Bethesda have a long, and controversial history as video game developers. They have dropped some of the most iconic game releases of all time, like the original Fallout series, and of course, Morrowwind; not to mention countless other titles that garnered them a cult following.
At the same time, they have been notorious for releasing some of the most broken and dysfunctional games of all time, and it appears that Fallout 76, just released, is both of these; broken, and dysfunctional.
What the Internet, and users are currently saying about Fallout 76:
An empty world with broken mechanics and most importantly a lifeless and boring world. Imagine Fallout 1, 2, 3, 4, Baldur's Gate, etc... but without any NPCs. Quests are uninteresting and make you want to skip the holotapes and robots that deliver them, fetch quests and kill X many zombies (monsters are unimaginative and rehashed). You'll be shooting immobile t-posing bullet sponge zombies and assorted riff-raff until they deplete your ammo reserve and ultimately their corpse will disapear before you can loot them. If only the bugs were the main issue. Unfortunately, this is a lazy cash-grab using a brown shaded color palette and an empty, pointless world.- Yasrin666 via Metacritic
This user has captured the bulk of my criticism about prior Fallout games, and put it into a very eloquent statement. There is no world-building, no plot to explore, or atmosphere to absorb after your initial familiarisaton with the world is complete.
Oh look, a nuka-cola can - and this one here is a different flavour! Oh, as it turns out there's only three flavours. In the whole world. No competing brands. Oh, an abandoned pinball machine! You can interact with it, but the left bumper might be broken. Except; the left bumper is broken on every single pinball machine in the exact same way.
The building blocks of modular game design come to the fore, combined with procedural quest generation to give the illusion of oodles of content, and hours of gameplay; this type of title gets its "90 hours of gameplay" by spreading objectives out over uninteresting, poorly designed vistas that haven't been tested by a human.
In game design, you never have enough time to embellish every single detail you want on a piece. Let's say you want to build a city. You build four types of walls, 6 types of roof, and 3 types of windows. When you combine all of these, you get an enormous number of variations, but when you build a city that is larger than the sum of its parts, repetition, combined with poor level design means the character has no set pieces or unique pieces of architecture to allow them to navigate naturally.
Modularity is fine, but it needs to be a balance. Take The Last of Us - that game used an enormous amount of modular assets for level design, but you never felt like you were in the same place twice. In every recent Fallout and Elder Scrolls game, the interior of almost all buildings has felt identical. In the real world, city to city, and suburb to suburb, there is enormous variance in the types of environments, door handles, bricks, walls, and floors that you encounter.
Perhaps I'm being critical of an open world game for being too "samey", but if it is an open world, without true world building, then its really, not a world, unless it is a world where everything comes from one-mega-corp supplier who states that stone slabs, and brick walls will all be constructed of the same colour, shape, weight, and mass of brick, which is a reality when you employ a combination of modularity, a tileset, and procedural level design. (Unless you a No Man's Sky, which surprisingly, does open world procedual generation incredibly well!)
Moving on to another user review of Fallout 76, this one being a positive review:
I enjoyed this game. It's not perfect, and it's not what I'd expect from Bethesda. It's less of an RPG and more of a Survival Game. It reminds me a bit of Seven Days to Die and other Zombie Survival games from the early 10s. Lots of scavenging, building, and what have you. Still, there is some interesting information poking around in the background with logs and messages and on terminals and all that. I will admit, I do think the lack of NPCs is a bit upsetting, and that's ultimately what holds the game back from a perfect rating in my opinion. If there is anything to improve going forward, that might be it.- TomEastman via MetaCritic
By now, it is pretty evident that the latest Fallout game isn't meant to be a single-player epic, with an overarching story, intertwining sub-quests, difficult moral choices, and a world that is truly influenced by your actions, or, a world that forces a character to become changed by the changing world around them.
There's nothing wrong with Minecraft. There's nothing wrong with games where the objective is to survive, build a base, and obtain resources over time, defending it as necessary. Placing the Fallout brand on such a thing does not necessarily make it amazing.
Bethesda had many things going for it here - they had the netcode from The Elder Scrolls Online. They had the assets from Fallout 4. They had the rabid fanbase, frothing at the mouth, bucket of bottlecaps in tow. What they clearly, have not had, in quite some time, is the polish, or self-awareness, the shame, the intestinal fortitude to not flush their own shit down the toilet. Instead, it sits in the bowl, festering.
Better out than in.
I visisted my local Electronics Botique (the place where most video games are sold here in Australia) - (it is our version of America's Gamestop) today, to make a couple of observations. This is what I saw:
- A pile of boxes, six foot tall - presumably Pokemon Go themed Nintendo Switches, and copies of Civ 6 for Switch, which launches locally tomorow. This was draped in plastic bags and tapes, in a vain attempt to obscure what was within.
- A handful of copies of Red Dead Redemption II available for sale.
- HUNDREDS of copies of Fallout 76 on the counter, alongside the previous titles in the series to enable upsell / downsell for the inevitable "trade in / return".
- A few people in line, sad expressions on their face, clutching barely used copies of the game, hoping to take advantage of EB's 7 day refund window for new releases.
- Those same people, warning, others that they should not purchase Fallout 76.
I'm sure it will get better, but there's one thing that you're definitely buying when you purchase a Fallout game.