 Back in August, it was still believed that Fallout 76's transformative Wastelanders update would release sometime in the holiday of 2019 window. And around then, I bought a copy of Fallout 76 on PC for 15 bucks. I wanted to replay the game in its new and improved state to get a baseline experience that I could then weigh against the major changes that were coming in the winter. I played a few hours before Wastelanders was delayed and other new releases came out. After playing all of the year's big holiday releases, I ended up going back to Fallout 4 for like 4 dozen hours and enjoying it quite a bit. And that got me thinking, why did I still enjoy Fallout 4 so much, even with all of its flaws as an RPG, yet I did not enjoy Fallout 76 at all? Had I been unfair? Had my opinion been unduly influenced by my expectations for the game, rather than what the game actually was? And perhaps most importantly, had the myriad of disastrously bad stability issues so ruined the game that I hadn't been able to experience what the developers had intended the game to be. So with Fallout 4 fresh in my mind, I decided to start a new character and play 76 a year after its release to see what worked, what didn't, and see if I could understand and justify my initial negative reaction to it. Or perhaps, I'd find that I'd given the game a bad rap unfairly. So today, we're going to give a fair shake to Fallout 76 a year later. We're going to look back at what it does well, we'll see what's improved and what hasn't, we'll try to understand why most players, myself included, enjoyed Fallout 4 more, despite the games having remarkably similar gameplay loops. And we'll try to give a bunch of examples of how Fallout 76 could have been better than it is. And I think it's important to say that I actually enjoyed my replay much of the time. There is still much of the core fun that exists in other 3D Fallout games, and it shines through in a lot of things. Fallout 76 has an interesting map, although it's too big. It's still fun to explore and it's still fun to loot things. The crafting is fun, the base building is good. When the combat is working, it can be relatively enjoyable, and the game lends itself to a type of slow exploration that's simply not a part of most other open world games. The Bethesda formula has not been wildly successful by mistake, there's something good there. But much to my surprise, many of the technical issues that were present at launch are actually not fixed at all. In its current state, it is still frustratingly broken. Quest markers disappear and require a restart or unselecting the quest, that happens all the time. This connects, or less frequent than launch, but it's still the least stable online game I have ever played, and there are several design decisions that absolutely break the game on a regular basis. But it's also easy to imagine a Fallout 76 that could have been an excellent game. Instead, it's still a game that can keep you playing, but it's also a game that simply doesn't play as well as the previous titles in the series, after the logo. I didn't have a YouTube channel when Fallout 4 came out, which is a real shame because I've come to realize the way you grow your channel is looking into making a good video about a controversial game right as it releases. All I can do is wait for the next catastrophe and practice my clickbait-y thumbnails, which I am admittedly not good at. In the meantime, I'll just continue doing what I've been doing, and that's making an honest effort to meet games halfway and judge them as fairly as I can. I bought an Xbox One specifically for two games, The Witcher 3 and Fallout 4. The Witcher 2 and Fallout 3 were two of my very favorite RPGs of the last generation, and Fallout New Vegas was probably my favorite game of the 360 era, period. So I bought an X1, The Witcher 3, and Fallout 4 at the same time. And I played Fallout 4 first because I like shooters more than any other genre. As I played it, I had a pretty great time. The writing and voice acting were as poor as any other Bethesda RPG, but the shooting had been vastly improved. The hugely expanded weapon modding system had finally given a significant, tangible reward to exploration, and the camp building was generally a fun diversion when it worked, which admittedly it often did not. Fallout 4's map was big, but not like heinously large, and its world design and environmental storytelling retained Fallout's creepy, depressing vibe. The improvement in gameplay, graphics, sound design, and looting were profound, making Fallout 4 the first Bethesda game that felt mechanically good to play. Had these improvements been paired with improved writing, quest design, and dialogue, Fallout 4 would have been amongst the greatest games ever made. Had these improvements been paired with writing, dialogue, and quest design merely as good as even Fallout 3, 4 would have been one of the generation's best games. But unfortunately, these tremendous improvements were paired with catastrophic steps back in RPG systems, leveling, progression, writing, quest design, and dialogue. Every one of the systems that Fallout has been loved for from the first game on saw significant decline. RPG systems became quite shallow and skyrimmified. They weren't bad, per se, they just weren't as good, but the writing, quests, overall story, and dialogue systems all were downright awful, straight up anchors dragging the rest of the game down to their level. So rather than being recognized as a triumph, Fallout 4 was rightfully judged as almost two separate games. The vastly improved shooter-looter exploration game and the downright awful quest and dialogue-based RPG. Sick with me here. I'm going over this because there was a point in Fallout 4 that literally maybe stopped playing and it had nothing to do with a moment-to-moment gameplay loop, and this will tie back to Fallout 76 in a moment. As I made my way through the story, I got more and more frustrated with the simplicity and stupidity of Fallout 4's factions and its stories. Now Fallout 3 and New Vegas weren't literary works of art, but they were interesting enough conflicts with factions that felt for the most part like believable parts of the cohesive world. While much of the supposed choice might have been a clever illusion in Fallout 3, the illusion was at least effective and I felt like the actions I took were actions that I had decided to take and could defend. And obviously New Vegas was just amazing, so let's just even leave that out. Fallout 4's factions were unforgivably lazy and poorly imagined. It doesn't take much imagination or effort to conceive of a more believable and defensible motivation for the Institute. It doesn't take much to imagine a more morally ambiguous outcome deciding with the Minutemen. This isn't about Fallout 4, but I'm just going to quickly demonstrate this. The Institute's motivations in Fallout 4 are literally never explained and their position, as such, is indefensible. The Minutemen are straight up good guys. How about this instead? In order to side with the Minutemen, you need to snuff out independent groups that want to govern themselves. Basically, the Minutemen would be a small, proto East Coast NCR. You would be trading independence for security. Siding with the Institute would be trading independence and justice for progress. The Institute would be choosing an unambiguous rule by technocrats, an aristocracy based upon IQ. The Minutemen would still allow more freedom and self-governance, but at the cost of a lesser standard of living. The Institute would provide a better life, but at the cost of any say in the government at all. See? I've made a harder choice now. Now the decision to help the railroad is actually hard because there are tangible, defensible benefits to siding with the Institute. Instead, Fallout 4 made this decision pointless because none of the factions were believable and none of them even had an ideology or a vision to choose from. You just kind of basically chose which NPCs you liked better and then you had to kill literally every other NPC on the other side. When I realized I was being asked to massacre every member of the other two factions, I stopped playing and I did not come back to finish it for months. That's how bad the writing, quests, story, and RPG aspects of Fallout 4 were. They were so bad they made me stop playing. And then I played The Witcher 3, which only made Fallout 4 look even worse in comparison. So why did I just go through all that in a video about 76? Well, because here's the thing. Up until the moment that the utter disaster of Fallout 4's story, NPC, dialogue, and quest design was fully revealed, I was having a blast. I was having such a good time, I was considering it one of the best games I had ever played. So if that's the case, it stands to reason that simply removing those aspects from the game would be a good thing, right? If Fallout 4 was great, the entire time you aren't engaging with its dialogue, story, or its quests, a Fallout game without those things should be excellent. And thankfully, we don't have to imagine that game. Fallout 76 is that game, and it demonstrates just how wrong that line of thinking actually is and was. Because even with a bad story, Fallout 4 still provides a ton of context to the player for their actions and it drives the player forward in a compelling way. Fallout 76 simply does not. The spirit of 76. When I play a game, I tend to try and identify what the driving vision was. What were the developers striving for? And most designs can make their way back to an easy elevator pitch. For example, what do you imagine the original 10 second pitch was for Destiny? Maybe… Halo, plus World of Warcraft, a light, casual-focused MMO blended with a first-class FPS. I think we honestly can trace Destiny back to that. Or for Borderlands. Hey, I've been playing Diablo a bunch, wouldn't a shooter Diablo be amazing? As I played Fallout 76, I noticed that its initial pitch, its vision, is muddled between two goals and it's impossible to know which one came first, although I kinda think I can guess. There was almost certainly this. We've got several of gaming's most valuable licenses, but we only have one game as a service. Let's make a Fallout game as a service. Then from a gameplay perspective, the obvious design pitch would have been this. Fallout is all about surviving the wasteland. What if we mixed Rust with Fallout 4 and made a light MMO survival Fallout game? That sounds fun. These aren't mutually exclusive of