But when you do come across another player, there's little reason to interact. Encounters with other players are rare, so huge is the map and so few are the players who inhabit a server at any one time. Fallout 76, of course, argues the soul and consequence this time around comes from other players, but as a multiplayer, sort of MMO, sort of sandbox experience it's a failure, too.
Without NPCs, Fallout 76 lacks a soul and it lacks consequence. It's Fallout at its worst: basic, monotonous and lacking nuance.
Go here, get the thing, bring it back, interact with a robot, job done. Most missions are little more than fetch quests. Most of the quests Fallout 76 has you do are so boring they border on the hilarious. You're always one step behind the overseer, a person who constantly teases you with tales of all the wonderful adventures you're not having. Following the overseer's footsteps feels like turning up late to a concert, the venue trashed, echoes of fun you weren't a part of whispering from the walls. There are holotapes and scrawled notes and terminal entry logs to find, and while some of these are interesting and well put together, Fallout 76's world-building suffers without NPCs. Lots and lots and lots of robots.Īs a result, Fallout 76 is a ghost town, which is apt since the main quest feels like you're chasing ghosts. This main quest leads you towards the kind of places we're familiar with from the Fallout games: burnt out towns, creepy buildings and cobbled-together settlements. After you emerge from Vault 76 on Reclamation Day, wide-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to rebuild Appalachia, Bethesda's post-apocalyptic recreation of West Virginia, you're presented with a main quest to follow the trail of the overseer who, like everyone else in the game world, has already buggered off. Is this a game best played on your own? It certainly seems so at first. It feels as if it's wrestling with what it wants to be even as you're playing it. I was once attacked by a radscorpion while taking a nap.įallout 76 is a video game at odds with itself. And I'm not talking about the radroaches that kill you, either.
What it does instead is facilitate boredom, frustration and game-breaking bugs. Unfortunately, Fallout 76 does not facilitate any of those fantasies. What if I ran a town, hosting elections and keeping the peace? What if I opened a shop, selling exotic items to other players in a desperate bid to raise enough caps to survive the harsh wasteland? What if I worked behind a bar, serving drinks to other players, passing on gossip and words of wisdom? What if I was the head honcho of a group of raiders, ordering other players to attack camps and loot the corpses of our enemies? What if I founded my own faction, something like Caesar's Legion from Fallout New Vegas, perhaps? What if I wanted to infiltrate a player-run faction I didn't get on with, befriending their leader before stabbing them in the back? The collision of Fallout and multiplayer sparks all sorts of exciting ideas in my mind, most of which have to do with post-apocalyptic role-playing. The high-level conceit here is the question, what if Fallout was multiplayer? And I think this is a grand thing to wonder about. But while other players are doing the best they can with what they've got, this is a game world that spectacularly fails them - on pretty much every level. Bethesda's attempt at Fallout multiplayer is, like so many of the series' vaults, a failed experiment.įallout 76 strips away most of the things I love about Bethesda's Fallout games and replaces them with human-controlled avatars.
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