Saturday Morning Gaming: Fallout 76

Back in 2017, EA cancelled one of their single-player games saying something about how they weren’t economically viable anymore. Of course, the gaming community went *NUTSO*. There might be a huge call for multiplayer and massively multiplayer games, but there was also a huge call for single player games (or so the gaming community argued).

Well, the next month, Bethesda released a #SavePlayer1 ad campaign where they talked about how awesome single player games were and they got Lynda Carter involved:

This generated massive goodwill for Bethesda. Todd Howard was the man and everybody was pleased to admit that they had purchased Skyrim two or three times.

But then… Fallout 76 was announced. And it was rumored to be multiplayer. *MASSIVELY* multiplayer.

I was apprehensive as heck because didn’t they just come out with a “Save Player One” campaign? Didn’t they create a hashtag?!? This doesn’t make any sense! (You can see the five stages of grief happen in real time in this old comment thread.)

Well, I stopped looking forward to Fallout 76. Why look forward to a game that you’re never going to play?

I stopped thinking about until the first reviews rolled in and I read the reviews with a grim satisfaction. The game sucked. IGN gave it a 6. A 6! It was so bad that they had to abandon their 7-10 scale!

There were *NO* NPCs! Like, the idea was that you’d be in this MMO without NPCs and everybody would interact with each other if they wanted to interact and they’d learn about the lore of the world by finding tapes everywhere. You know, like Bioshock! Sure, there were ghouls and “scorched” (red ghouls that could use guns) but other people? Nope! Just your fellow Vault Dwellers!

AND EVERYBODY HATED THIS. Bethesda made this huge world and forgot to put a game in it.

I laughed and went back to playing my single player games.

Well, there’s a Fallout television show on the Amazon. It’s, apparently, pretty good. It captures the weird humor mixed with the weird horror mixed with the weird violence. I haven’t watched it but my buddy did and he said “DUDE, WE NEED TO PLAY FALLOUT 76!!!” and I was hesitant because… well, all of the stuff I’ve said already. “Check your gift queue. I just got you a copy. Load it up and we can play it tonight!”

And I checked my gift queue and there it was. So I loaded it up.

And I will get into this in detail next week but I have to say that I am surprised at how much work Bethesda did to fix it. The game no longer sucks. There are now NPCs. There are still tapes lying around everywhere… but they feel like additional storytelling elements rather than, like, the *ONLY* storytelling elements. And, if you’re willing to pay $13 bucks a month for Fallout 1st, you can have a private server and play it like a single player game (or you can invite your broskis if you’d rather and not have to put up with griefers).

If you’ve got Amazon Prime Gaming, you can get it for free this month.

It it worth $40? I don’t know yet. I’m iffy. Is it worth “free” (and $13 for a couple of months)? Heck yeah.

Next week I’ll talk about the game itself and the stuff that I like and, yeah, the stuff that I don’t.

So… what are you playing?

(Featured image is the Fallout “Please Stand By” wallpaper. I use this as my home PC’s wallpaper!)