Fallout 76: Beta Notes

For the second time ever, war has changed.

The Fallout 76 beta has given players the opportunity to explore the world of the Fallout universe in a new MMO setup. Now you can roam the wasteland with friends, or maybe make new ones. Or, more likely, brutally murder everyone you meet for their tasty, tasty gun-food.

The beginning of the game is a very familiar experience to any fan of Fallout; spending approximately a million years creating a perfect avatar of yourself in the character creator. After that, it’s finding your way out of the vault and then your feet. What may be less familiar, and even daunting for new players, is the permanently locked hardcore survival gameplay. Disease, hunger, and thirst meters take up a large amount of the player’s pre-occupation when wandering the wasteland, no longer simply just rads, HP, and AP.

You masochists out there probably love this – real post-apocalyptic survival! But for newer players, or those who enjoyed the regular experience of Bethesda’s Fallout games, it can be really daunting. Let’s face it, looking after yourself in real life is hard enough.

Thankfully there are many ways to keep these factors in check through the crafting stations. New medicines of different strengths, new meals to cook, and even different levels of purity in water can be crafted, instead of relying on chugging dirty water and then consuming some Radaway. The rest of the crafting system is even more in depth, from weapons, armour, and the ability to paint your gear.

However, all this crafting has a downside in that absolutely everything has a weight value, even ammunition. This becomes incredibly tedious incredibly quickly, as you have to run around looking for crafting benches to scrap your junk and reduce the weight, or spending caps on relocating your C.A.M.P. so you can store your excess stuff there. This doesn’t really solve the problem though, as your stash has a weight limit of 400, which is not enough in all honesty.

The other option is to liberate locations with workshops like in FO4, but now you have to defend those locations every 20 minutes, either due to an invasion of NPCs, or from other players contesting your dominance of the location. All of these issues make the crafting system more of a punishment than gameplay. Thankfully, the actual act of settlement building is still really fun, and the ability to create a base of operations with your friends is going to make some really cool fortresses and campsites on release.

Bethesda Game Studio, 2018

Just exploring West Virginia with friends is an incredible experience, as me and a friend found out when we set off in a random direction and saw a fraction of the playable world. Todd Howard did not oversell the visuals here – they are incredible, and there’s a surprising variety of environments to see and explore, from marshes to mountains to diseased hellholes. We fought critters and robots, small and large, and died at the hands of numerous wasteland horrors based on West Virginian folklore. The familiarity of the Fallout gameplay and sharing that with friends in the moment rather than trading stories is a joy.

Unfortunately, what is less gratifying is the way that quests are given to the player – once you enter a location, the quest appears in your Pipboy. Sometimes picking up holotapes will activate a quest, or even talking to the odd robot still roaming the landscape, but it’s usually the former. This doesn’t feel great as the list of active quests quickly becomes incomprehensible and also just feels disjointed – the player has only just arrived at the location, and instantly knows to go investigate a house, or clear out the radroaches in a basement to get a reward. There’s little intrinsic value in this method of storytelling.

That said, what little of the actual narrative I’ve experienced is cool; seeing the world in ruins and following the exploits of the Vault Overseer, and how West Virginians dealt with the aftermath of the nuclear war. Following all of this through holotapes, computer logs, and handwritten notes is fantastic, as this has been some of Bethesda’s best writing in their games and in Fallout 76 it excels.

Another place where Fallout 76 really gets it right is the way the signature S.P.E.C.I.A.L system is implemented into the game. The cards bonuses and the ability to share those bonuses with your party is a super clever way to include the system in an MMO setting.

Bethesda Games Studio, 2018

Being a Bethesda game, there are several little bugs and jankiness: VATs, framerate drops, a player managed to scrap his Pipboy, which is honestly amazing. But a major issue has surfaced as to the security of the game on PC. A redditor and modder by the name of teetharejustdone discovered that there are some serious exploits and lapses in security in the games online architecture. Whilst this makes it possible to make mods for 76, it also makes it possible to disrupt others game. Lag switching, God mode cheats, and other exploits can be targeted at specific individuals in the server because IP addresses haven’t been encrypted at all.

Bethesda, for what it’s worth, have been fixing things in time for launch apparently, but they’ve also downplayed and even denied the allegations made by teetharejustdone. It’s clear why – his reddit post was pretty damning, and made the game seem like it was simply cobbled together. If you’re a particularly security conscious person, to avoid playing FO76 on PC until these issues are definitively resolved

With all said and done, I can see the germ of a great idea in Fallout 76. Taking on the nuclear wasteland, collecting resources, and building a base all with your friends is one of the better ideas Bethesda has had. However, the jankiness of some of the core mechanics and the flaws in the weight system are off-putting, and the current, but total, lack of security on the PC version of the game would completely turn me off if that were my platform of choice. I think this is going to be a game to wait and see what the immediate post launch support is like, and whether Bethesda can take this seed and grow something beautiful.