Fallout 76

 

Being a fan of the Fallout series, the idea of a multiplayer game always excited me. Roaming the wasteland with a buddy, going on missions and looting and playing the various roles the games are known for, why wouldn't it be fun? So I've been keen to see what Fallout 76 was all about for awhile now, I heard whispers that people hated the game, but I wasnt sure why. I didnt buy it for a few years, because it just wasnt clear at all what kind of game it was. Is it a campaign game, where it has a straightforward story, beginning, middle, end, and credits? Is it just an MMO without much of a story? What is it? Even for awhile there it was a subscription based game! I'm not buying some subscription MMO, so that alone put me off. But they actually stopped with the subscriptions not long after the game released, and is a one time payment (But with microtransactions and other payments, I'm sure). Still, I couldnt figure out if it had a co-op campaign or not, even after researching it. It sounds like for the first few years of the games existence, the story wasnt even finished. Like they kept putting in the main missions in a piecemeal fashion. I saw the game on sale in late 2024 on a big discount, so once again I googled what the state of the co-op story was. It sounds like by this point the actual full story is made, theres ending credits, so you can actually beat the game now. The whole way they handled this co-op presentation was just poorly done, it shouldnt have been this hard to figure out what kind of co-op gameplay it has, and being vague about if the campaign is even finished sucked. But finally me and a buddy picked it up to see what its all about.

There are no difficulty selections, and there is a fairly straight forward but not very memorable or exciting introduction which you wake up in a vault surrounded by robots and not much more and simply exit the vault. Unlike Fallout 3 or New Vegas theres no exciting premise or alluring setup here. Its just plain as can be. You create your characters appearance (I just hit the randomize button) and arrive outside Vault 76. Then theres some vague plot about the Overseer leaving and she leaves you a note to find her? But then none of the main quests have ANYTHING to do with the vaults Overseer, infact the Overseer quest is marked as a side quest. I genuinely have no idea what the fuck the protagonists motivation or objective was supposed to be. Like, in Fallout 3 its simple: Find your father. New Vegas? Find the guy that killed you. Fallout 76: ??? I dont know. The whole plot feels so aimless and pointless you don't have a reason to care about anything, its so ambiguous and poorly put together even after beating the thing I don't even know what the hell the protagonist was motivated by?

Anyway.. after a lackluster setup you can then play co-op. The whole reason I finally wanted to play this, is because its Fallout: Co-op edition. Great, I'll play the whole game with a friend! Well you easily enough invite eachother to a party, and can now roam around the open world doing the main quests together. Great, right? ... Not really. You'd think you just share quests and objectives, but no, you each have your own quest and you each have to complete each objective. If one friend falls behind, the other guy can progress through the whole game without him. So you have to make sure you're constantly on the same objective of each quest. To make things even more fucking confusing, at the games release there was a specific amount of Main quests, but then through the years and months after the games release, they started adding more and more "Main quests" that are basically a second campaign. But nowhere in your quest log does it separate the "campaigns" out, everything is just blended together under the same "Main quest" category. We were only interested in, at first playing the initial release "campaign" set of quests. These all center almost exclusively around non-human NPC quests and objectives. Because at the games release, there were actually no human NPC's. Something I heard people give the game shit for. And yeah, its pretty shocking to make a Fallout "Role playing game" ...where you don't even really play any role. Theres no one to talk to or choices to make. So what we had to do is look up a list of the Main quests on release, and do those. But for the first while, we were accidentally doing non-release campaign stuff and massively confusing ourselves, the whole thing is stringed together in such an awkward, intuitive, clusterfuck way. The pacing is atrocious and nothing makes sense.

As for the open world, the game takes place in West Virginia (I didn't even notice until more than halfway through the game) but what that means is that there are mountains everywhere. The map its self is annoying to navigate, its rarely just a straight path to the objective. You frequently have to instead take these long winding roundabout ways around big mountains, its honestly just a shit location for a video game. I dont want to spend 10 minutes walking around a damn mountain. But in typical Bethesda jank, if youre ontop of the mountain and need to get down, You can slide your way down the side of it without taking damage. But other than this, theres not much to remember or look at. The graphics and colors are like Autumn from what I can remember, a lot of yellows and oranges...but there are just no interesting locations. I dont even remember a single location, or anything. There arent Towns or villages, theres nothing like that. Theres just boring destroyed buildings and no memorable landmarks. Honestly how did they make a game map so dull and forgettable? Just like everything else in this game, maybe the only thing that isnt forgettable is how bad the whole thing is.

The games presentation is...very hit and miss. For instance, it does a nice job with the Fallout aesthetics and decorations all over the map screen and menu's, with the iconic Fallout boy and various decorations and prompts, but the games graphics are just ugly and dated, it times it looks worse than an Xbox 360 game and especially the lighting system can be very lackluster and janky. But there are some more serious crucial flaws with other aspects of the presentation. For instance, its a co-op game, and something you want to do in a co-op game is follow your friend easily, right? Well here the only way to find your friend is a tiny icon on your compass, a yellow square. The problem is, EVERYTHING on your compass is either yellow squares or yellow dots. Now you have dozens of shit on your compass, and your friend is just one of them. Most of the time its near impossible to decipher which fucking icon on the compass is your buddy, making the entire co-op experience even more annoying and incomprehensible. Even worse is the fact that when youre slightly too far away from your friend, the icon wont even show up on the compass! So you have to open the big map and aimlessly scroll around until you find him and try to work your way towards him. Yes, you can fast travel to eachother for free, but often times the fast travel doesn't even put you near eachother, making these issues even more frustrating. Every single aspect of multiplayer gameplay is just fucking butchered in this game, what the hell were they doing!? The whole point is to make a cooperative,  multiplayer fallout game. THEY FAILED. Guess what. Theres not even any fucking text chat! How do you make an "MMO" and not even put Text chat!? All you get are these stupid little gestures, theres like 10 of them. I think theres voice chat, sure, but I cant fathom no text chat.

Finally when we understood a list of quests to do, and we understood the stupid "co-op" mechanics where we dont even share quests or objectives, then we could make some progress. Except it gets even worse. There are sometimes areas that are "instances" where only the leader can complete the objectives. In these areas, the co-op partner just has to follow along blindly and not even be able to see the objective, and essentially wait his to turn to become the party leader and then do everything all over again.  How do they keep fucking up all the co-op mechanics? Thankfully these instanced areas are few and far between, atleast on the initial release date "campaign" quests. But I think on the post-release quests , they actually added human NPC's to try to damage control aganist the backlash, and these ones are filled with instances that are just a massive pain in the ass, having to wait your turn to talk to NPC's and do conversations over and over. And yeah, we played a few of these post-release quests with the humans and its still awful. The dialogue choices are bloated as fuck, probably to do damage control against people hating on Fallout 4's limited dialogue choices, but none of the characters or plot or premise are interesting at all, you simply don't give a shit, and talking to people doesn't accomplish anything or do anything interesting anyway. But we didn't do much of these post-release quests involving humans, we mostly only did them accidentally before we understood how the clusterfuck of a quest system works.

So anyway, after a few cumbersome hours, we understood the awful co-op quest system. We understood what quests we must do to complete the initial release "campaign" and 'finish the game'. The thing is, every single main quest and objective in the game is just garbage , not fun, menial bullshit that no one cares about. Almost every single objective in the game is go fetch some item, or go use a terminal. Terminal this, terminal that. The lack of human NPC's means they had to put computers and terminals all over the damn place as some sort of half assed attempt to put lore and structure behind your tasks. It sucks, isnt engaging, and is just downright boring. After the first 20 terminals or so I just stopped caring entirely and didn't even bother to read anything anymore and just spammed the buttons until the objective completed from then on for the rest of the game. Its such a joke. There were no interesting or memorable locations or objectives or quests in the game. Hey dude how about going to the DMV and renewing your license by talking to hiiilarious humorous robot butlers? And being attacked by lazy waves of enemies and running around looking for DMV cards in the trash? Hey how about being told to craft meaningless boring items at a work bench but you lack the resources so you have to walk around aimlessly looting random bits and bobs of garbage for HOURS until you can craft the stuff just to progress? How about going to some generic building and picking up some pieces of paper and then reading 6 terminals and then leaving after fighting a handful of robots or ghouls? You'll be doing that a lot!

