Fallout 76

Bethesda changes its formula, but not for the better, in multiplayer RPG Fallout 76.

Valley Galleria is a rotting mall in Fallout 76, and one of the most eerie and unsettling places I’ve ever visited in a game. It’s dark and spooky, with cheery music still faintly echoing through the decaying halls. This place scares the crap out of me. I immediately drop into a crouch, terrified of the horrors I might find inside. I have a quest to complete, but right now I’m too nervous to crabwalk more than a few feet at a time. Cut to a few minutes later, and I’m jogging briskly through, my fear completely gone. Turns out the mall was filled with Scorched, Fallout 76’ s less-interesting version of raiders, the same enemy type I’ve been killing since I first stepped out of the vault. Fallout 76 is a lot like Valley Galleria. It’s a fantastic and evocative setting for a game, but the novelty of its sights disperse quickly and you’re back to following quest markers and absentmindedly killing the same monsters, again and again.

25 years after the nukes fell, Vault 76 opens, and you step out into post-apocalyptic West Virginia. You’re not alone: The other two dozen players on the server represent the only living humans in what’s left of Appalachia. The rest of the population are dead, or robots or monsters, meaning your quests come from notes, journals, a few talkative bots, and holotapes. There’s a lot of strong worldbuilding, explaining how the factions were established and began to war against each other. There are interesting personal tales to be discovered and pieced together, too, and mysteries to solve. I investigated a child abduction cold case, I joined a secretive costumed crimefighting guild and nosed around in the inboxes of politicians and businessmen.

Sometimes I miss talking to NPCs as in singleplayer Fallout games, and the fact that everyone is already dead detracts from the drama and urgency. But in most cases I’m perfectly happy reading the history of the region, its conflicts and the trials and tribulations of its former population.

Reclamation declaration

When first stepping out of Vault 76 you’re in a heavily wooded mountainous region where the buildings are gently rotting, but not completely devastated by nukes. The further out you travel, the harsher and deadlier the world gets, from the chemically blasted lands up north to the toxic air of the mining and industrial zones in the south. Cranberry Bog, overgrown with oppressive plant life and foggy swamplands, feels completely otherworldly, separated from the rest of West Virginia by the Savage Divide—a war-torn strip of land filled with robots and growling molemen.

Along with major points of interest like the robot-staffed Whitespring Resort, the remnants of a crashed space station, and the devastated capitol building, there are plenty of small but fun locations to uncover. A lot of effort has gone into making this human-free world an interesting one, and it is: Nearly every excursion I make leads to some fun or gruesome or interesting discovery. As quests and exploration move you back and forth across the map, though, repetition begins to set in. Infiltrate a building once, and it’s fun to wipe out all the monsters inside. Visit it again later, sometimes just minutes later, and it will be repopulated. Even the best locations lose their wonder as a result.

At least there are a few rarer monsters, like the mythical mothman, the wendigo, the flatwoods monster, and that awesome big-ass hermit crab who uses a truck for a shell. Their infrequent and often startling appearances, and the fact that they do more than just run at you, are a welcome relief to the unending parade of common enemies.

Combat is largely unchanged from Bethesda’s previous Fallout games. It’s still chaotic, and it’s still a hoot blasting mirelurks in the face with a .50 cal machine gun, laying a trail of proximity mines down and watching them eat away at a charging deathclaw’s health, or throwing a grenade that detonates near a wrecked car, which explodes into a mini-mushroom cloud and sets off

There are interesting personal tales to be discovered

four other cars. The main difference is VATS, which ditches the slow motion effect, but is still useful for precise, long-range shots.

I have a black powder rifle I’m completely in love with: It takes forever to reload, but the lead balls it fires take down most enemies with a single shot and the cracking boom when I fire it outdoors rolls over the landscape for what feels like an entire minute. Weapons need attention, though. They degrade and break, as does your armor. There are workbenches scattered over the map, and you can build your own benches at your movable camp. All this tinkering can get a little tiresome when you’re just a couple units short of screws, springs, or aluminium, forcing you to go searching for more. But as your crafting skills grow and you unlock more recipes, it becomes a joy to cobble together weapons from scratch and upgrade your gear.

Frenemies

I’ve played a lot of Fallout 76 solo, which is mostly doable with the exception of public events designed around groups and the occasional blunder of winding up toe-to-toe with a powerful monster. I’ve also teamed up with pals and strangers, and not only is it a fun way to explore and fight, it doesn’t stop you from going your own way. Being on a team doesn’t mean you need to be your partner’s constant wingman: You can spread out as far as you like, and quickly rejoin them via fast travel when you want. This casual approach to co-op makes Fallout 76 a great hangout experience, a way to play solo and in a group at the same time.

You can also fight other players, but standard PvP is watered down. Shooting another player barely hurts them at all unless they deliberately engage in combat, so both players essentially have to agree on the battle before it begins. It’s an okay solution to the griefing problem, but that’s a problem Bethesda created itself by not providing PvP and PvE-only servers. You can also instigate combat with someone by claiming another player’s public workshop, but in my 50 hours of play no one has ever tried that with me. When I spent an afternoon doing nothing but claiming owned workshops, only once did the owner show up to defend it. The only loot gained after killing someone is the junk they’ve collected, which isn’t hard to replace, and with such low stakes few players seem to even bother with PvP.

Bounty hunting, however, provides an ideal PvP mode. Players can become wanted when they repeatedly attack someone who doesn’t defend themselves, or when attacking another player’s base. When a player is wanted, their location is displayed on the map, but they can’t see anyone else’s location. The bounty grows the longer it’s unclaimed, adding financial stakes, and stalking and hunting real players instead of just predictable AI enemies adds a lot of tension. The only issue with bounties is that it’s relatively rare to find anyone willing to become an outlaw in the first place. Shame, because it’s one of my favorite parts of the game.

Terminal illness

Fallout 76’ s menus, since they’ve been designed for controllers and consoles, are awful to navigate on keyboard, and this being a Fallout game with inventory management, base building, crafting, and trading, I’ve had to retrain my fingers to learn the awkward control scheme. Sometimes you can scroll with the mouse wheel, sometimes you can’t. Some menus are closed with escape, some with tab. Custom keymapping is incomplete, and multipurpose keys aren’t well thought-out. R is reload but it’s also used to transfer inventories between the player and a container, and when enemies die they instantly become containers. Numerous times while trying to reload during a fight with ghoul mobs, I’ve pressed R only to open the inventory of the nearest dead ghoul rather than reload my shotgun.

At the time of writing, basic features, like the option to disable motion blur or depth of field settings, are missing from the menu and require the editing of ini files. There’s no text chat, a complete hindrance for deaf or hard of hearing players, and discouraging for those who just don’t want to speak over their microphones. Bethesda has begun to address some of the PC version’s issues, and says push-to-talk and ultrawidescreen support are coming soon, but it’s hard to understand why they weren’t included to begin with.

I’ve gotten inconsistent performance out of Fallout 76 when playing with a Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 at 1920x1080. Certain busy areas run beautifully, others turn Fallout 76 into a slide show, even after a recent patch to address framerate hitches. There are also plenty of bugs: Quest markers not showing on maps or pointing to the wrong spot, broken animations, AI misfires, poor enemy pathfinding, and more.

Despite the considerable issues with the PC version, I’ve still had long stretches of fun with Fallout 76. The world retains a lot of what I love about Bethesda’s previous RPGs, with finely crafted environments, enjoyable weapons and crafting, and surprising little scraps of story to uncover and investigate. Like Valley Galleria, though, it doesn’t take long to for the shine to fade.

I’ve had to retrain my fingers to learn the awkward control scheme