Saturday Morning Gaming: Fallout 76 Reviewed

Okay. I have played a lot more Fallout 76. But before I talk about that, I have to talk about the other games in the series.

In the very first Fallout, your mission was to leave Vault 13 and find a Water Purification Chip. “They should have one in Vault 15!”, you’re told. “Here, let me mark it on your map!” Of course, it’s not that simple… on your way to Vault 15, you discover Shady Sands and have some adventures there and then you go to Vault 15 and discover that it’s been abandoned and looted. And then you have to find a chip somewhere else and there’s a *LOT* of somewhere elses that you need to visit before you find a way to save your vault. (More stuff happens after that, of course. But that’s the gist.)

In Fallout 2, your mission was to find the G.E.C.K. (Garden of Eden Creation Kit) and help your little village turn into a thriving town in the wasteland. “They should have one in Vault 13!”, you’re told. “Here, let me mark it on your map!” (Of course, it’s not anywhere near that simple.)

In Fallout 3, your father leaves Vault 101 and it is your mission to go out into the Capitol Wasteland and find him. (Of course, it’s not anywhere near that simple.)

In Fallout: New Vegas, the game opens with you getting shot in the head. It is your mission to find the guy who shot you in the head. (That part of the game is somewhat straightforward… it’s all the stuff surrounding it that gets complicated.)

In Fallout 4, you go into a Vault and you and your family are cryogenically frozen. You temporarily awaken to see your child kidnapped and your spouse murdered. Your mission is to go out and find your son. (Of course, there are complications.)

In Fallout 76 your mission is… um… to repopulate the Appalachian Wasteland? There’s also something about securing nuclear weapons and fighting the scorched? I’m not exactly certain.

Part of the problem, of course, is that all of the previous games had a fundamental story and you could, in theory, beat the game. Fallout 76 cannot be beaten. It can be explored. There are quests for you to follow and you can beat this or that quest. I’m sure that, eventually, I’ll secure the nuclear weapons and figure out how to deal with the scorched… but the game is specially designed to have you enjoy spinning your wheels.

Way back when, when I played Fallout 3, I found myself delighted by the richness of exploring the Capitol Wasteland and meeting new people and finding new storylines.

Fallout: New Vegas introduced “Hardcore Mode”. This introduced hunger, thirst, and sleepiness to the game. Like, you had to eat! You had to drink! You had to sleep! And so you had to do stuff like find stuff to cook and eat and much of what you made gave you a little bit of radiation poisoning. So you had to constantly balance your hunger, thirst, sleep, and radiation. Just like real life! And your stuff degraded as you used it! So you had to repair your guns and armor as you played! Just like real life! It felt like whenever you were going to go do a really big mission, you could prepare for it. Making sure that you were full and quenched and well rested and repaired made the game more fun.

Fallout 4 introduced “settlements”. You could build settlements and populate them and set up defenses so that when bad guys came, you could take them out. You could grow food and build shops and have different settlers in the town be assigned to work at the shops you built. I remember thinking that it was so difficult to find adhesive and when I discovered that you could make “Vegetable Starch” from stuff you could grow in town, I started a Vegetable Starch farm.

(I admit: It was around here that I thought “Man, this is a little too much. I just want to play Fallout.”)

Well… Fallout 76 is the culmination of all of the changes. Your equipment is constantly degrading. Your guns need to be repaired every few real-world hours. If you are in a prolonged battle, you will need to repair all of your armor. You also need to eat and drink and manage your radiation. Thankfully, you don’t *NEED* to sleep but you can get a “well rested” bonus to XP if you do. And, of course, you can build your C.A.M.P.s (Construction and Assembly Mobile Platform). (You don’t get NPCs, though. At least, *I* haven’t yet.)

As such, it felt like the mechanics of New Vegas were in service to the game, but the mechanics of Fallout 76 *ARE* the game.

In the first few games, you started out with all of your stats being 5s and you had 5 additional points to sprinkle around. You could have a handful of 6s, a couple of 7s, or maybe one single 10. In Fallout 4, you started with 3s in everything but you kept getting skill points as you went up levels. Eventually you could have 10s in everything, if that’s what you put your perk points into.

Well, in Fallout 76, you start off with 1s in everything… but you get a skill point when you go up a level. Here’s what my Level 27 character looks like:

You also get perk cards this time around instead of perks. The perk cards are kind of random, I guess (but you get certain ones when you hit a certain level… Expert Lockpicking comes at Level 19, rain or shine). You may wish that you had more cards to choose from, but you get the specially assigned ones when you go up a level and new ones at levels 4, 6, 8, and 10 and then 15, 20, 25, and every 5 thereafter. You stop getting attribute points at level 50 but you keep getting perk card packs every 5 levels in perpetuity.

Note: If you pay the money and subscribe to Fallout 1st ($12.99 a month or $99.99 a year), you can purchase a free pack of perk cards with in-game currency you earn by accomplishing little things like the following:

And not just that! Every day, you get a little prize. Maybe you’ll get a repair kit. Maybe you’ll get some scraps for your inventory (necessary to repair guns or armor). You also have access to an in-game bin where you can drop equipment and junk off and not be burdened with it. You’ll reach your carry limit pretty quickly, after all. Why sort through your stuff? Just dump it into the bin!

And that gets to the root of the problem. The game has a lot of little annoying things that get in the way of playing it. If you subscribe to Fallout 1st, however, you’ll be less annoyed. You get more stuff to repair with, you get more space to hold stuff, you get more perk cards. You get more stuff to do every day.

It’s not “pay to win”. It’s “pay to be less annoyed”.

I don’t mind playing it and I’m going to play it some more… but I don’t think I’ll be playing it for more than a month or two. I’ll go back to New Vegas and 4 because the point of playing the game, for me, is exploration and finishing a story. Just not, you know, maintenance.

That said, it’s a lot of fun to play with my friends. So, if you have a handful of internet friends to play with, play with them.

So… what are you playing?

(Featured image is the Perks screen for Jaybird’s character. All screenshots taken by the author.)