It all blends together into the same bland soup of boredom and repetition. I can only remember a few locations in the actual game. At one point it had us going back and forth through this mental hospital area picking up random items, another point we went through some army camp Basic training course where we just jumped around some obstacle course or shot targets. Another point had us going up and down this elevator in this big tower to talk to some stupid, boring robot character that had voice acting like something straight out of Borderlands (Thats bad). And when the quests werent dull or boring, they were straight up awful and obnoxious. Like towards the end of the game we had this stupid quest that made is keep going back and forth from this gigantic friendly Enclave base(?) using all sorts of dozens of terminals and computers for information, like having to walk 5 minutes deep inside the base just to find one computer just to get the next objective, to chase down these helicoptors or find some key cards. So we'd go do the fetch quest, then we'd have to go back to this base and crawl through 5 minutes of the stupid maze to find the terminal to get the next one. Just tedious annoying garbage objectives. And sometimes the objective marker doesnt exist, or doesn't point you in the right area at all. Like towards the end of the game, the last quest would just point us to random porta potties with a "mysterious button"  but it doesn't do anything. Its actually just the exit of the quest that you do later, the game is just crafted so shitty and buggy they couldnt even properly line up the quest markers. Wasting your precious fucking time playing this piece of shit, frustrating the hell out of you for no reason. A few times we just had to look up what to do or where to go because of stupid stuff like this.

As for the "MMO" features, I don't even know. The game only lets you play in a "room" with 28 other players, which it randomly selects whenever you start the game. Throughout the entire game I've maybe seen like, a total of 6 other real players. Its just pointless, the whole multiplayer aspect of the game feels half assed and pointless. You can fast travel to other players camps on the map, where you can interact with their workbenches and stuff, but its stringed together in such a confusing way most of the time it was more annoying than interesting. There is a feature where other players trigger nukes in areas, and it gives you  a popup about the nuke going off..but its almost irrelevant. It doesnt really do anything. You die from radiation, I guess if youre too close. But dying has almost no penalty , at all, in this game. You just respawn nearby, maybe lose a few caps or drop some random pieces of junk. We never really cared.

But because of the "MMO" features, the co-op and especially single player balance is completely fucked. Like for instance theres hardly any vendors or NPC's you can purchase things from in the game. Throughout the entire playthrough I only found like, 3 vendors to buy stuff from. And they hardly sell anything useful,  Stimpaks for health are almost impossible to buy, if you manage to find a vendor that sells them it will only be a handful of them. Same with ammo. So the entire Roleplaying and item collecting and selling aspect is ruined, too. It makes caring about loot and items way less exciting than it otherwise would be, I guess to be balanced around the notion you'll be trading with random players? I don't know, its designed like shit. How do you make a Fallout game with virtually no NPC's or Traders? What the fuck.

As for the actual moment to moment gameplay systems and mechanics, yeah they're fucked too. VATS is a well known and loved feature from Fallout, where it typically pauses the action so you can carefully analyze your opponent and choose how to attack. Well here in Fallout 76 VATS is ruined and near useless. It no longer pauses when you use it (of course, how can they make it work online? another example of a gimped mechanic to work around the MMO junk) and even more baffling is that you cant even target different limbs or body parts - atleast at first. You have to get an upgrade for VATS just to select different areas. So what the hell is the point of it? I don't know, I really dont. I guess it gives you Crit, but its so hard to even tell how effective it is, most of the time I didn't even bother. I eventually got the perk to select body parts with VATS, but the lack of pausing, coupled with really bad controls, in the heat of the moment it proved more harmful than useful. What a massive shame.

Speaking of pausing, the Pipboy inventory also no longer pauses. The entire premise of the Pipboy system in other Fallout games made sense because it paused the action, giving you time to look through your items and categories and strategize what to do next and what items to use. VATS pausing, and Pipboy pausing, were deliberately done as a neat callback to the franchises origins as a turn based RPG game. Removing pausing from Pipboy, makes the entire mechanic now cumbersome and frustrating to use. Meaning most of the time in combat situations now, you don't get these interesting moments of thinking what to do next, what item to use, looking through your inventory. Instead now its more brainless where you just have to blast the enemy thoughtlessly until they die and hope that you can do it, like bashing your head against the wall. I know youre supposed to use these quick slots to alleviate this, but I dont want to have to keep updating my quick slots every 5 minutes when I find some new item. They just fucked up this entire mechanic, as well.

