![]() ![]() But that progress feels like it’s constantly in jeopardy. The progress I make in Fallout 76, and the satisfaction I feel while playing, works a little like cryptocurrency - it only matters as long as everyone agrees that it has weight and value. Fallout 76 has offered the basic functionality of a working game only intermittently since launch. I don’t want to spend my few hours of daily gaming time fighting with connection issues I want to play a video game. Constant visual glitches further hurt our experience.įallout 76 just doesn’t work, and I mean that on the most basic level. While we could joke about it at the time - the common refrain was that anyone who couldn’t log in hadn’t properly sacrificed a goat while Mercury was in retrograde - the truth was that it wore us down. Frequent disconnections and other server issues made it hard to set up groups. Sometimes the ridiculousness of a broken game can be its own reward.īut that positive feeling didn’t last long. These parts of the game functioned well enough for us to be hooked, even though - and sometimes because - the game itself has massive issues. Building these characters, and the act of expressing our play styles through perk cards and the CAMP system, was enough to help me forgive Fallout 76 for many of its faults. It might not always feel like a Fallout game, but it can be a fun experience on its own terms. Fallout 76 server status series#The CAMP building system lets us take our character fantasy further one of us runs a humble shop for trading, even though trading currently requires that both players navigate an awkward series of menus, while I enjoy my riverside cabin with pictures of cats on the wall. We also travel with our gunsmith, who has a taste for dog food. My buddy, the alcoholic sniper who also acts as a doctor, provides cover. I’m the melee scavenger, often hip-deep in enemies and wildly swinging a spear. We are able to create unique builds for our characters with perk cards, which change how we approach the game and help us build a team. It works when we’re finding a building where a politician has given a speech, his only notes at the podium being a frantic “LIE!”įallout 76 could have been fun, but the game barely functioned. It works when I’m getting a group together to figure out the depths of a conspiracy, and while exploring hidden bunkers until we find ourselves confronting an Enclave AI, who happily welcomes us aboard. It works when I’m crawling through an abandoned prison or a government facility with my pals by my side. There are times when Fallout 76 works, of course. The problem isn’t with Fallout 76’s state at launch, which isn’t rare in modern online gaming, as much as it is with Bethesda’s inability thus far to make anything better - while making so much of the game even worse. Worse still, the company has been releasing patches that make things worse, introducing new problems and further demoralizing the player base. There are too many problems already, and too many of those problems are interconnected. The expectation is now set for Bethesda to turn things around with Fallout 76, or at least attempt to.īut the more I look at Fallout 76’s problems - and I’ve been playing, and continue to play, since launch - the fewer opportunities I see for Bethesda to save the game. This commitment has sometimes turned these games around, while earning back the trust of players who might have been angered by shaky debuts. Other developers over the past few years, including Ubisoft with Rainbow Six Siege and Hello Games with No Man’s Sky, have buckled down and committed to addressing launch-era complaints. Buckle in for a bumpy rideįallout 76’s rocky launch and subsequent negative reception has been well-cataloged, with problems ranging from the basic performance and utility of servers, to the thematic tone of the in-game nukes, and even the quality of merchandise released along with the game itself. ![]() And it’s becoming less clear whether Bethesda itself has an effective plan for how such a thing might be possible. I’m not sure how Bethesda is going to fix the game, to put it bluntly. ![]() The future of Fallout 76 depends on ongoing improvements to its current, broken state, but with every patch, Bethesda continues to move in the wrong direction. Fallout 76 is unique in one troubling way, however: Post-launch developer support has managed to make many of these problems even worse. I’m not surprised by this: I’ve played too many online games in their first weeks to expect perfection out of the gate. Fallout 76 was troubled during its beta period and suffered multiple issues throughout its extended launch. Fallout 76, Bethesda Game Studios’ first large-scale living game, was no exception. Online games often launch with problems that must be fixed, and fixed quickly. ![]()
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