Fallout 76

The worst reviewed game in the Fallout franchise, it serves as a "narrative prequel" to the entire Fallout franchise, taking place 25 years after the nuclear war that almost destroyed civilization. Most of the issues have now been fixed, as the game has fully improved thanks to several patches that saved the game's reception, so now it's not as bad as it used to be. This review is generally based on earlier versions.

Development on a Fallout online game started at Bethesda Studios and Interplay Productions with a project by the name of Project V13 (also known as Fallout Online). It was in development hell between 2007 and 2009 until it was canceled in 2011 due to conflicts between Bethesda and Interplay, and Bethesda used an out of court settlement to gain the full rights to the Fallout franchise. The developer of the game warned the costumers to "expect spectacular bugs" at the game's launch. Recently, in June 2022, several former Bethesda employees claimed that the game's development was severely mismanaged. Testers had to work 10-hour days for six days a week before the game's release date.

The game not only suffered from a heavily rushed development but was also being handled by Bethesda's less experienced Austin division instead of the more established and experienced Dallas division. This was likely because they know how to make fully functional but okay multiplayer games (they were even in the process of making a new multiplayer game under the first same name under their old name BattleCry Studios LLC prior to becoming another new Bethesda studio division, along with the game itself being shelved), but didn't have the same pace of development as other divisions have. Not to mention that this game led to the downfall of Bethesda. Bethesda used to be very good, but now they've been in their downfall thanks to this garbage game.

No physical copies of the PC version have a proper disc. Instead, they have a piece of cardboard with a game code printed on it. I am glad I got the PS4 edition as at least it had a proper disc. Looking at the covers is one of the most infamous examples of false advertising: despite Todd Howard claiming it has sixteen times the detail of Fallout 4, there is almost no difference between both games' graphics (if any).

The game can overall get repetitive and boring very quickly. Some of the daily and event quests you'll get are nothing but repetition.

The game's graphics look horribly unpolished and outdated, almost identical to Fallout 4. In fact, Fallout 4 looks better, and it came in 2015, 3 years earlier before 76. Adding further insult to injury is that even Fallout 3 looked better than this, even without graphical mods, and in turn that game came out 10 years earlier before this one.

The game was built using Bethesda's severely outdated engine from 2007 (which is based on the already obsolete Gamebryo engine), which is the reason many of the problems mentioned below are present. As a result, a ton of assets lifted straight from Fallout 4 were copy-pasted into this game due to the developers using Fallout 4 as a base, including bugs and glitches which had been known for years...some like the "damage bug" that has been known about since Skyrim.

• Adding literal insult to injury, during a presentation at E3 2018, director Todd Howard openly mocked people who claim that Skyrim and Fallout 4 are buggy, even though there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of videos on YouTube demonstrating game-breaking glitches from both of those games.
• Another is enemies failing to load their animations and just floating around in the default pose.
• Due to the glitchiness of the game, one player got permanent god mode, which may seem fun at first, but it basically made the game even easier than it already is. He was practically begging for death. This is because the player had negative health points, and characters only die when their HP hits zero.
• Some players were even reporting logging into other players' accounts. Most notably, a player by the name of "Fattypatty" logged in one day to find that his level 78 character had been magically deleted and replaced with a level 8 character. He contacted Bethesda's help service, but they blatantly said that they couldn't do anything about it. He hasn't played the game since.
• Once January 1, 2019, rolled around, the nukes had initially stopped working (somehow Bethesda didn't even program different years in an always-online game). This meant that the game was impossible to beat (no joke) as none of the players could launch the nukes to summon the unique enemies that can drop end-game gear. For some weird reason, sometimes when your AP meter reaches zero, you'll lose a small chunk of your health. To make matters worse, one player had his AP meter depleting by itself without any reason.
• The loading time is about as atrocious as the HyperScan. And to make matters worse, if it takes way too long, the loading screen will become disoriented and glitched and will have to reload itself!
• The first few patches were ridiculously large: each was bigger than the base game itself, and in total were over 100 gigabytes.