course, and at first glance, it probably shouldn't matter which of these design ideas came first. But then you play Fallout 76 and you realize just how important it actually is. Because if the original design decision was simply, we need a game's service title and Fallout seems like it would work best, then you're starting from a different place than, hey, what if we built an online survival game set in the Fallout universe? So let's explore that for a moment. If the initial pitch was, we need a game's service and Fallout is a good IP for that. You're starting from a different place than if the pitch was, know what would be fun, Fallout 4 and Rust blended together. Because here's the thing, the what if we built a new game that combines Fallout 4 and Rust, that is a compelling idea for a game. But to really make that work, you would have to re-imagine a whole bunch of things and build a new idea from the ground up. However, if the pitch is, we want a game's service Fallout title, you're starting with the game and thinking how you can most economically build it out. So one starting point has you building a game and seeing if there's anything you can bring over into your entirely new idea, and the other has you taking Fallout 4 and seeing what things you need to change to make it work as a grindy, always online games as a service. And sadly, you do not have to play 76 for very long to realize what the actual starting point was. Rather than building a new game and using Fallout 4 as a baseline for the gameplay loop, Fallout 76 started with Fallout 4 and tweaked things around the edges to fit it into the game's service model. This led to all sorts of seemingly small issues that take what could have been a fantastic game and make it a series of annoyances and inconveniences. As I replayed 76, I gave it as fresh and open a chance as I could as someone who really didn't like it at launch. And I want to make something clear. In this playthrough, I finally fully understood what the people who love this game see in it, and I will talk about those positives in a moment. But because the core idea behind the game is backwards, there are fundamental flaws that constantly interfere with 76 being the game it could have been if it had been designed more holistically, rather than as a very high-budget modding endeavor. Let's take a look at some of the biggest issues with the core of the game and see if we can understand why they are the way they are and whether small changes would have made a difference. Gameplay I'm going to start this section out with the undeniable positives that occasionally shine through with 76, because when the game is working, when it feels most like you're playing Fallout 4, it can still be a very entertaining game. The building, exploration, travel, crafting, and combat loop are relatively unchanged from other Bethesda open world titles. Fallout 76 can often feel good to play when everything is working like it should. I've often seen YouTube videos or Reddit posts asking how anyone could enjoy this game. Well, the thing is, Fallout 76's leveling and questing is so messed up, and I'll explain that later, but it can often make it a frustrating slog. But around level 40, things change dramatically. When you've finally leveled up enough that high-level mobs aren't spawning out of nowhere and killing you instantly or taking hundreds of rounds of your ammo to kill, the game finally starts to feel good. And the core gameplay is as satisfying as it was in Fallout 4, but let's dig a little deeper and see if we can figure out what's what here. On first blush, 76 and 4 have that same gameplay loop other than the grind being amped up to a billion in 76. I have a whole video, though, about the importance of adding context to player action that focuses on Borderlands 2 and how well that game drives you forward. And Fallout 4, for all of its many flaws, also does a pretty good job providing context and driving you on. Part of this is achieving a balance. Having only one quest at a time can lead to periods of boredom if the thing you're currently doing isn't particularly engaging narratively or mechanically. But if you have too many things going on at once, you end up with a similar but opposite problem. If you've got 10 quests running, you stop actually focusing on what you're supposed to be doing, and instead you're simply wandering around interacting with objects that are devoid of context every few minutes. Fallout 76 may have a similar moment-to-moment gameplay loop, and it even has similar quest design, but the presentation and design of the quests in 76 just robs the player of any compelling context for their actions. This is the result of the UI, the writing, and the way the quests are built and placed in the world. And like many other problems with 76, this is not the result of changing the Fallout 4 formula too much, as a result of failing to change things enough. All the modern 3D Fallout games have had the player wandering the map with one main quest and several smaller side quests active at any one time. The quality of those side quests varied greatly and were at their very best in New Vegas. But in general, the 3D Fallout side quests amounted to only a few variants. Go to a place and kill everything, and either