So what else is there to the combat? Not much. Most of the enemies you come across are Robots, Ghouls (Scorched), Bugs, Bandits, Raiders. We saw Deathclaws pretty early and mid into the game, but they werent as intimidating and scary as in other games. I think this is because Fallout 76 heavily relies on Level scaling, so enemies are always close to your level, meaning they cant be massively more overpowered than you and vice versa. A pretty terrible mechanic that sucks in basically every RPG.  rarely later on in the game some Dragon type things that are near impossible to kill, and a handful of other monster types but they're so few and far between and not a part of the main quests that I didn't care or notice much. Most of the time its just robots, robots, robots, Scorched, etc.

The entire perk system is, you guessed it, totally fucked up and ruined, too.
The level up and perks now revolve around these Cards, and you equip a certain amount of cards to each SPECIAL category, depending on what level that category is. This thing is unintuitive, cumbersome, clunky, and just not fun to do or figure out. Each time you level you get to pick a card, and then if you pick the same card multiple times they combine together, I guess making the perk more powerful? And then you have to make sure the card is equipped or it wont do anything...For like the first half of the game I barely even cared or paid attention and just equipped whatever card because the whole menu and UI was so hard to understand. This is because the first half of the game was extremely easy, like the balancing in this game is off the walls stupid. For probably even more than the first half of the game, I barely had to care about anything. Infact for some insanely stupid reason, the game started off by giving us like 60 stimpaks, thousands of bullets. and so many supplies that we didnt have to care about looting anything. Just why? Why do that. The whole point of making RPGs exciting is this Rags to riches feeling, starting off with nothing and working your way up, thats why looting is exciting. Why would they just start you off with so many supplies? It made looting and progressing through the game simply boring and uninteresting. The amount of shocking design choices made in this game are just off the charts. How did they fuck it up so bad? How do you be a game developer and ruin a game so hard?

Infact when we started the game it asked us the question: Do you want to start at level 0, or level 20 (Recommended)!
Like...what? Why is that an option? Of course we picked level 0, but still it gave us all this stuff. What the hell is going on in this game?

About 3/4 through the campaign suddenly the difficulty shifted, by this point we were long since just running past most enemies, or doing the bare minimum required to progress because we just were not enjoying the game. Leveling up felt almost pointless, except to get more Strength so we can stop being overburdened, because the game has a real issue of just dumping tons of random junk objects at you so you're almost always near max weight it became mandatory to max out Strength just to alleviate it. But then all of a sudden we had these quests with enemies that we can barely do damage to out of nowhere. On the one hand I'm glad it finally got challenging, but why did it take 20 hours? The balancing is just terrible.

Another absolutely insane design choice is how the guns and ammo work. I didn't realize this until literally the last mission. But whatever gun you have equipped, is what ammo the enemies will mostly drop. For the entire game I was using a Combat Shotgun, because I couldn't understand why every single enemy is dropping Shotgun shells? So I figured just keep using the shotgun since ammo is so abundant. But no, its because of this stupid design choice. Its not explained or made clear anywhere, it basically made me ruin my entire looting experience and gun selection choice. Even still, Combat shotgun just seemed to be the most effective weapon. The first half of the game the enemies were a joke, but then towards the end everything was a massive bullet sponge taking dozens of shots to kill it became just a chore.

They also managed to ruin basic things like repairing your equipment.
In other Fallout games, to repair you equipment you can simply find another copy of the same gun or armor, and press a button to combine them together to improve the condition of the main one. This feature is gone, now you have to collect random shit like Adhesive, Scrap metal, Nuts and bolts, This and that. So much so that its annoying to try to keep track of, with a terrible UI that I didnt even bother most of the time. So the entire aspect of trying to hold onto and preserve my prized possessions was near non-existent. Making all the items not as exciting or rewarding. I think I repaired a gun once the entire game. Didnt even try with armor because it felt like such a chore, also trying to figure out what piece of armor I had equipped or trying to compare them for which one is better, the interface was so bad I almost didnt even bother to do that, either. The itemization and caring about items in this game is terrible, which is a critical blow for a game that wants to be an RPG.

Funny enough, we played this game around Halloween, and one of the quests was this truly awful thing to "Collect 10 accommodations"  a very vague objective which basically meant to kill "Legendary" enemies. Well, this game has Seasonal enemies, meaning around Halloween it would randomly spawn these Halloween themed Legendary enemies, which might be the only reason we actually completed this quest, although it still took hours. We mostly just roamed around until we found these Seasonal enemies, because figuring out how to do the quest otherwise proved nearly fruitless and annoying. Every step of the way this game kept pissing us off or being more and more frustrating, so much so that some days we would sit down to play it, and within 1 hour be so upset, annoyed, and out of patience that we'd just quit for the day because its that bad.