The game's story is an absurd mess. You and your friends are doing nothing but cleaning up the mess left behind by the nuclear war, hence the large amounts of object-collecting missions. The developers tried to explain away the near-total lack of storyline or player goals by claiming that the idea was for players to create their own stories for their characters and "make their own fun", excuses commonly used by some "services" nowadays to justify the lack of content.

• The series' satirical take on American nationalism has been seemingly ditched in this game in favor of making American nationalism the main plot device, even without using the simpler (as the game uses a badly vague one, instead) in-universe explanation, that the Enclave was beyond the rationale of the Vault 76 dwellers' spirits of believing that the same old Pre-War United States wasn't flawed, to begin with.
• The concept of the "Scorched Plague" feels like an afterthought to justify the lack of NPCs, despite paying voice actors to voice all the deceased and unseen characters in the final game by audio logs. This made it look like a lazy excuse to not make hundreds of workable passive NPCs for a multiplayer online game prior to the Wastelanders DLC's announcement to seemly prove this point.
• Nobody seems to be that bothered by the fact that a nuclear war just happened, despite the sole reason why the player character(s) was/were in Vault 76 was due to him/her/them "successfully" surviving the Great War 25 years ago.
• The only story or lore, for that matter, you'll get is from audio logs found scattered throughout the game or bits and pieces of text from terminals scattered about in the game. This was resolved in the Wastelanders DLC.
• The backstory for most of the locations is only about how the characters there died or became Scorched victims, most of which are generic. While there are few that don't end fatally, they're mediocre at best, like the mysterious "magical" piano that plays by itself in an abandoned church named "Haven Church", located in the Mire region. On the topic of dead corpses, some of them look to have died quite recently; their "decaying" grayish pale skin looks more like makeup for those aforementioned deceased NPCs, rather than their implicit deaths that occurred within the span of 25 years before and during the game. These corpses would realistically have been mummified, entered a state of advanced decomposition, or have been skeletal by the time the player encounters them.
• There's really no ending scene, unlike almost all of the other Fallout games. The game continues as if the final battle never happened.For some strange reason, the Brotherhood of Steel is mentioned here as the "first" attempted local chapter for the faction, despite the older games stating that the first chapter was located in Lost Hills, California. This makes the claim that this game is a prequel to the Fallout franchise feel rather artificial. The developers tried to explain this by claiming that the region belonged to some former US soldiers who survived the Great War, and the leader of that group just so happened to be friends with the BoS founder, Roger Maxson. They used a somehow functional unnamed radio broadcasting station to contact Roger Maxson, even though he was located thousands of miles away. In reality, this is just because Bethesda is obsessed with the superficial aspects of the Fallout franchise (the Brotherhood, super mutants, ghouls, etc), to the point that they can't make a game without them. This was thankfully toned down or removed in the Wastelanders DLC, as the BoS and Enclave are no longer considered as major factions, and are instead replaced by the Raider and Settler(s) factions. On the subject of super mutants, they appear again, with another nonsensical excuse for the Forced Evolution Virus to be around so they can exist. The feral ghouls also appear again with predominantly no justifiable reason as to their appearance 25 years after the Great War happened, as the process of ghoulification and later eventually becoming feral (depending on each case, as seen in all the games until this point) takes longer spans of time as canonical lore implies. Here, they just instantly (even within a 25-year period, which makes mostly no sense) turned into feral ghouls for no reason, but like the problems above to force the lack of passive NPCs narrative Bethesda is pushing for.

• This was the ever first truly vocal appearance of the Brotherhood of Steel founder, Roger Maxson, as mentioned throughout the series, alongside using him as a background character for a few audio-logs. This is despite him being regardless of misuse to justified the Appalachian Brotherhood of Steel's existence in the game. Unlike the bad explanations of the appearances of the franchise's iconic elements like the Brotherhood of Steel, the Enclave's (or a technically breakaway faction of it) reason to appear in this game actually makes a lot of sense due to real-world connections like their headquarters, which are based on The Greenbrier hotel and its bunker. It's too bad that they were the main background antagonist due to their previous leader and only human, Thomas Eckhart, who was a reactionary narcissistic moron that led his group to collapse, leaving their AI MODUS as an artificial sole member and new leader all within 3-4 years in it lifespan, and the main indirect (not deliberately like previous games) reason why the Scorched Plague exist.