interact with an object, engage in dialogue, or loot something and bring it back. All the previous games also used the classic RPG design of always having three goals running. You'll have very quick local quests that could be done immediately. Then the player has mid-range quests that require some time investment or travel to a new location. And then long-range quests that are so far away, the player reasonably assumes that they are long-term goals to accomplish when all the medium-length quests are finally directing them to that area. 76 sticks rigidly to this formula, apparently deciding that what's worked in the previous three titles will work here as well. But it doesn't work. At all. And there are a variety of reasons for that. The importance of people. Such was made of Fallout 76's lack of human NPCs and dialogue options when critiquing the game. With some defending the game by rightly pointing out the fact that Preston Garvey may as well have been a robot for all the character he displayed. And while Fallout 4's greatest problems all lie in its writing and characterization, it's also easy to forget that the game still had several interesting characters that kept things going. Nick Valentine, Hancock, Piper, dance, um, Pam, the kid in The Frigerator. None of these characters are great, but they're all at least adequate enough. Borderlands 2 is the game I chose for disgusting quest context, not because it's writing is spectacular like The Witcher 3, but because it is always interesting enough and memorable. Such a player behavior depends on real human psychology. So while getting a quest from Tiny Tina is functionally, technologically, and mechanically the same as getting it from a terminal or a holotape, the context matters. It is simply very, very hard to care about doing tasks for dead people. And when you strip that out, you're left only with the bare mechanics of the quests. Fall Out 4 was not very good at, and that 76 is just terrible at. When you pull character out of the equation, getting water from a stream, repairing a scorch detector, finding NPC's last holotape or launching a nuke are literally exactly the same. Without context, all you have is walking up and pressing E. Fallout 76's desire to have no living NPCs seems to have been a nod at a rust-like experience. The idea was that any human you see as a player. While that sounds like a reasonable thing to want to achieve, it fails to understand how that would work in a game that's going to have you questing, and why we enjoy quests as players. Tiny Tina's quest and the quests from All the Robot are two of my very favorite quests ever in a game, and both of them are simply navigating to a point in the map, killing a bunch of things, and pressing E on an item to bring it back. That is, functionally identical to the Free States quest line in Fallout 76. The reason we recall quests like that is because the characters were doing them for interest us, or amuse us, or affect us emotionally in some important way. 76 tries to have it both ways. It seems to understand that players will not quest exclusively out of terminals. It realizes that context or player action is crucially important, but it doesn't fully realize that psychology matters. One quest, finishing up a task that a dead person left unfinished, could easily be a memorable experience. Questing exclusively for dead people creates a kind of listless wandering that leaves a player without the important illusions needed for gameplay. We need to be led to believe that our actions have ramifications outside their mechanics. At least in an RPG, that is crucial. Because Fallout 76 doesn't have this, it can never achieve what even a mediocre RPG like Fallout 4 does. It is impossible to care about quests if the person giving you the quest doesn't care. And dead people don't care, so why should I? Again, let me sum it up. Without that context, without feeling like you're doing something for a reason, you feel like you're doing nothing. Like you're just wandering and waiting for XP to pop up. The other issue that arrives from this is twofold. One, without human NPCs to give quests, how do you let the player know what he needs to do? Certainly the previous games had its share of quests picked up from terminals and notes and holotapes. But only a certain type of player reads terminals, and only a tiny percentage of player reads them all. Fallout 76 decided it wanted no hub areas, no living NPCs, and no bounty boards for quests, so it arrived at what I guess is the obvious solution. Much of Fallout's gameplay, right from the first game on, relies on simply wandering the map, exploring locations. I mean, this is probably Bethesda's most rightfully lauded mechanic, because they are very good at making maps that are fun to explore, and make sense to use this as a means of delivering quests, I guess. But what seems like a good idea on paper, actually falls apart in practice. You see, Fallout 76 has a horrendous UI. Like, literally 33% of the screen is covered with obnoxious yellow writing, as a long list of quests takes up crucially valuable real estate on your screen. It is simply awful. You can turn these off by deselecting the quests from your quest log, but that results not only in the horrendous writing disappearing, but