Fallout 76 in 2023

 Where did that bring you? Back to me.

'Where you start doesn't matter; it's where you go from there.' Slightly bastardised and distorted words by video game director Todd Howard when trying to defend the dogs dinner that Bethesda made out of Fallout 76's launch month, and though I've spent years lambasting him the truth of the matter is that most games do try and make their money on the back half in the online space. Diablo Immortal gave itself away as a bear-trap of monetisation so that it could forgo profitable sales figures in order to grab the more consistent and perhaps even more lucrative model of locking a tiny selection of exploitable players in an addictive cycle of money sucking. Quite literally exploiting people with addictive tendencies and more money than sense; because the Diablo Immortal developers are the kinds of people who would have no moral compunction loan sharking if it offered a better pay-out then what they do today. Actually bad people, over there.

But for Fallout 76, excessive monetisation isn't exactly their end-game. More over it's another one of those pesky side effects of trying to maintain this game that doesn't lend itself naturally to recurrent pay schemes. Growing into it's 'place' was more of a matter of taking their spaghetti-string code of a game and turning into a 'Single player Fallout game with online features stuck on' like the original idea was supposed to be. Albeit, a single player Fallout that is helplessly stretched out past the point of tedium thanks to the heavily squeezed levelling process, pay limitations on fast travel and muddled narrative that lives and breaths thanks to the power of the retcon. Good lord does this game smother itself in retcon energy! You'd be forgiven for thinking this is a totally fan-written story with how daring it tries to slide itself into recognisable Fallout affairs to justify it's own exsistence!

Still. After all of the years, surely the Fallout 76 experience should be closer to that almighty 'completed' state that Todd Howard teased us about all those years ago? Or at the very least I should be able to see the difference between what the game was at launch and where it is now! Especially since I actually played the game on the cusp of it's second year! After the majority of the connection issues were solved and the broken elements were patched, I actually picked up Fallout 76 for cheap in one of the most shameful 'in-person' purchases I've ever committed to. I had to plead with the shop attendee not to judge me as they cut some serious side-eye my way. It was an experiment. A blind desperate experiment that Fallout retained some of the merit that otherwise would be lost in such a bold departure from the source material.

The early second year of Fallout 76 was much like the first year, because the team had to spend an extra amount of time patching the game and so couldn't start on their grand journey just yet. And for what it was, I actually think the base game did a fine job selling it's world narratively. You were literally the only few wanderers scouring a post-apocalyptic world since abandoned again, picking through the dead voices and following directions of ghosts to uncover the terrible infectious threat that managed to wipe the state clean of survivors just weeks before your ejection from the Vault. Though the isolation was the game's most regularly lambasted feature, in many ways it helped sell the seriousness of the narrative they were trying to tell where this scorched plague was the true bogey man of the post-world that only the handful of Vault survivors could hope to fight against.

And then the people came back. Like the second coming of man, the 'Wastelanders' update saw the return of NPCS to the world of Fallout 76 and with it a seismic change in the state of the world. Now the desolate waste of Appalachia was inhabited with people and factions and life. Not enough to constitute a post-apocalyptic society, like I always argued to be the strength of New Vegas' setting; but enough to subvert one of the core atmospheric themes of the base game. That started something of a trend which was continued by a new bunch of characters in Broken Steel, and will likely be expanded on in the future of the game isn't shut down abruptly because the Fallout 76 community has been officially identified as a 'small community' by Zenimax. (Pretty sure 'Elder Scrolls Legends' was a 'small community' too, and we all know what happened with that game...)

Playing Fallout 76 today, from scratch, (because Bethesda never bothered to bring any substantive save adapting options to the game despite the fact that each version of the game is updated synchronously, aside from the test build, so there's no reason why there shouldn't be options.) is a totally different kettle of fish. Now there are NPCs dotted all across the route to solving the Scorched pandemic, and the narrative of a land burnt clean of settlers rings a little hollower. I mean sure, some of the key locations the game sends you to are still barren as hell itself, particularly the flooded town house which I hate exploring with a vehement passion, but knowing there are dozens of living and happy citizens stuffed up in every errant corner makes it hard to take the overarching threat of the deadly scorch beasts quite as seriously as it was simply a year prior. I just have to pretend that Foundation hasn't been built yet.

Of course, that's just how the story of the game has changed; the general vibe is quite different too. A lot of the PVP heavy players of the game have fled for greener pastures after months of being totally ignored by Bethesda. Their personal PVP server was taken offline and the Battle Royale mode was scrapped for lack of interest despite being surprisingly functional. (And a stupid amount of fun. I miss it.) 4 or 5 currencies litter everything you do, the significance of which would be very much lost on me if I were as green of a player as my level seems to imply that I am. I can imagine a newbie being utterly confused by the 'Legendary exchange' machine fitted to every train station in the game. And then there's the battlepass 'seasons'. I just can't stand battlepasses, they're literal handcuffs begging people to play your game excessively and tying otherwise new content to their 'loyalty' tracks. But it's there, the only regularly updated part of the game these days aside from the Atomic Shop.

A year ago I had a real vision for what this game could have been, and for the ways it could have grown. Borrowing Zenimax's ESO formula would have worked wonders; expanding horizontally as well as vertically and feeding the various sectors of the community in order to keep everyone happy. The Fallout 76 of today is somehow conceptually narrower than the game used to be, with a community more resigned to the monotony of an online service than enamoured by the allure of exploration. Perhaps this is just the natural fate of any online game growing up and discovering where it's meant to be in life, or maybe this is a shrivelling up of an otherwise potentially decent experience. All I can say for certain is thus; I have the feeling that 2023 is going to be a make-or-break moment for the beleaguered title, and I'm curious to see how that plays out for it.