Ok so the main story is incoherent garbage that no one cares about or you have no understanding of what the protagonists motivation even is, further making you not care. The co-op experience is butchered, with a bad HUD and quest system that sucks for cooperative play, the Roleplaying is butchered and almost non-existent outside of combat stats and perks which they also ruined as well. The MMO features are uninteresting and pointless, lacking even text chat. Theres no roleplaying elements in terms of NPC's. No vendors so you barely care about loot or wealth. The combat is either laughably easy for most of the game, or bullet sponge chore towards the end. The enemy variety is lackluster and dull. Pipboy and VATS are ruined. Item bloat cluttering up your inventory with constant junk. Tedious, annoying crafting, worthless itemization and balancing..this game is just terrible, hate to say it. I was hopeful people were just hating on this game and being too harsh, surely a Multiplayer Fallout game cant be that bad?! It sounds great on paper, yeah I'd love to play through a Fallout game in co-op! But no, virtually every aspect of the gameplay has been ruined or bastardized so much so that it doesn't even feel like a part of the Fallout franchise, this is some shit game wearing a Fallout skin. It has almost nothing which actually resembles core Fallout gameplay and mechanics. Everything that it was supposed to be has been ruined and tarnished. I cant remember the last time I was so frustrated, disappointed, annoyed, bored, mad, at a game.

The last quest was particularly atrocious. Its this thing where you have to go around doing fetch quest after fetch quest at the Enclave base I mentioned earlier. first finding this Nuke card from a helicopter, then going around and finding Code tags from random areas, then you have to go to some random Silo bunker and activate a nuke. Well by the time we figured it all out, and got there, (We had to use Google because the game is so shit and vague) we had no ammo left, no supplies, nothing. We have this giant base full of infinitely respawning robots where you do nothing but run around interacting with...you guessed it, terminal after terminal, eventually getting to a point where you plug holes in pipes but youre dying constantly of radiation, then afterwards have to go to some other area and open a big door but you have to craft some shit at a workbench blah blah...We got so impatient and sick of it, having no resources,
(reminder, enemies wont drop ammo for a gun youre not using, meaning if we have 0 ammo for our main gun, we cant find main gun ammo. Also, theres no vendors, so we cant buy main gun ammo. We actually had no idea how to get ammo now, we were fucking stumped)

So, we were  so over the game, I just asked some random level 1000 person on Steam to join our party and help us beat the last quest. Yay! The shit MMO feature came in handy for once! After running through the base letting this guy kill everything, we got to a final terminal where we had to put in some Nuke code, some randomly generated code each day that we're somehow supposed to piece together and figure out ourselves using in game items and terminals (Yeah, fuck all that. We tried, but it was too incoherent) we found some website on google that tells us the current day's code, put it in, set off a nuke, that we didnt even get a cutscene to witness, it just made a tiny little blast in a tube infront of us and ... thats it. Thats "the end" of Fallout 76s initial release campaign. Wow this game was bad.

Took us about 30 hours to "beat" it, as in get through the main campaign. What else are you supposed to be interested in here? Why would anyone play this game for hundreds of hours, or infact pay monthly!? What, just to build your own stupid little base and decorate it to show to random people you cant even text chat with? To do stupid, pointless daily quests and events? To grind for new items, when the itemization is uninteresting boring stuff? I don't know, its hard to see any value in anything this game has to offer. Yeah, it has small moments of fun blasting random enemies and raiders with your guns, but thats all you do in the game and it wears out quick. The gore system isn't even as good as other Fallout games, I barely noticed any gore or brutal gibs or anything, remember the Slow-mo VATS cam from Fallout 3? Theres nothing like that here. The game is almost devoid of excitement. At the very least you can play sort of co-op with a friend throughout this trainreck, and laugh at how fucked up it is together, if that wasnt an option I wouldnt have even gone through the whole thing, no way. A failed single player experience, failed MMO experience, failed co-op experience, failed RPG, failed FPS, failed story game...somehow, this game really is as bad, or infact worse, than its reputation.

3/10