Fallout 76

Regardless of how Fallout 76 transforms and mutates in the months to come, the present version is a brave, imaginative, and rewarding exploration, but its true glory is revealed among friends.

Fallout 76 isn't the best Fallout ever, but it turns out to be an interesting experiment, able to grow and thrive with time, despite an unjustifiable technical aspect.

Playing with buddies looting collapsed shopping centres and derelict towns is a blast and the robust crafting and character development mechanics are excellent. However, quests’ repetitive nature and a lack of human players filling the vast world can make Fallout 76 feel a little sterile and hamper its long-term appeal, especially if you don’t have friends to accompany you on your journey through the wasteland. This makes Fallout 76 a good, not great, entry into the iconic franchise.

Fallout 76 retains the same captivating immersion, atmosphere and organic exploration that made Fallout 4 so enjoyable thanks to an excellent open world, though you’ll have to contend with a poorly implemented online component and the typical Bethesda technical hiccups and rough edges.

The bottom line is that Fallout 76 was an experiment that was created on an outdated engine incapable of implementing the vision Bethesda has for it. This has led the game into a full blown identity crisis, as it doesn't really play well as a single-player game, sucks at PvP, with its only saving grace being its multiplayer experience, specifically with friends. Sometimes it's better to be great at one thing than good (or not so good) at many things. Promised updates in the future may eventually get the game where it needs to be, but as of today, it's not what fans wanted or expected.

I don't think I've ever had a game in the test that was so difficult to judge. It doesn't grip properly, but Fallout 76 makes me feel very contradictory. On the one hand, I really enjoy the game world, the exploration and all the stories told here. But I'm also someone who can get involved with this indirect way of telling stories. I can understand that for many this doesn't work without NPCs and dialogues. But I enjoy reading the different diary entries and listening to the holobands. On the other hand, the poor technical condition of the game really annoys me a lot. The poor performance despite average graphics quality is hard to understand. You can and must expect more from a modern game in 2018.

Ultimately the big change, and kind of the whole purpose for F76, is the multiplayer component, and how that plays out is going to depend a lot on the community, a quantity that I believe is still very much to be determined.

Fallout 76 is one of those games which makes us uncertain. I can't call it complete trash, but can't call it a good game either. But somehow, I believe in it. If Bethesda keeps working hard on the game, in a year, it will become a game which deserves to be played.

Fallout 76 is an underwhelming and disappointing mess, but may have the potential for greatness if Bethesda chooses to support it long-term.

Putting aside its many technical issues, Fallout 76 offers an empty world in which, paradoxically, there are many things to do, but everything appears to be an end in itself. There is something good in this game, but it’s crippled by a bland world design and a non-existent plot. This is a game that may be able to entertain, but boredom is always dangerously around the corner.

It’s easy to be critical with Fallout 76. The flaws are so easy to see that it has every single chance to be this year’s best meme in gaming. But if you enjoy multiplayer experiences with plenty of loot and a great leveling system, you can have a nice time cleaning up its radioactive wilderness.

Despite the considerable issues with the PC version, I've still had long stretches of fun with Fallout 76. I really wish PvP had more at stake then lost junk (or at least more willing participants) but the world retains a lot of what I love about Bethesda's previous RPGs with finely crafted environments, enjoyable weapons and crafting, and surprising little scraps of story to uncover and investigate.

Fallout 76 aspires to offer a lot with West Virginia and exciting co-op, but fails due to unbalanced game design and technical flaws.

Fallout 76’s premise may have made a lot of sense of paper, as many people love surviving with friends in a huge world, but in practice it has a lot of things that keep it from reaching greatness: From the sparse open world with too few players, to the non-engaging story, to actual clunky multiplayer, both cooperative and competitive.

The bare-bones plot and general lack of direction mean you must make your own fun. It's set in a largely static world that doesn't care about the choices you make, and the few times when you can impact the world may be lost to you or circumvented by others with a mere server hop. There's fun to be had if you enjoy the thought of poking around a Fallout wasteland with a friend. Otherwise, very little here feels new, and it feels like a lot of content is missing in comparison to previous games in the series.

Miracles do happen once in a while and No Man’s Sky proved that sometimes it is possible to get back on your feet even after a terrible failure. Right now though Fallout 76 is botched spectacularly on so many levels that even talking about this game is a waste of time. [01/2019, p.46]

Fallout 76 is a broken, unfinished and "un-SPECIAL" game that consists of many cut-down elements. Despite that, it can be enjoyable for players who love to explore the post-apocalyptic world and invent their own, private role-playing story. F76 looks so constrained that it should have been released as a paid DLC to Fallout 4. Shame.

Fallout 76 is a bit of a disaster, which is a shame because there are good ideas and good bits of content here. There wasn’t a single play session where I didn’t have a lot of fun, but there also wasn’t a session where something ridiculous didn’t cause frustration. It feels like it should have been released into early access as a work in progress for the next several months, thus alleviating some of the frustration from poor performance, bugs, and balancing issues.

Fallout 76 meant to change the very concept of the series, but turned out to be a complete disaster. The game is not only boring and empty, but sometimes simply unplayable.

Fallout 76 is an unfinished game, set in a world that lacks pretty much everything we learned to love in the previous ones. One of the biggest disappointments this year.

Quotation forthcoming.

Fallout 76 lacks the heart and soul of what is a Bethesda RPG. The exclusion of NPC's and, in general, decent quest givers makes an emotional (or any) connection to the world near-on impossible and manages to shatter any immersion.

Fallout 76 isn’t to be compared with other Fallouts - it’s a spin-off that wants to be something new. Unfortunately, the multiplayer sandbox it tries to be is stagnant and intensely frustrating to play.

In an effort to do everything, Fallout 76 fails to do any of it well enough to form an identity. Its multiplayer mindset robs its quests of all the moral decisionmaking that makes the series great, and all that’s left is a buggy mess of systemic designs that never seems to work together and regularly contradicts itself.

Some of the core mechanics like the new perk system and pure gameplay loop are actually an okay foundation to build from, but they're mired in questionable design decisions made worse with several technical shortcomings that could take a significant amount of time to fix. Until that happens though, Fallout 76 is a difficult game to recommend to anyone except for maybe the most ardent fans of post-apocalyptic playgrounds.

Fallout 76 is a failed experiment. A game that, even with some good points, ultimately fails to deliver an entertaining experience due to its terrible combat system and some technical problems.

After the first few hours of Fallout 76, you can expect a lot of the same mission types over and over again. Playing with friends is ideal, but it cannot overcome the constant repetition. Base-building and undiscovered locations serve to be the best portions of this radioactive mess.