Let me start with context. I was one of those people who was skeptical but optimistic when information about Fallout 76 first started to drop. That teaser sent me to the moon but leaks revealed by Jason Schreier over at Kotaku painted a fuller picture of exactly what it was Bethesda was already selling preorders for. A fully online Fallout experience? Could the legends be true? Is Fallout Seattle finally due? Sadly no. This was a completely different project that Bethesda had cooked up, using the remains of the average Fallout 4 as their skeleton. Where we, hopeful fans we were, expected some sort of amazing 'Fallout: New Vegas' style remix, Bethesda had something brand new in mind for Fallout. And it confused a lot of people.
Bethesda had always been 'the single player company'. They had helped define single player RPGs. Heck, the year before 76's announcement they had pushed the #saveplayerone campaign to directly counter Blake Jorgensen's assertions that single player games are no longer popular. Yet all this time they were working on a fully multiplayer title of their own? 'Traitors!' many cried, most facetiously but some with real passion. I was less worried about it, I wanted to hear what they had to say. Not that it ended up making things any clearer.
E3 2018 was a weird one for Bethesda. Fan reaction can be summed up by one shot that the in house cameras captured of the moment after Todd Howard announced the thing that everyone in that auditorium already knew; Fallout 76 would be online. Cue the shot of talented modders, Elianora and Fadingsignal (I believe, correct me if I'm wrong). The former cheered with some excitement whilst the later did not, seemingly more guarded. I was one of those in the camp that an online Fallout would be awesome. Sharing the wasteland with your friends, going on quests, causing mayhem. If everything worked it would be amazing. 'If everything worked'.
The moment Fallout 76 came out it was clear that the game had problems. Several problems. Core problems as well as bug problems. Fallout 76 hardly ran, stuttering and lagging and crashing at the slightest provocation. God have mercy on your operating system if you actually managed to launch a nuke! Combat hardly even worked, the game looked dated graphically and, most damningly of all, the world felt uncharacteristically empty. You see, somewhere along the way someone had an idea they thought would revolutionise the Fallout series, maybe even the online genre! This person thought that the Fallout 76 may be improved if all the human interaction in the game was limited to player on player interaction, so that every human was another player. This person thought this was a great idea and throughout development no one thought to overrule them. This person almost single handedly killed the game. The rest was done by word of mouth.
'The game barely works and when it works it sucks!' was the general consensus amongst critics and fans alike and the claims did hold some merit. Add that with the general negative PR that Bethesda was garnering with controversies such as the collectors edition 'duffle' bag that turned out to be plastic; or the limited edition Nuka Cola dark bottle mishap, and it isn't hard to see why this game plummeted into the burning ashes like a backwards Phoenix. Not even die hard fans wanted to shell out in support. Not for £60. (With microtransactions.) Even I didn't buy it. And that's not just out of being poor. I didn't want to be part of such a dumpster fire. No one did. And so Fallout 76 died. Unbought and unplayed.
First came the promises. Months after launch the fire fighters over in the QA department were still wrestling with the blazing inferno that was the servers, yet despite that the Fallout 76 team saw fit to release a video roadmap on their YouTube channel. Most promised features were too far in the future to get really excited over, but a couple of items really stood out to dummy number one over here. Raids? In fallout? Sign me up! Even now as I type this I'm slapping myself in the face for being such a sucker for the R-word. So, that alone is what got me interested enough to look up how the game was faring.
Next were the compromises, for obvious reasons (See: metascore) Fallout 76 could not justify it's original price tag. Games with this kind of reception find themselves in sales pretty quick and on second hand shelves even quicker. So I moseyed on down to one of the last second hand stores still in existence and picked up a copy for a fraction of the original asking price.
And finally was pig-brained optimism. After all, there's no way the game could be as bad as everyone said it was. Could there?
And it wasn't. At least not anymore. Fallout 76's team had made great strides towards making the game as stable as possible both in gameplay and in server reliability. The game still crashed. Oh boy, did it crash. But it would happen once every couple of days instead of twice an hour. Still far less then ideal but hardly momentum killing. Giving the advantage of a functioning product, I was able to judge Fallout 76 for the package on offer, and it wasn't all bad news. Yes, the graphics were dated but the game was far from ugly. Yes, the combat was less tight then Fallout 4 but seemed functional overall. The real problems reared their head in those pesky fundamental design flaws I mentioned earlier.
Lets go back to that whole 'Every character is another player' decision. The thing sets Fallout apart from all the other post apocalyptic titles that dot the gaming landscape is it's fun and quirky moments that juxtapose the horrifying reality of persisting in a world ravaged by nuclear flame with the absurdity of light-hearted satirist commentary. These pangs of dark humor lend Fallout it's off-kilter vibe that leaves the player unsure what they can expect to find from the wasteland. Maybe a Nightkin in Elton John glasses and a wig acting the under appreciated radio host for an army of brainless mutants; or a collection of holotapes that tell the sombre accounts of a hiker who losses everything yet finds peace through the subtle mentorship of a group of lost children. Fallout has a world that can you make you laugh and make you reflect; that world is given life by the people who live in it.
