Fallout has always been a solitary experience, with every instalment of the long-running series casting players as a lone wanderer in a retro-futuristic post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland. Emerging from your underground bunker long after the bombs have fallen, the main appeal of these sprawling action RPGs has always been the wide array of quests you need to undertake to secure the future of mankind, and the various interactions with the world’s inhabitants. The series has gained a enormous following since really coming to prominence with 2008’s Fallout 3 (which would be right near the top of our list of all-time greats, if we ever put one together), and expectations were high when Fallout 76 was announced during developer Bethesda’s E3 conference earlier this year.
But things turned sour when the words “entirely online” were mentioned. With fans clamouring for a new entry in the main series, such a departure was considered by many as something they neither wanted or needed, but fears were tempered by the line “of course, you can play this solo”, giving hope that the single player experience could still deliver the goods…
“When the fighting is stopped, and the fallout has settled, you must rebuild.”
Fallout 76 is an open world survival game where every single person you encounter is a real life player. Gone are the quirky characters of previous Fallout titles, replaced by emote-throwing avatars that you’re never quite sure are friend or foe. Quests are doled out by computers and holotapes, and largely involve heading to a destination and either collecting or killing a certain amount of things. Sure, you can try to go it alone, but you’ll often find that there’s simply too much to handle without backup. “Public Events” appear on the map from time to time, in which any player can head to a specified area to help others complete side missions in return for useful loot, and there’s also the possibility of banding together with a team of players to seek out a series of launch codes before blasting away part of the map with a nuke, unleashing some of the game’s strongest enemies. Launching a nuke on your own is nigh-on impossible though, as completing the necessary tasks without assistance is quite the tall order.
76‘s world is gigantic – four times the size of Fallout 4. While it might be undeniably beautiful in places, the sheer size of the map (and, currently, sparsely-populated servers) means that players can be so far from each other that it can be a long time before you even bump into anybody else, and there’s rarely anybody around if you suddenly find you need a hand. Even if you’re averse to interacting with other players online, choosing to go it alone instead, the lack of NPCs in the game means it ends up feeling more lonely than it should do. You’re essentially left with either completing fetch quests or building a base, which might not be enough to keep you going.
Technical issues are also an unfortunate downside, with the framerate chugging along as the constant online connection struggles to keep up (which will frequently result in server disconnects and full-on crashes, potentially causing players to lose progress). There’s often a pronounced lag in command inputs, making combat difficult as by the time the screen catches up with where you’re trying to aim, the enemies have run away. This lag combines with the always-online nature of the game to give another drawback – pausing isn’t possible, which affects Fallout‘s much-loved time-stopping VATS feature. No longer able to freeze enemies in place while you carefully target their limbs, VATS is now nothing more than an auto-aim function which rarely works as intended.
Fallout 76 is a tricky one to review. The player base isn’t yet large enough to satisfy multiplayer fans, and the experience of playing solo lacks pretty much everything that made previous Fallout games so enjoyable. If the tech issues can be ironed out and players can be convinced to give this one a go, there’s definite potential for 76 to have some longevity. In its current form though, “here’s a nice big world with some monsters in it, go and make your own entertainment” doesn’t quite cut it. It’s going to be an uphill struggle, but we really do hope Fallout 76 can get there in the end.
FALLOUT 76 / DEVELOPER: BETHESDA GAME STUDIOS / PUBLISHER: BETHESDA SOFTWORKS / PLATFORM: PC, PLAYSTATION 4 (REVIEWED), XBOX ONE / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW