The Long Game
Progress reports on the games we just can’t can t quit, featuring the newly populated Fallout 76
Discussion around Fallout 76’ s free Wastelanders expansion, which adds living, non-player residents to its map for the first time, has understandably focused on the new potential for dialogue. The term ‘human NPCs’ carries with it an implicit benevolence, despite all we know about human beings. Edge’s first taste of faction life, however, is the Blood Eagles, a sort of highly evolved raider group that isn’t big on conversation.
The Eagles control their rank and file through chems, either recruiting addicts or forcing prisoners into dependency. But their nastiest trait, as far as we’re concerned, is their ability to throw grenades – not one shared by the majority of pre-Wastelanders enemies, and something that takes us by surprise.
There’s a curious parallel to be drawn here. Sea Of Thieves was developed with the goal that every sail on the horizon should belong to another player, with the attendant anticipation that brings. Yet it turned out players weren’t keen on blowing each other apart with cannons, and so skeleton ships were devised to give them guilt-free targets to shoot at. Fallout 76 has been through the same journey. Player-on-player contact was supposed to be made fraught by the possibility of mugging and murder. But rather than slaughter each other, settlers settled into a rhythm of resource-sharing and friendly emotes. And so the Blood Eagles became necessary to fill the gap left by human combatants.
That initial dearth of human beings has left an odd mark on Fallout’s lore. In the beginning, unwilling to part with semi-intelligent enemies, Bethesda invented the Scorched – infected husks with enough low cunning and motor function to hold a shotgun and flank a player position. It would have been possible to fold them under the purview of the Ghouls – somewhere between their docile, if irradiated, birth and feral, zombie-like end. But instead of drawing on existing fiction, Bethesda conceived of a plague that linked infected humans to a Scorched hivemind. Even now, with human factions present, the plot is prepossessed with the Scorched: to join the new Raiders, we have to convince them to inoculate their people against the disease. Despite their practical origins, the Scorched are at the heart of Wastelanders, and are likely to influence Fallout’s storytelling for years to come.
By and large, though, Wastelanders is a Fallout nostalgist’s dream, plonking down densely populated hubs comparable to Megaton or Diamond City. The trick has been confining them to corners of the map where veteran 76ers need not find them, if they’d prefer to stick to their own camps. As many of us can attest, you can get used to the isolation.