The multiplayer aspect is heavily flawed:

• There's little to no reason for players to play together since the difficulty is really low and there are no bonus rewards for playing with other players.
• The game has a 24-player limit per server because it wants to feel post-apocalyptic and having lots of players on a map would ruin it. However, past games had lots of NPCs in smaller maps without harming this atmosphere, so it was inexcusable having a small player limit.
• There were no single-player private servers at launch. This was going to change in 2020, but unfortunately, the private server mode is made only available through the infamous Fallout 1st subscription feature, along with becoming a co-op mode, instead. Griefing (trolling/harassing of other players) is incredibly easy. Since the level of monsters that spawn is determined by the highest-level player in the area, high-level players will often follow low-level players around, generating monsters at levels much too high for them to fight until they die so they can loot the corpse. Since this is not a PvP kill, it does not result in the high-level player becoming wanted. Also, following a nuclear explosion, an irradiated area is formed where extremely high-level monsters spawn, which is supposed to allow high-level players to raid the area for legendary equipment drops. Unfortunately, at launch, there was nothing to stop players from nuking areas near Vault 76 and force new players to deal with endgame-level monsters until it was changed later so no nukes can drop near Vault 76.

The game's pre-release early access stage (known as the B.E.T.A. despite fulfilling none of the normal functions of a beta) was obviously just a publicity stunt, as it was far too close to the launch date for any issues that turned up in it to be fixed. Sure enough, the game launched in a state identical to the B.E.T.A. release, bugs and all. Because progress from the B.E.T.A. is transferred directly to the actual game, those players who paid enough to get into it (which was only available on more expensive preorder packages) had an automatic leg-up on regular players. This wouldn't have been a huge problem if the PvP wasn't hopelessly broken. Prior to the addition of the PvP-focused Survival mode in Wild Appalachia, the main game's basic PvP system was actually broken for many reasons:

• • The PvP system is not "open" (i.e you can just start fights with players who have enabled PvP): instead, after you attack another player, they have to attack you back to commence the "duel". This could be seen as something that one's mother or a stereotypical "Karen" would come up with to make sure everyone was having fun, thus robbing the game of any sense of threat.
  • It's worth mentioning that the game doesn't penalize disconnections in-between duels.
  • It favors the latter person too much since the PvP modifier doesn't wear off until they attack back. Firstly, if they don't attack back, they almost won't get harmed if they run away. Secondly, they have all the time in the world to look at your gear and put on all of their gear (including a super-armour and their best weapon), since they will receive almost no damage from the attacker, and hit them back with all of the gear. Needless to say, the combat has little to no balance.
  • The rewards are poor, so there's no real reason to PvP.
  • Fall damage isn't affected by the modifier, so you can build a high place, invite someone there, break the floor beneath them so they fall to their death, and finish them off.
  • If a player somehow kills another player without entering PvP or does something not really evil like accidentally melee the door to another player's restroom, they will become "wanted" on the server. This generally results in having a bunch of level 100+ players wearing power armor and dosed up to the eyeballs on chems fast-traveling to the player's position and murdering the hell of out them to collect the bounty. This is apparently supposed to prevent griefing, but since it actually doesn't as noted above, all it really means is you can accidentally summon a roving death squad.

The game's netcode is atrocious and anything too heavy will cause server-side problems that will at the very least randomly boot players. One group of players set off three nukes at once and actually crashed the server they were on. The netcode is also very insecure, with one Reddit user finding out that editing the game's .ini file can result in you being able to phase through walls or find the IP address of every other player currently on the server.

Obviously, the one thing that did work just fine on launch was the "Atomic Store" with overpriced microtransactions for extra atoms, the in-game currency. While it is possible to earn them, the rate is pathetically slow once all standard quests that give atoms are completed (working out at about 40 atoms or more a week if the player completes all possible challenges) and the items are things that modders would have made for free in Fallout 4. Unfortunately, the pricing of the Atomic Shop is simply ridiculous: a set of blue/yellow Vault-Tec-themed paint for your power armor can cost up to 1,800 atoms, and there are even outfits imported directly from Fallout 4 for sale. However, item durability from Fallout 3 & Fallout: New Vegas has returned since the feature's absence in Fallout 4.

