Fallout 76
Rebuilding civilization is a lonely task
MULTIPLAYER FALLOUT sounds like a good idea. Teams of survivors emerging from their vaults and working together to rebuild a civilization in a retro-futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, where energy weapons and robots exist, but cars have fins, and computers look like the IBM model 5150’s grandaddy. There would be monsters or raiders to fight, radiation to avoid, and missions to complete for NPCs. It’s easy to see how it could work.
The reality is different. You do indeed emerge from a vault, years after a nuclear war, as is Fallout tradition, but everyone else is long gone. Perhaps you overslept, but whatever kept you from leaving Vault 76 at the same time as the others, it did you a disservice. You’re left alone in the empty wilderness, following the messages left for you by the vault’s overseer. And no, you don’t need to have played Fallouts5 to 75 to understand what’s going on.
Before we get on to the wilderness, however, we must address the launcher. Instead of releasing the game on Steam, Bethesda has created its own marketplace. It’s not bad—although it lacks community features and the ability to take screenshots with a hotkey—and if you want to get Bethesda games such as
Wolfenstein or Dishonored2, it’s the place to go. It’s also blurry on 4K monitors, and doesn’t like it if you’ve got a multi-screen setup and move it from one to the other. The “Buy Now” buttons on games don’t give a price, but open a browser window for an online store. It doesn’t remember your password, and logs you out after a few days. There’s a long way to go.
Back to the game, and the wasteland is living up to its name. The feeling of emptiness, despite running into some suitably mutated wildlife, is exacerbated when you reach the first town and find only robots. There are no human NPCs, just robots, computer terminals, and audio logs. There are other players—it’s an always-online multiplayer game—but they’re sparse, and often separated from you by several levels. You’ll be reading this much later, but we were playing in the first weeks after launch, and saw almost no one of a similar level as ourselves.
Being an RPG, level is everything. You level up through doing things, killing things (crystalline mutants called the Scorched are the main antagonists), and crafting things, and you receive perk cards you can apply to all your attributes that boost skills, such as how much you can carry, how long you can go without food and water, and how well the VATS targeting system works. VATS, a mainstay of previous Fallout games, that stops time and allows pinpoint attacks, as well as explosive gore-shots of bullet strikes, has been gutted. The time-stopping was never going to work in a multiplayer game, but the kill-cam shots have gone, too, leaving just a real-time limb-targeting system. It’s barely worth it.
If you can get in a group with other players of a similar level, there’s some good questing to be had, and the autumnal West Virginia wilderness is an attractive place to spend time, despite the LOD pop. Over this, however, towers the loneliness, and so much glitchy bugginess (patches have been incoming) that this is currently looking like an experiment that’s seen limited success.