Fallout 76 was a very bold proposition upon the world when it was first announced. Here was a title that sought to capture the role playing magic of the Fallout world without resorting to the ESO model and merely simulating it's gameplay. Indeed, Fallout 76 intended to use the exact same engine as Fallout 4 to ensure that the gameplay felt as one-to-one as feasibly possible, something that many thought was impossible seeing how unstable that game felt. Modders had been trying for years to install some form of online multiplayer for Bethesda titles, most notably in Skyrim's modding scene, although most efforts had ultimately achieved very little tangible potential. For that concept to then be ballooned into an entire MMO felt unbelievable, but then, Bethesda had much more resources and personnel at their beck-and-call so perhaps it wasn't so outlandish. So we thought. How little we could suspect the truth of the matter.
Since it's October debut Fallout 76 has been the poster child for bad game launches, bragging issues on every front from lacking content, baffling design choices, weak stability, various bugs and glitches, and an overpriced storefront. Truly there has never been a worse launch for an Online AAA product. Everyone who doubted this game and Bethesda in general had their trepidation validated once this title finally launched and proved to be a travesty. Those who disliked the direction that Fallout 4 was taking the franchise were proven right and pre-order victims were reminded once again about the dangers of blind faith. And, as it just so happens, this would only be the first mistep of a year of blunders for Bethesda Game Studios, working to systematically erase the decade's worth of goodwill they had built up, providing a poignant showcase of how the mighty can easily fall.
There were those that dared to hope for Fallout 76, In fact I was one of them. Bethesda titles almost always launched with some bugs, we rationalized; 76 was even more broken than the average Bethesda launch, true, but once those holes were all patched surely it would be smooth sailing thereon in. Once the 76 roadmap had been published and the first new content started dropping for the title, that was the start of a whole new age for the game. People were starting to come to the game and realize it's unique merits, they started to realize that this was the kind of title that one could enjoy in some limited capacity. But the real exciting part was the potential for this title to evolve with the times, we'd already been promised a whole new 'Raid' system and even NPCs come Winter. The future looked bright.
Somehow despite all that potential, things became progressively worse as time went on. Bethesda gradually began to break the content already in the game with ill-thought-out remissions, their new raids turned out to be clueless and boring, their monetisation practises became more desperate and predatory and, most recently, the game has buckled under it's own weight and descended into buggy chaos. I can but imagine how frustrating it most be for everyone to pour their life-force into resurrecting this title only for it to end off worse than before, but in all honesty Bethesda have no one else to blame but themselves in that regard. Almost every misstep that Fallout 76 had taken in the past year can be directly traced back to a conscious decision on Bethesda's part and thus they'll certainly reap what they now sow.
It should surprise no one to hear that in the past few weeks Bethesda have managed to reach a new low when it comes to providing a stable platform for Fallout 76 to play on. (or rather, failing to.) Two key issues have appeared, one being their incompetence at releasing another update which fundamentally breaks the game and the other being their lethargy with tackling the growing problem with cheaters that the title has suffered from. (Although that can be likely tied to 'incompetence' also.) These are the same issues that has been taxing the Fallout community for months now, and another prime reason why it's laughable how Bethesda expects its community to by $10 a month to play this title through their 'Fallout 1st' system. Honestly, one could almost say it speaks to an underling contempt for their audience.
Pop on their Reddit for the past few weeks and you'll see one key issue being bought up time and time again by the community, and that is of the artificially created 'legendaries' that have flooded the game's ecosystem. These are weapons which are given 'prefixes' to determine a special effect that they all exhibit, similar to how 'item rolls' work in looter games. As these 'prefixes' are ideally randomly assigned, the most useful and synergistic combinations become valuable and highly sought-after amidst the community. Due to a recently discovered exploit, however, cheaters have been able to 'game' this system in order to reliably reproduce weapons with a desired effect which they then sell through the game's inexplicable, and unofficial, gun-running market. This has broken all the balance of the title, established the community as decisively pay-to-win and given rise to a whole slew of 'dead prefixes' (Bonuses that have no effect to the weapon they are assigned to, such as a baseball bat that 'reloads after every kill'.)
Another huge issue that has popped up recently is one that has been incidentally recounted, but I''ve seen it with enough frequency to assume it's validity. That being a new bug introduced by Bethesda whereupon somehow, for some reason, armour durability decreases everytime the player reloads their weapon, until it breaks. Now this effect is primarily cosmetic and can be fixed by simply removing your amour and putting it back on again, but such actions are very difficult to conduct in the middle of a gun fight. This sort of issue is one that speaks to the absolute lack of quality control that afflicts the Fallout community, strengthening the pleas for Bethesda to institute a Public Test Server. (I've no clue why they've yet to oblige.)
This final issue is, from what I've read, exclusive to the PC editions of Fallout 76, but still holds the potential to sunder the balance for everyone. Basically, people have found a way to access certain spawn mechanics from the console of the game that allows them to summon in assets from Fallout 4. The worst example of this being those can summon human NPCs into the game (something that Bethesda famously, stupidly, excluded from Fallout 76) and those that spawn items so large that they get in way of everything; Like the Prydwen. (Which, though it may be besides the point, shouldn't canonically appear in Fallout 76 given that it was retrofitted for use 200 years later and is currently residing in a scrap heap north of DC.)
All in all, this has amounted in a dour ending for Fallout 76's 2019. They started the year strong with promises and dreams and ended it all with broken hearts and general hatred. At this point the prevailing question for Bethesda's development team is, how long can they keep this up until the other shoe drops; that is to say, until someone finally pulls the plug on this dying beast. We've seen no growth out of this title and some could argue that things have gotten worse, afterall there was no 'Fallout Ist' system when the title first launched. Titles that have found themselves in similar shoes, like 'Final Fantasy XIV' and 'Anthem', have had to take drastic steps in order to win their audience back, but that has required them to admit that was a problem first, before steps could be taken to fix it. Bethesda haven't even got that far, and it's making fans lose hope that this team will ever get their proverbial act together. I don't know what it will take to make Bethesda wake up and smell the fire they've been fueling for the last year, but I pray it happens soon because I'm not sure whether this is a rut that the team has the potential to come back from. God speed, guys.
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