FALLOUT: 76 Review -Shattered World, Broken Game

Ted Hentschke   |  

Dec 27, 2018

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Developed by Bethesda Softworks

Available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One

Available for $39.99

Rated M for Mature

I am done with Fallout: 76. I’m not going to bury the point of this review. The game is broken, and I am done. Perhaps they will fix it someday, maybe even someday soon. But I can’t keep doing this. I’ve seen a number of negative reviews just about everywhere, and I was determined not to follow the trend. It seems like most reviewers never even got to the end-game, never dived deep into the far reaches of the game, and their opinions reflected that. I was determined to give this game a full shot, to really get into the heart of what they were trying to do, and deliver a review that spoke to true fans of the franchise. And by God, if I didn’t fucking do it. I’m now level 70, have slain a Scorchbeast Queen, have followed the paths of the Enclave and Brotherhood of Steel and waded my way through every broken quest and feature. And at the end of it all, I am just so done with this pile of broken mechanics and unfulfilled promises.

Ever since Fallout made the jump from isometric to full-blown shooter, people have been clamoring for multiplayer. Imagine the joy of exploring the desolate wastes with a friend. Fragging raiders, slaughtering ghouls, reverse-pickpocketing mines into random civilians, all with your best bud there to cheer you on. Fallout is a series made of grand moments and fantastic little discoveries, which are only made better when you have someone to share them with. So when Fallout: 76 was announced, it sounded like what we had all been waiting for.

If back of the box blurbs were full games, then Fallout: 76 sounds amazing. Explore the wasteland with up to 16 other players in a persistent living world? Fantastic! Build your own bases, team up, create alliances, and dominate the map? Hell yes! Discover the remains of the various factions, find out how they all died out, and rebuild them from the ashes? That’s exactly what I want from a Fallout game. Unfortunately, Fallout: 76 is a hollow shell that fails to fully deliver on any of its grand potential.

A game has to screw up real bad to let me vaporize mutant toads with plasma, and still not like it

It should come as a no surprise to anyone that this is going to be a predominantly negative review. Chances are at this point you’ve stumbled across a vitriolic review, twitter post, Reddit comment, or hurtful meme. The game is absolutely chock full of bugs. Far more than any player should be expected to reasonably ignore, even for a Bethesda game. Pile on a king’s ransom in balance issues, underdeveloped mechanics, and inconsistent patching, and you’ve got a recipe for a sub-50% Metacritic score. It would be frankly dishonest to call the game anything other than a broken mess.

Now before I get into what I find to be the real problems with the game, I cannot stress just how many bugs are in this game. It constantly rubber bands between simply broken to completely unplayable. Every time I experiment with a new location, playstyle, or mechanic, it’s a whole new world of bugs. One consistently egregious bug—known colloquially as the “damage bug”—causes enemies to heal from ranged damage when their health is depleted instead of just die. This bug has been present since day 1 and still has not been fixed. Every time they release one of their “patches,” I race over to the forums to find out what they broke. At this point, it’s impossible to tell what was intentional changes (like a 20% decrease to melee weapon damage) and what they just accidentally broke. Ever since the last patch, I’ve been experiencing frequent server lag and loading screen crashes that has pushed the game over the meridian of frustrating into the land of infuriating. Compound this with the fact that quests will drop when you log out and log back in, and you can see why I have now given up on the game.

Even without the bugs, I’d still be hesitant to give the game a really positive review. Despite all of the frozen models or rebounding health bars, you still could not ignore Fallout: 76’s squandered potential. Everyone is losing their minds (and rightly so) over the game basically not working, but any significant time with it will reveal that the major problem is that Fallout: 76 is shallow. Mountains of crafting recipes, locations to explore, and quests to repeat don’t hide the fact that there really isn’t a point to any of it.

“Yeah man, but like, WHY are we fragging the toxic swamp monster? Aren’t we ALL toxic swamp monsters on the inside?”

Let me backtrack a bit and explain what Fallout: 76 is all about. You play as a dweller of Vault 76, one of Vault-Tec’s many safe-havens that doubled over as living human experiments for the science of the future. Fortunately for you, Vault 76 wasn’t one of those, “drug the water supply” or, “make them all eat each other” Vaults. Instead, your Vault is tasked with rebuilding the country after the bombs drop. So you emerge from the vault a blank slate, ready to pick up the pieces of the shattered world and rebuild it as you see fit.