all quest markers disappearing. If you want to do a quest, you've got to live with this fucking mess on your screen. This is compounded by the fact that 76's quests are literally accepted automatically, simply by arriving in locations. As opposed to deciding to go get a quest, it just appears on your screen because you happen to walk by. That is terrible for building context with a player. How can I care about a list of things that just appeared on my screen? This serves to fully cement quests as context-free checklists that must be completed in order to make them mercifully disappear. And worst of all, this method of giving the player quests, rather than fitting nicely into the game's exploration loop, serves to terribly undermine it. The list creates a kind of constant nagging anxiety. No matter what you do, you cannot avoid the game giving you yet another quest while you're still working through the 11 things you've already got. Your only choice is to ignore them or be constantly and infuriatingly sidetracked. Many players check off quests like tasks. It feels good to clear out your quest log. It gives a feeling of pride and accomplishment. And it serves the function of kind of bringing order to the chaos of the game. There was a long list of tasks, and I methodically checked them off one by one before deciding that I can go get some more. Fallout 76 robs you of this. Its exploration just deluges you in an endless stream of nagging. Passing a building presumptuously fills your quest log and your screen with quests constantly tugging on your sleeve. People despise Preston Garvey's. Another settlement needs your help, radiant quests. If you Google it, you'll see thread after thread of people trying to figure out how to stop Garvey from giving you these quests. Fallout 76 is all Preston Garvey. You actually kind of can avoid those radiant quests, I think, by making sure you never get in Garvey's line of sight. It's annoying and forces you to kind of abandon sanctuary, but it can be done. Fallout 76 doesn't give you this option. Simply walking the map, which again is Bethesda's most enjoyable mechanic, fills your screen up with low quality, low effort radiant quests, which is one of Bethesda's worst mechanics. It is a terrible way to assign the player tasks because it robs them of any feeling of agency. It treats you like a post-apocalyptic maid, dumping a never-ending sludge of context-free, menial tasks on the side of your screen that you're supposed to do for dead people. Worst of all, if you happen to be assigned a daily quest like this, it will appear on your screen every single day. Every single day in the game, I reject the quest that makes me shoot animals with a syringer to make them talk, and every time I log back on, the quest is back. How is that a reasonable thing? I cannot be the only one who finds that incredibly annoying. It pisses me off that the syringer is in my inventory, even if it doesn't have any weight. It just drives me crazy. I don't want this quest. Questing as Travel Alright, lamenting the problems that arise as a result of no human NPCs is not some grand insight, I understand that. Everyone pointed out what a tremendous mistake that was, and Bethesda obviously agreed as the Wastelanders update makes clear. Something that's a bit less obvious, but no less gameplay breaking, is how the player is pushed through a map in an open world game. Open world games have settled on a familiar structure, and that structure revolves around the quest hub. Fallout New Vegas will take you from Good Neighbor to Prim to Fort McCarran, etc. A game like The Witcher 3 leads the player to an area. That area will have a variety of quests to exhaust until the main quest line sends you to the next large hub area. In between there will of course be smaller areas with only one or two quests to complete and keep you busy as you navigate the world. And in a game like WoW, there might be several branching areas with different hubs depending on which direction you go. But in general, open world quest based games have the player arrive in an area and explore the surrounding zone while finishing up quests. Almost all of these quests will either be grouped in one spot, or will be close enough to each other to allow for a player to check off several in a row. Even Fallout 4, which actually tends to allow quite a bit of freedom to roam, still basically adheres to this formula. You'll go to Sanctuary, to Diamond City, you'll meet Hancock, etc. For some inexplicable reason that I honestly cannot figure out, Fallout 76 abandons this structure almost entirely, although not at first which makes it seem like they just forgot how to do things after the first area. After leaving the vault, Fallout 76 starts remarkably similar to all other games, aside from everyone being dead obviously. An immediate quest to follow the overseer will lead to a tutorial quest hub very similar to Megaton or Good Neighbor. Here, the game has you do a variety of very basic quests to familiarize yourself with Fallout 76's survival mechanics before leading you along to a series of locations. The problem very quickly arises however, that Fallout 76 doesn't want to have any sort of quest hub to consistently return to. Instead, the game just generally pushes