one reason and one reason alone. Ever since The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, they’ve been making and releasing the same game over and over again. Yes, you can paste on improved textures, add a few little extras and tweak the combat, but there’s no ignoring the fact that once you strip away all of the decorations, it’s all uncanny. I got the same feeling playing Fallout 4 as I did when playing Fallout 3. By making this game Bethesda tried to take on player criticism and make something different and new. Then for whatever reason, they released 76 and nearly messed it all up.
It might seem like I’ve dropped a whole load of criticism onto Fallout 76 and unsurprisingly the Fallout fanbase, at least on the Internet, has experienced a polarisation, reaching a state not dissimilar to the deeply divided Star Wars community in the aftermath of The Last Jedi. Despite all of that, it’s surprising that I don’t hate the game. Far from it. In fact, I’ve been both frustrated and entertained since I first booted it up and despite its many flaws, I’ve been coming back to it again and again. Bethesda may have bungled the launch with the “release first, fix later” attitude that’s becoming more and more common, but part of the reason why I like 76 is because for the first time in a long time, I’m playing something by Bethesda that feels new and different. The opportunity to make something great is here, and there’s still plenty of time for this Vault-Tec experiment to go the right way.
It’s no secret that Bethesda games have a reputation for being buggy and broken on release (and some are still that way a long time afterwards), but Fallout 76 is buggy even for Bethesda. It could have done with a few more months in the oven just to iron out the bugs and glitches that happen far too frequently. I question if the BETA program that was introduced for this game actually did any good whatsoever. Over the course of an hour, my game crashed twice for totally unknown reasons. Before that, I had to log out of my current server and log in to a different server because my quest objective was broken and couldn’t be completed. I ran into serious glitches, including lighting problems and texture pop-in, and physics bugs that were both worrying and amusing. Yesterday’s patch did a lot of tidying up, improving the framerate and loading times, but the game still hits snags in random places and stutters. Luckily, this is a multiplayer game and multiplayer games lend themselves well to bug fixes and scheduled maintenance. In fact, it’s almost mandatory for modern multiplayer games to receive regular server maintenance and patches with bug fixes. If 76 is going to succeed, it needs to be stable and smooth before anything else.
Despite problems like texture pop-in, 76 lends itself well to sightseeing and exploration.
Human NPCs. If you’re at all familiar with this game, then you knew this was coming at some point. The choice to have no computer-controlled humans in this game was a bold one, and I remain mostly unconvinced that it was the right way to go. Still, this approach does have some merit. I followed a particular questline involving Vault 76’s Overseer, who goes missing shortly after you leave the safety of the vault. Despite the fact that I never came across her in person, and was following her trail by listening to pre-recorded audio messages found in different locations, I was pleasantly surprised and impressed by the level of storytelling detail and emotion that they communicated to me. I was engaged and wanted to see what lay at the end of the trail, and I cared about what happened to her. However, this high-quality storytelling doesn’t apply to every quest I’ve come across. Some lacked tension simply because I knew that no matter what I did, the endpoint was going to be an audio tape on a dead body rather than an actual human being.
Quests are given by robots or holotapes. There are also robot-run trading posts across the map. Despite that, a few players have been trying to act as traders.
The solution is fairly simple: invest in fully voiced human NPCs. Bethesda was aiming to try and get players to make their own stories by joining up with their friends and having adventures. That doesn’t preclude having computer-controlled humans by any means. A lot of MMOs have them, whether it’s Warcraft or even shooters like Destiny. Sometimes, robots take the place of human beings on quests, but the robots just don’t cut it. To get people to really engage, players need to feel that they’re talking to someone and not something. Previous Fallout games were populated with humans, whether it was hostile Raiders or secluded little communities, and part of the franchise charm was discovering them. Even with other human players, 76 feels comparably empty.
It would also help to increase server population. If Bethesda wants people to engage with one another and team up, then it only makes sense to have more people available. Maybe there could even be purpose-built meeting points for you to greet your fellow Vault Dwellers and set out on quests. Getting people to engage with strangers on the Internet will always be a problem, because it’s just that: engaging with strangers on the Internet in a pretty personal manner. My impression of Fallout 76’s servers was a whole bunch of people exploring solo and a couple of teams, likely friend groups on PlayStation Network, searching and looting locations together. There are public events that you can participate in, but actual community engagement seems poor. I hung around a few to see if anyone would show up to help, but no one did. Whenever I passed a fellow Vault Dweller in the wilderness, I would wave. While most would wave back, they would continue on their own journeys without even a second thought to teaming up for a bit. 76 needs to encourage people to get together, especially when it includes something as big as launching nuclear missiles as a group activity.
Codes for the various nuclear launch silos can be looted off dead enemies.
Player-versus-player (PvP) is also far too basic at the moment to be of any use. A couple of times, I offered a friendly gunshot to other players’ knees (ha ha) to see if they wanted to participate in a friendly duel of sorts. On one occasion, the player ran off despite the fact that I had done little to no damage. On the other, I was ignored as they looked deep into the glassy depths of their Pip-Boy. In all the time I’ve been playing, I’ve never come across a single player who had a bounty on their heads for killing other players. Bethesda have announced faction-based PvP is coming, but games should really ship with most of their key gameplay mechanics. Combat also feels a little flat, mostly because the iconic VATS system works far too awkwardly in real-time as opposed to slowing time. It was an exercise to try and rely on it less.
VATS now moves in real-time, making it awkward and hard to control.
The in-game map provides plenty of places to explore. At four times the size of the map in Fallout 4, 76 is expansive and just begs to be explored. The different regions are all well-designed and distinct from one another, whether it’s the ash-choked mining wastelands of the southwest or the humid swamps of the northeast. Bethesda’s attention was clearly on crafting new and imaginative locales, buildings and environments rather than on the simple stuff like fixing bugs. I was drawn off the beaten trail far more often than my criticism of the game would suggest. The addition of the new PERK card system is fantastic. And they say innovation is dead. Other game systems have been wonderfully designed, from peppy audio cues to the popups that appear when you level up.
The PERK card system is an interesting addition to the game.
Reviewing Fallout 76 as it is right now just wouldn’t be fair. Yes, you could argue that since Bethesda released it and it’s not a beta test, it’s subject to the same reviewing process. But there have always been games that have vastly improved since their launch, and 76 has more potential than most, even if the game engine it’s using is creaking audibly and is older than time itself. It’s already good fun now. While fixing it won’t be easy, there might come a day when 76 is no longer met with mixed reviews, when it’s regarded as a hit Fallout game and one of the industry’s finest online experiences. Imagine hilltops dominated by forts, created by players through the use of the versatile CAMP system, with players establishing their own kind of order on post-apocalyptic West Virginia. Similar things have been done before, and 76 can do them again.
Not quite a mountaintop fort, but the C.A.M.P lets you build a home base for yourself
Vault 76 might have opened earlier than scheduled, but players have the opportunity to make the best of it. If Bethesda’s in this for the long haul, then so am I.
Back to Appalachia, Vault Boys and Girls.
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