Keeping up with the 76-ians.

It's time to put this game down.

It's been a while since there has been a report-worthy story surrounding the world of Fallout 76. Ever since the launch of the incredibly contentious Fallout 1st subscription service I've done my best to ignore the goings-on with this community as much as possible. That is because, predictably, Bethesda's latest greedy implementation had shocked the community and managed to split them down the middle. (Between those with and without self respect, I suppose.) Were I an empathetic individual I may even express some sympathies to the community manager as Bethesda seems singularly obsessed with making their life worse. But seeing as how the 'community manager' seems to little more than organize a weekly blog, I'll save my sentiments for the poor sods foolish enough to buy into this terribly priced subscription.

From what I have observed regarding the community, things have fallen into anarchy once again on Bethesda's forums and on the dedicated Reddit threads. The real problem isn't just the fact that Fallout 1st exists at all, although a sizable number of the community are justifiably incensed about that, but rather that almost every feature that Fallout 1st offers is undercooked or broken. That scrap box with it's unlimited capacity has been known to delete player's possessions for reasons unknown to the team so far, the 'private servers' can be accessed rather easily without permission from the server owner, The forward camps have a tendency to mysteriously vanish without provocation and The un-lore-friendly  Desert Ranger outfit has served as a target on subscriber's heads for people who are sick and tired of these idiots justifying and rewarding Bethesda's bad behaviour.

It has been a fair few months since I have loaded up the game myself and I have to say that I have no intention of changing that anytime soon. Fallout 1st is just the latest in a shrew of premature moves from Bethesda to capitalize upon the loyal community that they built under their solid game. (I say 'premature' because they forgot to establish that community and solidify that game.) Things are a far cry from the way they were at the beginning of the year when the year one roadmap was introduced. (A roadmap for which the flagship piece of content was delayed until March next year) That was a time of hope and optimism wherein folk were starting to see the long running gamebugs get patched and were growing excited at the promise of impending content in the near future. It was a time wherein Fallout fans dared to dream, before the reality of modern-day Bethesda descend on us all.

During this time I picked up the game and started to get into the community. I would stroll through the forums, read player's stories, and occasionally even see the odd Bethesda spokesperson reply to a comment. (It's been a long time since that's happened) When you start to engage with a community to that degree you'll eventually start to learn the lingo of the land and see those familiar names in the blogpost. Eventually you'll start to understand when you read posts complaining about 'Bloodied builds' and the 'TSE Meta', and you'll begin to get familiar with the tools that all the community use in order to reach those higher tiers of play. It was in this way that I first learned about the Fo76 interactive map.

A while back a Redditor who goes by the moniker u/undefined7196 unveiled the fruits of a couple months worth of datamining; a website he called Map76. It was essentially an interactive tool that would display spawn points for ammo, plans, enemies and just about anything that one could require from a map like that. Just like the interactive maps for Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim, this guide was practically over brimming with icons and tags that would allow players to plan their journey's throughout a gameworld that is positively ungainly in it's size. Plus, this gave people the opportunity to hunt down special plans that they have been looking for, implementing an endgame that Bethesda forgot to implement themselves. (No, the pathetically 'balanced' world bosses don't count. Nor do the enemy spam 'Raids' that still don't function properly.)

The community graciously accepted this tool just as they had with the Fallout 76 build planner, and those datamined leaks that used to tease upcoming additions to the Atom Store. They were small tools built by the community that enriched the gameplay experience by offering information that Bethesda neglected to do so. Now, one could say that this could be breaking some sort of guidelines for play from Bethesda's perspective; but seeing as how these tools, datamined though they may be, had no feasible malicious capabilities, one could be forgiving for operating under the laws of 'no harm no foul'.

Visit Map76 as of the writing of this article, however, and you won't find a cool interactive map but a message of farewell to the Fallout 76 community. (Okay, maybe more a condemning rant aimed at Bethesda.) So what happened? Did Bethesda finally crackdown on the dataminers for daring to peak inside game files? Kinda, but in a way much more stupid than that. You see, undefined7196 apparently worked with a group of dataminers who took upon themselves the thankless task of uncovering Fallout 76 bugs and reporting them to the team. (You know, the thing that Bethesda were meant to be doing for the past year now.) During this selfless act of vigilantism they discovered an exploit on 'some obscure forum' and went to check it out on their accounts. They confirmed it existed, reported it to Bethesda and then promptly got banned for their work. (What's that they say about the price of doing good?)

This seems to have been the straw that broke the camels back for undefined, as he had just as much trouble abiding by Bethesda's follies as the rest of us have. He has seen the rampant cheating that has gripped the Fallout 76 Battle Royale mode on the PC, (A situation that Bethesda have done nothing about for months) ground his teeth everytime an update drops that introduces more bugs than fixes (Which has been the case every since the Raids dropped in Summer) and struggled over his inability to get a refund over his Fallout 1st subscription due to the fact that he spent some of the complementary atoms, despite the fact that none of Fallout 1st's promised systems work as intended. (And yet he bought it in the first place which makes him part of the problem.) Our ranter caps all this off by declaring that if Bethesda can't be asked to care about this game anymore than neither can he, and he took down Map76 for good measure.

One doesn't need to be a master of damage control to realize that when your game is bleeding out on the tarmac the absolute last thing that you should do is take shots at your own community, and yet this is where Bethesda is. Even those who stick with the game through thick and thin, (even when their complacency is ultimately helping to destroy the game faster. But I guess hindsight is 20/20, huh Fallout 1st subscribers?) can't abide by these actions and are calling it quits on this lackluster title. Future game deign classes at Uni are going to point to this whole saga as a case study for how not to handle a game, and Bethesda as an example of how to eviscerate decades worth of goodwill as expediently as possible. I wish, as always, that I had a positive note to end this on, but I don't. At this point, Bethesda's credibility might as well be dead and buried alongside this roadkill of a game.