I'm running through the Appalachian woods, dodging around tree trunks hopelessly trying to avoid some new gross bloated monster spitting flaming bile at my dust cloud. (Sure, If I turned around I could probably stomp it, I am a veteran wastelander, but I'm playing along for the moment.) Finally I manage to stumble up an embankment and over the horizon I can see it, the populated settlement of Foundation, gleaming in the distance. Just a short sprint and I'll be able to be rid of strange mutant on my tail and get enjoy some hard-won R&R. But along the way the ground gives, I suddenly slip and barrel into a swamp just below my eyeline. Suddenly I'm greeted by a threat I'm much more familiar with; A diseased Mireluck Queen, and her brood, looking very perturbed that I just jumped into their home and right on top of their eggs. (Needless to say I roadrunner-ed out there)
Even with this new 'Wastelanders' overhaul for the Fallout 76 base game, the best moments of this game still lies in it's moment-to-moment surprises, but I'm happy for an excuse to talk about something positive regarding this game so I'll treat that as a plus. (Oh, and no Resident Evil this week. It's due to a heavy blog I have incoming so don't get on me too hard.) For the unaware; last week Bethesda dropped their official renaming of Fallout 76 alongside a change to the very fabric of the game itself: A litany of NPCs, human enemies, and questlines in order to make the great West Virginian wasteland feel just that little bit less empty. (Maybe you could even say that the game is almost at the quality for a 1.0 release now, but I'm not sure I'd go that far.)
This is Bethesda's big rallying call to their community to get back into the game, and they even took the time to visit the Reddit and state an official thank-you to the board for their support. (A little 'Fair weather fan' of you, Bethesda, but I appreciate the gesture.) Now is the time that Bethesda want to extend that olive branch to the public and show them that Fallout 76 is finally a game to be proud of, more than that, it's a game worth spending money on. (Although £100 a year for Fallout 1st will probably never be worth it, no matter how much overhauling they do.) So With so much riding on it, does Wastelanders live upto the promise? Is it the birth of a brand new age for Fallout 76, one where people can admit to being players of this title without fear of public ridicule? Can Bethesda ride this high into a new age of prosperity for the much-beleaguered Bethesda fanbase? Well it's certainly a start, but I still think there's a long way to go. (And I'm honestly not even sure if Bethesda can feasibly take it that far)
Coming back to Fallout 76 after so long was certainly a trip, doubly so since my last time with the game was spent almost exclusively in the Nuclear Winter 'Battle Royale mode' and not in the base game, so I had to get back into the swing of things. I was initially greeted by a hoard of angry (and I can only assume cannibalistic) mothman raiders looking to tear me limb-from-limb, so I can safety say that my interactions with the new folk could only go up from there. Then my biggest worry was getting back to my quaint mountain hideaway whilst praying that the new settlements hadn't unceremoniously ousted me from the home I'd held for about a year. (Luckily they hadn't, which is good. I'd hate having to introduce myself to the new neighbours by gutting them one by one.)
Next I had to meet the woman of the hour, the one person that I've actually been eager to meet ever since the game first launched; The Overseer. You see, this is the lady who set up that initial fetch-quest which drove the entire original plot line. This is the ass who sent me on a deadly journey around the Appalachia battling scorched and finding a way to quell their spread before something happened which could only be described as an extinction level event. All without so much as sticking her head around the corner once to see how I was doing. No, instead she just left a cookie crumb trail of holotapes with instructions whilst she went sightseeing through her childhood home. Online Speculation even went so far as to presume she had died, for if you follow her personal tapes in chronological order then the last one would be made just after her having been shot and wondering if she'll live to make another. But the old girl is tough, apparently, because now she's back and actually ready to meet me in person. (How very gracious of her highness.)
Right away I was struck by the dialogue system. Not because it was unfamiliar to me as a 76 player (again, it's been almost half a year) but because it was even vastly different to Fallout 4's dialogue system. (In a very good way.) Rather than being locked into 4 choices per dialogue, each mapped to a face button, players can actually have in-depth conversations where classic Fallout traits appear such as inquisitive questions and even speech checks. That's right! Finally it feels like the stats I've given my player are worth more than just simply enabling the best perk cards, they are actually important to my character in defining his personality, and somehow that made my character incredibility smart yet antisocial. (Unfortunately that only half reflects me.)
