Apocalypse #11: Fallout 76 revisited
It’s been almost five years since its original release — how does Bethesda’s most controversial game (for now) stand up?
Initial release: 2018
Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
Platforms: PC/PlayStation 4/XBox One
Is there a game that gets more flak than Fallout 76? Almost from the moment it was announced, Fallout 76 has been at the center of controversy, with the gaming community airing grievances ranging from Bethesda’s shady business practices, ongoing minor technical issues with the game, to just the fact that Bethesda made it and therefore it’s a Slap In The Face To Everyone Who Likes Good Games. Even now, five years on, I still get people telling me, “I heard that game sucked” when I tell them what I’m playing. And sure, it’s not on them to know better, I don’t fault them for it — but it is frustrating how much of an uphill battle it is to convince people who’ve never even played a Fallout game in their lives that Fallout 76 is in fact a good game.
Listen: I’ve played — and enjoyed! — bad games before. Aliens: Colonial Marines? The biggest problem with the game is pathetically easily fixed. I thought Duke Nukem Forever could have had a lot of potential if only George Broussard hadn’t run it into the ground — and I’ve since been vindicated on that. Daikatana? Well, that one’s just a monument to youthful hubris. Point is, if you earnestly think that Fallout 76 is a bad game, let alone The Worst Game Ever, then I have to think you just haven’t played very many games.
In late 2019 I sat down to play Fallout 76 and fell into it for a good two months. My review of the game at that time was written in that magical period between Wild Appalachia (which added some fresh new content to the game while still keeping true to the core vision) and Wastelanders (a major overhaul of the status quo, adding NPCs to a previously unpopulated Appalachia.) While you may want to give that a read to get a snapshot of what the game was like at the time, I’ll just sum it up: it’s pretty much Fallout 4’s engine, but bigger, bleaker, more beautiful, and with some of the best writing Bethesda’s done in years, all bolted together with a predatory cash shop and some MMO mechanics in a game that wasn’t really built for it. While I have occasionally checked in since to play through the new content, I found myself increasingly frustrated with the direction the game was going in. Some poor decisions on my part also meant that my character was severely underpowered and leveling up to right the ship would take longer than I had patience for, so I kind of dropped the game for a while.
I recently sat down for another go this summer, on a new character, to experience the game as a new player would have in 2023. Here’s what I found.
The first thing is that they’ve bodged together a limp justification for why the player character would be leaving Vault 76 in 2104 (the game’s current year, two years removed from the initial opening of the vault.) In short, you’ve decided to stay in the vault, afraid of the outside world, but now the food is all gone and the robots, powerless to shuffle you out, are now reduced to begging you to leave. (This is ignoring the fact that the vault is programmed to vent all the oxygen out as a means of forcing the Residents — that’s you and everyone else playing — to leave so the robots can seal the place up forever.)
Unfortunately, much of the rest of the game doesn’t seem to take this into account. Similar to The Elder Scrolls Online not really signposting what’s new content and what’s old, to the point that someone had to write up a guide for doing things in chronological order, Fallout 76 throws multiple main quest threads at you from the jump, but the actual dialogue frequently assumes that you’ve been out of the vault since Reclamation Day in October 2102. And then sometimes it doesn’t: with not one, but three major changes to the status quo — the initial arrival of the Raiders and Settlers, the return of the Brotherhood of Steel, and finally the Responders returning to take over the Whitespring Hotel and turn it into a de facto refugee center — the game world has changed so much, but dialogue with these characters frequently seems to have been written for new players, with your past achievements disregarded, downplayed, or outright disrespected by people who absolutely have not been in the area until fairly recently but think they have more of a claim to Appalachia than you. The Raiders (the ones situated at the Crater, who collectively have the personality of high school bullies taking your lunch money but differentiate themselves from the far more violent Blood Eagles gang) are an excellent example of this. Their leader Meg, previously heard on holotapes, outright says her gang, which left Appalachia years ago fleeing the Scorched plague that devastated the region, was there before you ever left the vault and that she sees you as an upstart. The opposing faction, Foundation, a group of settlers and colonists with a construction theme, are even worse: most of these people aren’t even from Appalachia, but rather Pennsylvania or the DC area, but will tell you to your face, “We’re here, we’re boring, get used to it.”