Now you always start out a Fallout game at level 1, but that level 1 is generally tailored towards a certain playstyle. You throw your special points into stats that suit what you want to do and buff a few skills that support that. As a result, you usually pop out semi-proficient in whatever your focus is. If you’re like me and tend to go intelligence/charisma, you already will be hacking basic terminals and passing some speech checks. If you decide to go strength and endurance, you’ll come out swinging and be able to win most combat encounters. If you max out luck, you sling your stupid catchphrase and remind your viewers to like and subscribe, because you are a meme.

As Fallout: 76 pops you out with no skills, this initial character creation is instead done in the first 20 levels, which translates to about 10 hours of gameplay. The standard Fallout Perk/S.P.E.C.I.A.L./Skill system has been significantly altered to fit the new multiplayer shooter vibe. Instead of setting your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. (strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility, and luck) at the start, you now gain one point to put into those stats every time you level. When you level one of your stats, you then get to pick from a “Perk Card” to equip in that slot. Perk cards generally either grant a buff or provide proficiency at a skill, like sneaking or crafting melee weapons. Perk cards can be leveled up to more effective higher level versions by picking the same card up to a certain max level. You modify your character by equipping these cards. The number of cards you can equip is based on that stat’s level, maxing out at 15. So if you have 15 strength, you can equip 15 points of strength cards.

Ah, yes. No way this will ever become tedious or confusing. Never ever.

It’s certainly a novel way to do progression, but Fallout: 76 lacks some of the basic functionality to make the system easy to use. The most glaring problem is easy swapping of cards. Cards can be switched out at any time, meaning the only real downside to improving your crafting over your weapon damage is that you’ll have to grind some extra levels to unlock them both. Given enough time, you should easily have a “base/crafting” loadout and “adventure” loadout. However, there’s no way to quickly swap. Every time you want to change your loadout, you’ll have to go to your perk screen and swap out every single card you want to change. It’s incredibly pointless and tedious. On top of this, certain cards like hacking/lockpicking have no combat application. This means that optimal play requires you to open your perk screen, swap out the cards, pick the lock/hack the terminal, and then swap them back. Just ignoring this and leaving them equipped will leave you at up to a 3 point disadvantage. It’s absolutely ridiculous that this much micromanagement is required for optimal play.

That’s not even mentioning that you have no idea what future perks have in store. Perks, in general, are listed under stats that make sense (agility is usually speed/stealth, endurance usually health, strength usually melee/heavy, etc.), but how the fuck am I supposed to know that explosives are as strength skill? New card unlocks are tied to character level, so the only way for me to know what’s in store is to go out of the game and look it up online. It leads to a certain level of decision paralysis, as you’re never sure if the perk path you’re going is a dead end. God help you if you decide to go a charisma build.

Pro Tip: Don’t go Charisma in a game with 0 speech checks

“But Ted, that’s the case for all Fallout games! You never really know what’s in store for a new playthrough or playstyle, that’s part of the fun!” I agree that this is true for the single-player Fallout games. In games like Fallout: New Vegas, each style will open up a bevy of new options and a unique style that can take you through the game. In Fallout: 76, there is a specific optimal playstyle. If you do not go power armor and some kind of automatic weapons, you will not be able to experience the endgame.

Now some of you might be disagreeing with me, but my hundred hours of experience say that you are wrong. The “endgame” for Fallout: 76 come in the form of nuclear “red zones” that spawn after a missile is launched. Here is where the Scorchbeast Queen spawns, and up to 100+ rads/second flood your system. Now you can go light armor, but Power Armor provides you with the rad resistance you need to survive. You can go melee, but Scorchbeasts fly and melee exposes you to massive damage. There are perk cards you can take that improve your abilities while out of power armor, but why? Why would I waste 3 of my precious perk slots for +45 damage resist when out of power armor, when a single piece of power armor can give me up to 90 damage/energy/rad resist? Keep in mind that those 3 perk points could also go towards giving me another 30% damage to automatic weapons, something I can use in conjunction with my power armor.

In this pictures: two people playing the only endgame there is.

Now, these kinds of balance issues can be patched out with some work. If the balance/bugs/ease of use were the only problems, it could be fixed with a lot of work. What makes Fallout: 76 a metric fuck-ton of work to fix is the lack of purpose. These kinds of open world games are always inherently “pointless,” but add meaning through the ability to create something lasting. In Minecraft, it’s all about getting enough diamonds to add the diamond skull to your obsidian dread castle. In Rust, you can come together to form a clan of raiders all dedicated to hoarding the fattest loot. It’s all player-driven endgame, and it’s some of the most memorable gaming experiences you can have.