I understand what the intention was. By ensuring that every human is a genuine human, the interactions are made all the more special. Only no, they aren't. Rather the opposite. Players aren't interested in maintaining the facade of your delicately crafted world. Players are players, they want to play the game. Now that no NPCs inhabit the world, no human ones anyway, you have no firm anchor to that world and thus have a harder time accepting its authenticity.
Another casualty of the 'No NPCs' decision was the main story. People have criticized the story left and right for being terrible and poorly written but for my experience that is not the case at all. I tried harder than the average person to invest myself in the story and found a rather unique Fallout tale; one that played out like a zombie movie only with giant radiation spewing bats instead of brain eaters. The real problem was with the presentation of the story. No NPCs meant the quest designers had to guide the player on where to go through notes and robots, making the main campaign just a huge note quest. ('Note quest' being a mod community term for: Not interesting.)
The key reason this doesn't work is encapsulated by one particular interaction in the story. The player reaches the Mire in search of a weapon to combat the Scorchbeasts. The player then finds themselves enlisted in an operation to install an early warning system in the area to warm about impending Scorchbeasts attacks. So whats the problem? Well, you are made to undergo this rather hefty back and forth at the behest of a series of pre-recorded messages made by "A dead girl." This girl who keeps reminding you that she's dead every time you go back. In this way the story keeps constantly reinforcing how the actions you are making don't matter as the person you are helping has already perished years before you ever showed up. Additionally, the early warning system doesn't work for you (Despite some discourse about it syncing up with Pipboys) so you're essentially wasting your time installing an early warning system for a swamp full of dead people. Think the warning might be a tad moot at that point, don't you?
At the start, the story incentivizes the player by showing them the horrors of the Scorchbeasts and the husks that their breath creates. This momentum evaporates the moment you inject yourself with a vaccine and become immune to huskification. Nearer the endgame they switch gears and tell you that, unless quelled, the Scorchbeasts will breed and spread across the continent causing "An extinction level event." Holy crap, right? That's serious stuff right there! Only no, because this tape was recorded months ago so either it has already happened or these Scorchbeasts are really taking their darn time. Also let's be honest, the entire game world is devoid of life so what is the difference if everyone else on the continent dies too? That is the dissonance between story and game that severs any emotional connection that the player might build. Even if they're really trying to build it, like I was.
Yet still I liked the game. That was because around the game was a world that was absolutely worth exploring. If you ignore the missing NPC's, hard though it is, you find that the Appalachian Wasteland is one of the most interesting and diverse locations in Fallout yet. It has an incredible mix of corporate corruption, political intrigue and roaming Cryptids. Aspects that were touched on sparingly in other Fallouts actually take centre stage in this world and still retain much of their attractive lure. I enjoyed digging up the history of the Hornwrights and their job threatening tech push or the struggles of the surviving Charleston cabinet trying to maintain order and the chaos that came of that. I loved the mystery of the grounded space station in the north and the curiosities of the machine run city in the south. I came back to 76 time and time again for it's hidden stories, the stories that exist purely for building the world space in my head.
In many ways 76 took a lot of Fallout 4's aspects and made them better, excluding the gunplay and main narrative. As I discussed 76's world is more intriguing; The C.A.M.P allows for tons more freedom with a far Superior building menu, and the legendary weapon gameplay loop works much better in an online game then it did in a single player setting. If only they had done something more involved with the story, and fixed the bugs. Fallout 76 might have become something special. If only someone decided to reverse Fallout 76's biggest blunder.
Enough beating around the bush, you've probably heard the news. Fallout 76 announced this E3 that they plan to bring back NPC's this fall alongside a brand new main story, settlements, companions, romance, the whole shebang. Marking the capping-off of what has been a road map of mostly great content for the struggling game. People cheered for a decision they never expected would be reversed, heck I never expected it. They even tout the lack of NPC's on the back of the physical box. They are going against the back of the box! Is that even legal? Even the team seemed amazed to be going this direction, in the trailer they have the Overseer (Now confirmed to still be alive) say "I don't think any of us expected for people to actually come back." No kidding.
Most telling of all for this paradigm shift in direction is the way how the brief E3 trailer took time to tease the dialogue system. It's going to be the Fallout 3/Vegas dialogue tree again! No limiting wheel in order to accommodate the quickly stale gimmick of move and talk. Full dialogue boxes that will allegedly accompany actual choice and consequence. Maybe, when this 'Wastelanders' expansion hits the game will finally start living up to the promise that everyone had for it in that first trailer. Okay, I won't go that far but it is a huge leap in the right direction.
It still isn't ideal that in the modern age of gaming we are comending a game for announcing that it will reach the state it should have been at launch, one year late. It's a terrible reflection on the absoulte state of AAA development, that Fallout 76 made it to market the way it did for the price it did. But it's done. It happened. It's history and Bethesda will be dealing with these ramifications for years. Likely until the succesful release of Starfield. (Fingers crossed on that one.)
I am optimistic about where Fallout 76 is heading. I like the game and I'm starting to think that one day I may even love it. But that day is not today and I doubt it will come this fall either. Until the day when I can sing the games praises, I'll keep dropping in from time to time and building up my base or gearing up for another solo run of the nuke silo. Or trying those raids I was so excited for, and then completely missed due to E3. And whilst I do that I'll keep looking at that roadmap with anticaption and skepticism. Wondering if this country road really will take the Fallout francise back to the place it belongs.
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