you forward to the next location, and the next location, and the next location in a straight line. Even the few main hubs like the Free State Bunkers, or the Top of the World Restaurant, or Grafton, aren't really hubs in the traditional sense, rather than just larger locations that feature a main quest. Grafton, for instance, doesn't offer 7 or 8 quests to check off in the surrounding areas. It has one quest spread over a large area to the north. The Top of the World doesn't offer a wide variety of quests in NPCs. It has one NPC who sends you on one long chain of one quest after another with the weird radiant pop-up quests occasionally filling up your log along the way. This means the player never actually gets to really know an area of the map. You won't be traversing it back and forth exploring different spots. You just kind of pass through each area on your way to the next. But that's not the biggest issue with this strange choice. The biggest issue is how the quests are laid out on the map itself. For some reason that I cannot fathom. Fallout 76 not only doesn't have clusters of local quests to complete in each area, the one large quest associated with each zone will literally send you to every single corner of the map. Rose's chain will send you all the way to the very southern tip and then to the very eastern edge before sending you to the northwest and back. The Free States questline sends you all over the freaking map with no rhyme or reason at all. Not only is this just exhausting and frustrating as a player, it also is expensive because the game charges you for fast travel and it causes the game to groan under its terrible pacing. You never feel like you're exploring or working towards something. You feel more like you're on a never-ending walk with random map spots set as arbitrary destinations. Fallout 76 could be vastly incomprehensibly improved if there was simply a logical local layout to its quests. When you arrive in Grafton, you should be completing quests in that surrounding area before moving to the east and finishing quests there before moving to the north etc etc. Games all do this for a reason. Not only would this make the game feel denser and less cavernously empty, it would allow the player to actually get to know the map. Fallout 76 doesn't want you spending more than four minutes in any section of its world apparently. Right as you get to an area, you will find yourself being told to go to literally the other end of the map and then back for no reason at all. I honestly do not understand the design choice here. It doesn't seem to have any actual goal in mind. It's almost like the quests were randomly assigned locations. The game path feels almost completely not designed at all. Because of this change, you never feel like you're exploring or even questing. You feel like you're traveling and that's an entirely different experience. This even works against the game mechanically. The camp building mechanics in 76 are frustratingly buggy and restrictive. But even with those problems, it is still admittedly cool to build your house. The game lets you move your camp around, but this makes it feel like you never actually live somewhere. If the game had stuck to a more conventional structure, it would have vastly improved its leveling gameplay loop. You'd arrive in Grafton and pick up 5-10 quests that need to be completed throughout the entire central section of the map. As such, you would find a nice location somewhere in the middle and build your house where you would stay as you finished up all the quests the area had to offer. Finally, when the main quest told you, you would move off to the west where you'd find another nice spot on a cliff, set down your roots, and do it again, exhausting the area before moving on. The very mechanics of the building cry out for this kind of semi-permanence. As it is, currently there's no reason to ever get used to where you are. Your next quest step will send you the entire map away, meaning you'll end up needing to use your camp when you're down there, as you will inevitably become over-encumbered and unable to fast travel. These issues with quest design are huge. But now that we've brought up over-encumbered, let's finally get to the gameplay side of things. A multiplayer mod. Why does Fallout 4's combat feel? For the most part, quite fun. While Fallout 76's combat is genuinely either frustrating or boring, there are several reasons. And almost all of them boil down to the fairly ham-fisted way that 76 was adapted from 4 without fully committing to the changes that would have been needed. And a lot of this boils down to what this game is actually trying to be. At first blush, it is easy to see 76 as a typical MMO type game. But there's a huge caveat there. MMOs rely on real progression to consistently open up new gameplay styles. World of Warcraft is constantly giving you new spells, new professions, new ways to play. Its progression changes your abilities. It changes the combat. That is not 76. To be fair, Fallout games have always been much more gear-based progression, but this is far more of a survival crafting game than an RPG. But even there, 76 falls short of other survival games. Rust, or Arc, or Subnautica even, have a collection and crafting loop