And like, okay, I get it. These people are jerks, right? And the game does let you voice your displeasure with having “your” Appalachia resettled by outsiders (which as far as I’m concerned includes Meg’s crew.) But the game just doesn’t really dig deep into it. While there are moments where Bethesda shows off some decent writing chops with these new characters, there’s equally moments where I find myself frustrated in how binary the choices are, especially when some of these choices aren’t mutually exclusive. An example would be the rift between Paladin Rahmani and Knight Shin of the Brotherhood of Steel. While their relationship is already fraught on ideological grounds, a tragic incident on their expeditionary force’s journey to Appalachia has driven a wedge between them that only gets worse as the story arc progresses, driven in part by Shin, who is consumed by guilt and feels the only way forward is to be punished and take the entire expeditionary force with him. The storyline’s final choice boils down to opposing ideas on what to do with a trio of scientists involved in an (unethically performed) attempt to improve the Forced Evolutionary Virus, the series’ primary bogeyman blamed for much of the mutated horrors that dot the wasteland. Rahmani, seeing the value of scientific knowledge in a shattered world, wishes to press them into service as scientists under guard, working for the Scribes, the Brotherhood’s chief technicians and librarians. Shin, having become even more of an absolutist than he was when you first meet him, sees this whole idea as anathema to the Brotherhood he was raised in, that Rahmani would even consider it constitutes a dereliction of duty, and he would rather see the scientists all shot. Your only choices are to side with one or the other, and the dialogue is written in such a way that you fully agree with their positions. There is no middle road, there is no option to say “you’re both right” (or wrong!); there is no way to say, “well, one of these scientists expresses zero remorse for what she’s done, I say we plug her and keep the other two.” Either way, one of the two leaders must leave or die. The situation is a difficult, nuanced one, and Bethesda has tried to present it as such, but when it comes down to making a choice, you’re really not left with many options.
All this is generally down to a persistent problem with Bethesda, and most of the complaints people have had about their writing since The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion are certainly valid. Bethesda are great at environmental narratives and the slow dripfeed of hand-written notes and computer emails to tell a story. Fallout 76 is full of some of the best world-building Bethesda has ever done, up there with the Randall Clark logs from Fallout: New Vegas. The overarching themes of automation, worker’s rights, violent repressions of unions, environmental destruction, corporate malfeasance, and a blatant disregard for peoples’ safety and livelihoods hits different in the age of “AI” and neural networks. But Bethesda’s NPCs, however entertaining they might be on a surface level, are often shallow, with little in the way of deeper dialogue options. For all the intensity of the rift between Shin and Rahmani, their characterization struggles to reach much depth.
But all this is to be expected. People have differing ideas on what Fallout is, or must be; to say that Fallout 76 is or isn’t an RPG is to kind of miss the point on what the game was originally trying to do. At its heart it was a softcore survival sim; the vast, empty Appalachia presents a huge, truly open world that tells its story through breadcrumbs but otherwise is content to leave you to it.
Sure, the random “events” that pop up, timed quests that give big rewards that only get better the more difficult the event, are a somewhat inorganic way of getting players to work together, but you don’t have to do them, you don’t have to interact with other players, you don’t even need to bother with the cash shop if you’re not invested in building cool C.A.M.P.s. And yes, the overall sense that you’re supposed to work with other people for the more difficult encounters remains — the game itself recommends tackling the original main quest’s de facto final boss with no less than eight people. Making matters worse, Bethesda doesn’t really seem to know what to do with players who finish the story content; updates bring new events, but little in the way of “raid” content, so you’re often logging in to do brief daily quests, do the “Daily Ops” and run a few certain events and then you’re done for the day, as the events don’t take long to complete. The grind for getting decent legendary gear, or even rare C.A.M.P. plans, is frustrating more often than it’s rewarding.
At its core, Fallout 76 is — or was — a compelling experience. But in the years since Wastelanders, one thing has become clear: the addition of NPCs complete with dialog trees to a game whose whole shtick was a depopulated wasteland, with nobody surviving not one but two apocalypses, really takes away from the purity of that vision, and as the game ages and more content is added, the old main quest not only becomes increasingly irrelevant, but the game gets more and more crowded in a way that the game by its nature cannot accommodate convincingly. None of your choices truly matter, because they can only ever be made inside instanced interiors, and they only ever affect those interiors. Choosing between Raiders or Settlers for the raid on Vault 79 is irrelevant, as you can still be friends with both. Choosing between Shin or Rahmani is irrelevant, as their politics ends at the door to Fort Atlas. So for every advancement to make the game’s core loop more fun — the overhaul in how leveling and perk cards and builds are handled is a big step forward for a game that wants you to explore as many roles as possible — it nevertheless loses a little more of what made it so charming to begin with. It’s lost sight of its original vision and doesn’t seem to know what kind of game it wants to be.
I still love this game a lot. But it hurts me to know that I will likely never again get to play the version of the game that made me love it to begin with.
