In fond memory of Fallout 76's Battle Royale.

Rest in Nuclear ash

Back when Fallout 76 first descended on a mostly aghast public, people weren't exactly receptive to the game that was in front of them. In fact a good chunk of them hated it. They hated the overly bloated world which stretched out points of interest so far from one another that a good several hours needed to be invested in the process of getting from one end to another. They hated the barren state of the world, having had all the NPCs exorcized from the map thus depriving the game of a chance to feel truly alive independent of the player's involvement. They hated the main narrative, being told entirely through second-hand audio logs, robbing any urgency from a plot that was otherwise one of the most 'save the world' style narratives that Fallout has had since 1. But most of all they hated the endless, seizing, jutting, bugs; the legacy of a project thrown together in an engine that could not handle it, led by a management team who were unfamiliar to this style of game.

It was a rocky start, and even the community that did grit their teeth and bear with the hold-ups were often left with their hands in their pockets wondering what there even was to do in the game. I mean sure, you could run the nuke silo's everyday and kill the Scorchbeast Queen, and people absolutely did, but what else was there? Running the ski lodge for tokens that you can gamble on getting a 'Fancy' skinned weapon? Those odds were way too low and the output way too underwhelming. Grinding various daily and repeatable quests? Barely took more than an hour back then to clean the map if you knew what you were doing or had a semi-competent second player backing you. Schematic hunting. That's about the high and low of it. We could hunt for schematics which gave us more weapons to craft or, much more importantly, new furniture to shove into the tiny build budget allotted to our personal towns. We were starved for stuff to do.

And that's when Bethesda decided to jump on the bandwagon of the day, a little bit late, and introduce their Battle Royale mode: Nuclear Winter. Coming from a Fortnite fatigued world and flanked by a plethora of other studios all trying to push their own ill-advised BR modes; (Dying Light even had it's own BR!) and thrown that atop of that hill of ill will that Bethesda's diseased game had already dredged up. It doesn't take a mystic to conceive why it was that people were less than optimistic for how this new mode was going to turn out. 'They're cluelessly chasing trends again!' 'If they couldn't manage a simple online game, how will they pull off a highly competitive mode?' 'This is going to be dead within a week!' I myself wrote off this Battle Royale upon announcement too, and I was actually enjoying Fallout 76 for what little it was worth at the time. I just didn't believe the promise. And then it came out.

I think the initial shock that shut everyone up right away was that the mode worked. It didn't suffer the endless desynch problems that the base game died at launch for, damage delay was minimal if it occurred at all, the spread of Fallout 76 weapon and their scaling felt right, the risk/reward of unique mechanics like 'Power Armour' felt almost tailor made for this balancing and the briefcase nuke mechanic was- well, actually I never came around on that mechanic and I still think it was dumb. But for the most part this mode worked much better than I thought it would. And whatsmore; it was fun too! In the way that gladiatorial BR bouts are always fun, I suppose; but when the vast consensus was that this mode would barely function, this slapped the dissent right out of our mouths. It was something to do, with a full spread of BR levelling systems which reward crossover cosmetics and caps for regular play and exclusive gameplay cards which could be earned and slotted to make builds and literally no mode-exclusive microtransactions! Okay, actually there was a Woodsman skin which was added to the base-game store and became something of a must-buy for anyone who wanted to take this seriously because of its natural camouflage; but apart from that this was a fresh and free mode which proved more than worth the time commitment.

Making use of just a fraction of that garishly oversized map which Fallout 76 was mocked for, Nuclear Winter boasted a huge play space with a variety of environmental variance which could account for differing play situations. Perhaps you'd be duelling around the lodge of death in the centre of the forest, or swapping sniper duels up the mountain incline; or maybe you'd have a skirmish on the huge intersecting overpass bridge which I feel like I ended up looting in about 9 out of every 10 matches. This map has ended up as one of my favourite places to do a Battle Royale just for the merit that it didn't feel like a BR map; it felt natural, dynamic and dipped with character, because it all pretty much was! Every other BR felt somewhat tipped to fit into that arena archetype to serves that style of game, and that works for them, certainly; but the homebrew aesthetic fit Fallout, and particularly the ramshackle community of 76, like a tattered, rustic glove.

I loved the mode, totally and absolutely. When Fallout 76 was really starting to bore me, and I could no longer justify the 20 minute walk to the nearest train station in order to pawn my scrap for a pittance in order to free my my storage limit for the hundredth time, I'd throw up my hands and decide to spend mt time having a blast rocking a mode which shouldn't have fit Fallout nearly as well as it should. There was nothing inherently flawed with the Battle Royale mode like there was with the base game, which meant the only failing was on Bethesda's side: their support. They didn't have enough of a focus on this mode in order to support it. Only one Battle Royale map works just fine when that map is a BR sandbox with elements you can shift around periodically in order to keep the player base on their toes and the gameplay loop churning, but when it's recycled from an established world and modifications are impossible; the team needed to make up their slack elsewhere. And they just didn't.

The pool of prizes was forever static, and the in-game store and soon-to-be-announced seasonal Battle Pass stole the idea of rotating reward pools, which is really something that would have kept Nuclear Winter fresh and worth coming back too. A second map was eventually introduced, but it was added into a rotation rather than just chosen to be the map for this season, meaning that people just preferred playing in the map that they already knew all the angles to and when offered a choice would just vote to stick to the classic. And despite all the new weapons and items that were being introduced to the base 76 experience, very few, if any, made it into the Battle Royale mode. In hindsight this all made it clear that Nuclear Winter wasn't something that Bethesda was seriously committed too, but I would have figured that the quality of the product would have won over a few spare resources from the development team. It didn't.

To this day I don't understand why Bethesda shuttered the Nuclear Winter mode in September 2021. It was receiving less attention, sure; but that was a challenge to change things up and relight that spark, not throw in the towel and go back and return to dust. Right now we have a Fallout game with an online mode featuring functional PVP, but no genuine benefit to engaging in that difficult-to-justify facet of design because the main game just doesn't make it worth the trouble. Without Nuclear Winter, that is a dead angle of the core game that is now utterly redundant. Fallout 76 now has a vestigial limp carrying it down. Maybe there might be a small arena mode thrown into the game at some point, or a special PVP/PVE dungeon with cool loot down the line, but unless Nuclear Winter is due some triumphant redesign and return in the future then these will always feel like placebo for an illness that already has an on-record cure.