that offers a progression through the game. All of the 3D Fallout games were less about RPG progressions and more about real-time combat. They aspired to be shooters more than anything else. Well, the first two games were bad shooters, but Fallout 4 brought the combat forward enough to at least be an entertaining FPS if a simple one. Fallout 76 certainly has builds. I'm not trying to sell it short, but the vast majority of player progression boils down to passive stat buffs. Certain builds will increase melee or gun damage, but the base gameplay remains pretty stable. In Fallout 4, this isn't really a problem. Certainly the simplified RPG progression and build diversity wasn't a positive, but Fallout 4 had enough going on that the game did not live and die by its combat. Dialogue, story, quests, the forward momentum of a scripted narrative progression means the combat didn't feel like it was all the game had to offer. We've discussed the pacing and narrative issues of Fallout 76, but there are trickle-down effects of the game's narrative and quest failures. And that's the fact that Fallout 76 is all combat. When you eliminate one of the core pillars of your franchise, you're left only with exploration, looting, and shooting. That would probably be plenty if 76 had moved the combat forward and thought of interesting ways to bring more depth to the combat and gameplay. But unfortunately, precisely the opposite is true. There are several reasons that Fallout 76's combat ends up being both limiting, and more than occasionally frustrating, we'll take them one by one. Shooting feels bad. I consider myself a bit of a shooter connoisseur, if you will. I love shooters. I spent a bunch of time thinking about what makes some shooters so good and others not so good, and I've played like every shooter from the time they came out. It's like one of my things. I've already explained how even if Fallout 76's combat felt as good as Fallout 4's, and it does not for a variety of reasons we're about to touch on, but even if it was as good as Fallout 4's, it would still be an issue because of the sheer amount of combat you engage in in 76. With very few other things to really do and quests that amount to a series of non-descript tasks with little to no narrative payoff, combat is 76's main activity in a way it was not in the previous games, and without a satisfying VATS system, and no longer as any of the RPG variety that VATS had previously provided to the game. With this being the case, 76 would have needed to improve the combat by reimagining some parts of it, and by really committing to designing the game to be a fun shooter first. When we think of the best shooters of the last 20 years, there are things that we can identify that Fallout 76 lacks. Most great shooters create their fun with dynamic movement, interesting tools, and a kind of puzzle aspect that makes players react to target prioritization decisions and use the correct weapon on the target. The faster players make these decisions and change their plans under pressure, the more fun the combat generally is. Doom and Destiny both do this spectacularly well. Doom has a wide variety of enemies that all require different weapons, different movements, and different strategies to kill. Players can move fast, switch amongst a variety of very different weapons quickly, and make interesting decisions about what needs to be fought first. Destiny does the same thing with a smaller arsenal, but an even greater emphasis on movement and abilities. In both of those games, you are almost never simply standing still pumping shots into enemies and slowly whittling down a health bar, like literally never. Both games also have an excellent balance between melee enemies and ranged enemies that almost never use hitscan weapons. Finally, those games do a great job designing combat arenas that are fun to fight in and that provide variety to the gameplay just by being careful about what enemies spawn where. You can really see this just by watching clips of people playing both games. Watch what Destiny looks like to be played, watch what Doom looks like being played, watch what the combat in Fallout 76 looks like. Fallout 76 tends to spawn enemies randomly, so the quality of the combat encounters varies wildly depending on what the game spawns where. Fighting 10 super mutants in a building with a bunch of cover and rooms can be quite fun. Fighting those same mutants in an empty field is miserable because your only choice is stand still and shoot things making sure to heal when needed. Enemies are almost all insane bullet sponges in the early going. Movement is slow and clunky and has a limited sprint that literally prevents and punishes the player from moving around. The over encumbered mechanic can make combat atrociously boring if you're overweight. Switching weapons and reloading is unnecessarily slow and the game very very very rarely has you engaging more than one enemy type at a time. Almost every encounter in the game is against groups of the same enemies. There is no decision to make when you are fighting 9 ghouls or 9 mole rats or 9 super mutants and for the vast majority of combat encounters in 76 you will end up backpedaling either swinging your melee weapon or shooting an enemy 10 to 40 times