The rest of my time has been split between enjoying the new systems whilst refamiliarising myself with the things I use to love. Like hearing the voice of the maniacal raider-robot Rose over the intercom (Who was my favourite character from the base game) and building up my lovely little base in the woods where no one dares to travel. Although there are still some problems with the game which get in the way of my potential for fun and make me sort of want to put Kingdom Hearts back on. Some key characters get stick in T-poses, bouts of lag strike every once and a while and the lighting seems to have gotten worse to the point where almost every texture looks desaturated during the day. (Maybe they were always like that and I just don't remember.) Worst of all, however, is the AI which is unforgivably bad now that it's being shown on human enemies. Whereas before you could maybe rationalise things as "Well these scorched have had their brains rotted" or "These Mole people probably wouldn't understand human tactics anyway"; seeing human Raiders stand in the open and wait to be gunned down is pretty silly and makes me wonder if there'll ever be a world where Bethesda can make challenging content for this game that isn't just "Turn up the health slider and call it a day."
So far the story seems to place us in the position of the fun ruiner, who's job it is to rock up to these new factions rolling into Appalachia, kick down their doors and tell them to get a damn inoculation. (The filthy savages.) You see, none of them were here for the hell of the Scorched beasts and their reign over the first year of Fallout 76, so they don't know how easily they could be infected and turned into burn zombies, so we've got to break the bad news. (Which is mixed with good news if you completed the original campaign, because you've already made the vaccine through hours of sweat, blood and audio logs. Oh, the audio logs!) However, there are whispers of some greater mcguffin as folk trade rumours about a great unopened vault that is sure to be full of treasures. (Not sure how none of us saw it. Unless it's that vault in the north west which never opened and didn't have a texture on it's number, but I just thought we didn't talk about that door.) So yeah, this isn't exactly the citizen kane of story set-ups and it showcases the 76 team's weakness of falling back to "Let's do another Vault thing! That's a Fallout staple, right?" But hey, we've been playing this damn game for months with only the vague snippets of a storyline, so beggars can't exactly be choosers right now.
Aside from that there is a new dimension added to the CAMP system for now we have the Ally system to deal with. As we were promised, Allies are 76's versions of typical Bethesda Companions, only with much less versatility. Yeah, you won't be hiring a whole party of badasses to defend you from the horrors of the wasteland, but you will be getting buddies to help make your camp feel a little less abandoned every now and then. You can build certain ally items to draw these people to your camp and once they're there you can earn little quests off them to help their narrative along. Even when it's something stupid like helping Commander Daguerre scan for any survivors from her space program despite, you know, there obviously being none. (Can't we just break the news to her lightly?) However, this is this odd little stipulation that you can only have one ally at your camp at a time, meaning you can't make a little town of folk yet. (Maybe in the future.)
With the new folk coming to the world, naturally this means that some new settlements now exist and they are always fun places to explore in these games. Although these locations more mirror the 'survivor' style of Bethesda's Fallout rather than the 'societal' style of Obsidian's Fallout. (Which severely limits the storytelling potential in my eyes) So far I've seen the builder fort of Foundation, which places it's routes in the former workshop in the southern mountains which was one of my favourite locations in the old game, so it makes sense that Bethesda wanted to do something with it. As Foundation, the place seems pretty dry with a smattering of folk who seem very 'salt of the earth' and 'milk bread', but I've been missing that sort of interaction so it feels special to me. (Also, I've surprised to see that the 'Top of the World' mezzanine still hasn't got a makeover with NPCs despite being literally the perfect place for that. Maybe that's due for a later update, I dunno.)
Finally I had another go at 'Nuclear Winter' so I can confirm that's still as tight as it always is. Some changes have occurred since I last played, and I have no idea what any of them actually do, but nothing has happened to ruin the core experience so I'm happy. A new map has been added to the lineup and weaponry now spawns in with a coloured tint to their item name which I think is supposed to mimic other Battle Royales like Fortnite. (So that folk know which item is superior at a glance.) It's a small change but it make make things just that little bit more accessible to the inevitable influx of players that the mode will be seeing in the coming days.
In conclusion, I haven't a complete reversal of my feelings towards Fallout 76, nor the insulting way in which Bethesda treated and responded to the community in the months since, but I am enjoying the game once again and that isn't something I ever thought I'd do. If there's one thing I will say about everything this update has provided, it's that it all shows potential, and that may seem like a back handed compliment "Oh, it'll get there eventually but it's not there yet", but I'm being serious when I say that I don't think the prospects for this game's future have ever looked so rosy. If you haven't picked up Fallout 76 yet, I cannot in good conscience recommend you amend that for any reasonable amount of money, but if it's discounted to heck and you've literally nothing left to do then why not? It's better than bashing your head into a wall. (Put that on the box.)
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