The armor system has improved over Fallout 4, so now it allows you to both wear your armor and your under-armor under every outfit. But many weapons and armor pieces in the game are locked behind a level cap (as per games like Borderlands), meaning you cannot use them unless you reach a high enough level. Given what a joyless slog leveling up in Fallout 76 is, this was a poor idea. At release, bosses could drop items thirty or more levels above the player's, though this was later patched to have a more reasonable level range. It is still not uncommon to encounter a suit of power armor and have to throw away most or all of its components (the frame is the only part not level-restricted) before the player can actually wear it. To add insult to injury, if you get booted from the game for any reason, your progress will be wiped, and you will have to redo any quests completed or re-obtain any items gathered since the last save.

Some of the new creatures like the Wendigo, the Mothman, and the Grafton Monster act very too much like fantasy and mythical creatures described by their real-life folklore counterparts instead of even fitting in the Fallout universe, which always had a down-to-earth setting or sometimes has a mild version of this concept. This problem is resolved for the Wendigo only, as seen from the Wastelanders DLC to officially confirmed to be a mutant, as a colossus version of the creature to be a three-head taller version. The Scorchbeasts in this game are literally just re-skinned Skyrim dragons, and some of the code for them is just copy-pasted from that game.

Most of the enemies you'll find are Scorched humans who turned into what are essentially semi-intelligent zombies (like feral ghouls but with lobotomites' remaining skills from the Old World Blues DLC in New Vegas) with green crystal shards because of the Scorched Plague. Speaking of enemies, they have terrible AI, as they often do not attack the player, or even acknowledge their presence. Despite their threatening appearance, the Scorchbeasts become a joke to fight because once you can run to the nearest SAM in the Cranberry Bog, they'll just ignore you and attack the SAM instead. The enemy balancing is an absolute joke, as higher-level enemies can take forever to die, even if you're at a higher level. The super mutants and robots, however, are even worse with the balancing, due to them being just bullet sponges. At least the actual selection of enemies is varied, even if some are horribly overused.

V.A.T.S. makes a return, but, unlike its previous counterparts, it runs in real-time instead of slowing down or freezing time. Besides, you can no longer target a specific part of an enemy's body while using it without unlocking a perk.

Prior to E3 2019 with the Wastelanders DLC announcement, there were absolutely no living passive humanoid NPCs (humans, civilized ghouls, and more super mutants) to interact with or receive mission quests from. Instead, all quests were given by robots or computer terminals.

The game uses a card system in order to get perks, unique skills, and weapons. While this doesn't actually require microtransactions, it's a fair bet that they were meant to while the game was in development. Prior to the Locked & Loaded update, There was no way to re-spec a character, ever, meaning that the player would end up completely screwing themselves over if they fail to spec up certain stats before reaching the point where no further perks can be assigned.

At release, the voice chat lacked a basic push-to-talk option. This meant that having a microphone plugged in resulted in all speech and background noise automatically being transmitted to nearby players, and the only way to disable it was to disable the microphone manually or unplug it. Push-to-talk was eventually added a month or so after release.

While the game's faction names are somewhat improving from Fallout 4's, other faction names are still lazy or even badly named like the Cutthroats, Free States, Order of Mysteries, and Responders. Given that almost all of their founders did live before the Great War and are not low-intellectual first-generation survivors, they should know how to give the factions that they founded after their styles better names than that.

Some locations aren't noteworthy to visit despite having a map four times bigger than Fallout 4. Not only that, but you have to pay caps to fast travel and set up camps. When you get to an area, you have the chance to get an event in which other players can help if they want to and have similar levels as you. However, the events are as uninteresting as the quests, and very rarely someone else will help, since almost everyone is a lone wolf.

The building system is messy and lacks mods. Plus, when you log out, other players will almost certainly dismantle anything you've built by the time you get back.