Fallout: 76 simply doesn’t facilitate this level of player interaction. You can build a base, but you have a certain “budget” that you can’t go over in size or utilities. You can’t build with other players, so you can’t work together to build the sprawling cities of your dreams. What’s more, servers are randomized on login. This means that there’s no way to make a lasting mark on your fellow survivors. You drop into a server, your base spawns in with you, and as soon as you log out/back in there’s a whole new slew of players who know nothing of your exploits. There’s no way to cultivate long-term player interaction.

Not that there would really be a point to it, even if you could make a massive guild. With only 16 players to a server, there’s only so massive and intense your battles can get. If by some miracle of God you get every player on the server to band together and duke it out, you still only have an 8v8 battle where everyone instantly respawns on death. There’s no point to it. And even if bases could be connected, they serve no purpose other than holding all your crafting tables and maybe a small farm. There are no merchants you can create, no economy you can cultivate, no utilities you can provide. You can’t work your ass off to build your base up to be a destination for other players, so why even try?

This pictures is lies

This sense of pointlessness seeps into the core exploration of the game. There are about a billion places to explore, but most of them have little in the way of any reward. Dozens of times I would work my way through a sprawling factory/lab/farm, and be rewarded with just an inventory full of crafting junk. One of the major charms of Bethesda RPGs is discovering what that next little spec on the horizon has in store. Is this cave just a regular ol’ bandit camp, or will you suddenly find yourself in Blackreach? Fallout: 76 manages to take this massive potential for emergent exploration and turn it into a pointless chore. You’re better off just jumping from quest to quest, as those consistently reward you with new recipes and materials.

Beep Boop. I have been programmed to defend this waterpark full of plungers and empty bottles with my life. Beep Boop. Please end me. Boop Beep.

I’ve spent the better part of four pages ranting about Fallout: 76’s shortcomings, and it deserves it. But I must admit that the only reason I’m so passionate in my disdain is out of love for what the game could be. Despite all that I see wrong with it, I still did pump 100 hours into it. A lot of that time, I was even enjoying myself. So let me divert for a while into what I liked about Fallout: 76.

First off, I really do like the story. You might think that the lack of human NPCs means that there’s no story, but that isn’t the case. I won’t spoil anything, but there’s a perfectly good reason that you pop out of Vault 76 to an Appalachia devoid of human life. You stumble across various pieces and plot threads after the fact and unravel the story like a murder mystery. It’s as fun as it is unintrusive; you’re free to read all the logs and find out where everyone went, or ignore it and just get back to the gun battles. For a multiplayer game, it’s a great way to do storytelling.

Secondly, I like how high-level weapons and recipes feel like a real reward. You won’t be able to craft Gatling Lasers and Super Sledges from the start. Whether or not you find a recipe is largely based on chance, but the rarity of these recipes makes you really feel like a badass when you manage to find one. You unlock new modification recipes by breaking down weapons, while some super rare modifications likewise have to be found in chests/quests/merchants. It can be quite the journey to fully bling out your .50 cal LMG, but finally doing makes you feel like the big boss of the wasteland.

Get guns to kill things to get guns. Perfect game.

Finally, the game is still Fallout. I can only be so sour while smashing Mole People skulls with my rocket-powered Super Sledge. Much of the reason I was able to pump as much time into Fallout: 76 as I did was that the formula works. It’s still fun to dispatch hordes of Super Mutants. It’s still tense to find yourself in way over your head against an enemy far stronger than you. It’s still thrilling to finally overcome a particularly obstinate boss. There’s nothing quite like trying to find just the right angle to hide in that lets you chuck your Plasma Grenades without the enemy being able to shoot you back. It’s that kind of gameplay that made Fallout a fan favorite, and the heart of that is still here.

I don’t think I’ve ever played a game for so long that I wound up feeling so fundamentally negative about. There’s a large move on Reddit right now to discredit all the bad reviews and create a cult-like air of positivity about the game, and I actually understand that. Fallout: 76 has all the promise of a game that could truly reshape the genre. I want it to be amazing. However, calling it anything other than a broken mess would frankly be dishonest. And at the end of the day, my job is to let you know whether or not you should buy it. As it stands, the game has price dropped several times. If you’re just looking for numbers of hours you can invest, it’s a great return on investment. But I can’t in good conscience say that it’s a complete package. There’s a ton of work to be done, and there’s no real guarantee that Bethesda will do it. Maybe in a year it will be the perfect game. Maybe it will be just as dead as all the previous inhabitants of Appalachia. As it is now, it’s just a wasteland more shattered than mended.

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