The weapon customization feature is more limited than Fallout 4, since you don't get all the mods at the start of the game, and instead have to scrap a lot of the enemy's weapons to get the mods or buy them from vendors.

The nuclear launch codes are not randomized as one might expect. Instead, they are fixed for one-week periods. This means players could simply look them up online and launch nukes at will, which they gleefully did.

During E3 2019, a trailer was revealed for the new piece of free DLC titled "Wastelanders", which while it finally included things that fans were requesting such as NPCs, also introduced a completely unnecessary battle royale mode which was also teased at the event to launch at a later date. The battle royale mode (titled "Nuclear Winter") was also given a "B.E.T.A" trial for a week, meant to test the game and draw up community support. This appears to have backfired, however, as the trial was rampant with cheaters, servers were unreliable, and many weapons and armor items were overpowered (especially Power Armor, which essentially means you will automatically win the match way too easily if you find it), and gameplay did not have much variety beyond the base game, other than making the open-world map small. Despite the unnecessary Battle Royale mode, that mode was surprisingly functional and mostly playable for a short time during that conference.

The clunky UI has seen no improvements, and is now not only tedious but actually dangerous to navigate as the game does not pause when a player is looking at their inventory. A mod came out three days after the game's release that provided a far better UI sorted into categories.

The carrying limit and storage limits are extremely low, meaning the player has to simply discard a lot of their loot. However, materials can stack almost infinitely, meaning that it is quite common to encounter player stashes containing tens or even hundreds of thousands of units of material. On the other hand, when carrying power armor, only the 10kg frame is counted as weighing anything, even if it has a full set of armor mounted on it. This means a player can wear a suit of power armor while having another entire suit in their inventory. On the subject of power armors, with the exception of the Excavator Power Armor and the Ultracite Power Armor, it is everywhere in the wasteland, even in places where it makes absolutely no sense like in a farm outbuilding.

While previous games in the franchise contained handheld nuclear weapons, this one was the first game to contain a launchable ICBM that can target any point on the map. Unfortunately, some players have a really bad habit of launching nukes in certain locations that the player is in.

Since this game requires an internet connection to actually run the game, not only do you have to pay up to $60 for the base game at launch, you would also have to pay for PS Plus or Xbox Live to connect to the online servers and be able to actually use the game, as not doing so would make your game nothing more than a paperweight. If in any case this game ever gets shut down, not only would you would lose your money, but in the case of physical copies, they would become literal e-waste. Server disconnections can happen very often.

Now, since the game has improved, there are redeemers. For instance, their update DLCs are free to download as promised, without any horrible pricing.

The music, like previous Fallout games, is nice to listen to, thanks to being composed by the well-known composer himself, Inon Zur. There's also a good selection of licensed songs from the 1950's and earlier to listen to, like previous installments. Spank's covers of "Take Me Home, Country Roads" by John Denver and "Ring of Fire" by Johnny Cash are also nice to listen to.

They have some subtle nods to other Fallout games without being too bastardized from the lore like the rest of the game did. For example, the Pip-Boy 2000 Mark VI is a nod to earlier games that other regions are using rather than the East Coast variants using the 2.0 version.

Depending on an optimistic view, human NPCs have finally been added in the Wastelanders DLC which came out in April 14, 2020.

• Along the way, the dialogue system from before Fallout 4 has returned likely for fan service and, since the playable characters are voiceless (again, in a multiplayer game), making both gameplay and plot have some sense.
• The developers decided to delay their "biggest" DLC update to the first quarter of 2020 (and later again for an April 7th release date) to strongly focus on bug fixes, which is a strange and ironic way of delaying a DLC-size update that's bigger than the whole game.
• In addition to the Wastelanders DLC being released on April 14, 2020, the game is also available on Steam instead of just on Bethesda.net for PC players.
• When the DLC was released that day, most of the glitches and bugs were removed, the NPCs didn't suck too much, and new storyline for lore-centric Fallout fans.

If this game hadn't been rushed, Bethesda would still be a very good company, and I think everyone would have enjoyed this entry and reviewed it positively. But if you think this isn't your kind of game, then don't even bother wasting your time at all.