one after the other until they are all dead. This happens far more often than it even happened in Fallout 4 because the vast majority of the enemies you fight don't have guns and even the ones that do still charge directly at you meaning cover isn't very effective. Bethesda Austin needed to actually innovate some of the combat mechanics to keep this interesting for dozens and dozens and dozens of hours. So what could have been done? Well they could have made small changes to don't really serve any purpose if the game is not really an RPG and this is not an RPG. What is the gameplay purpose behind the ridiculously slow weapons switch times? What's the purpose of the truly terrible reload speeds in early game weapons? Obviously it's an effort to make the RPG progression feel more satisfying but it's never good to have your progression be based around eliminating negative annoyances rather than providing positive benefits. Let's start with what I consider some small changes that wouldn't make the game all that different but would just make it feel better to play. Let's look at melee combat. Bethesda's games have always had floaty simplistic melee combat mainly because the games again at their core have been RPGs. There was less emphasis on making it feel good to swing a sword than on the systems behind what your sword does but again to be clear Fallout 76 is not an RPG anymore. It is a first-person combat game with light RPG elements. I can instantly think of a few ways that Fallout 76's melee combat could have been vastly improved extremely easily. What if instead of the slow clunky simplistic blocking mechanic that's held over from all the other Bethesda games Fallout 76 allowed you to simply hold the block button. So now you can use action points to hold your block up. Blocking an attack would drain even more of your AP and if you perfectly timed your block you'd parry and have a chance to make the enemy drop their weapon or break it. Now instead of simply having a button mashing melee system you'd have some actual skill and depth to the system. This could then be added to by upping the chance to stun or disarm based on stats and perks. Everything needed for a satisfying melee system is already in the game it just needed some imagination and changes like that are what's required to really make Fallout 76's core gameplay system its combat fun and give it some depth. There are tons of small changes like that that could have been made to more properly reflect the fact that 76 more than any other BGS RPG is actually a game focused almost entirely on combat. They could double the speed at which you can switch weapons and double the reload speed of most weapons and it would vastly improve the combat feel. Most weapons just feel really clunky to use half of them have these weird bugs around the reloading animation especially the single shot weapons like hunting rifles that stay zoomed in while you reload it makes you sick the game also drastically slows the character movement while you reload this wasn't in Fallout 4 as far as I can remember and it seems like a deliberate decision to try to kind of make combat harder if so it is a hilariously awful decision what this means is you spend just a ridiculous amount of time backpedaling and reloading your guns almost as much time as you spend actually shooting your damn guns it means that in many instances the very best strategy is literally kiting enemies around a tree or a car it is absurd I don't think the ridiculous amount of time it takes to reach out in your AP after sprinting is needed either. Vats is already kind of useless in ranged combat so it's rarely used I mean yeah you will occasionally use it to melee or for some of the more annoying enemies like bull rats or flying insects or when you get bored and just feel like doing it but for the most part 76 makes vats kind of pointless unless you like specifically speck into it as a result the AP mechanic is really more of a stamina system which again just serves to slow the combat down and make movement clunky and slow and boring rather than driving the player to make interesting decisions in combat Fallout 76 is all about managing and negating crippling restrictions rather than thinking about what weapon to switch to or which enemy to tackle first you're thinking about which gun reloads slightly faster and making sure you don't backpedal into a geometry object and get stuck and then there are several issues around enemy health enemy levels and just straight up combat bugs that are a problem I mean for instance that enemies that kind of keep healing themselves that's still in the game it's over a year later and a whole bunch of enemies will just heal themselves or not take damage it happens all the time every single play session that happens several times in a game where ammo is an actual resource that requires hours of work to either craft or find and I'm not talking about the legendary enemies which kind of have that same like mutation effects from Fallout 4 but the game just doesn't tell you about it they just get all their health back either way that is awful but I'm talking about just regular enemies that bug is still in the game beyond that enemies have such comical amounts of health that combat is just an outrageous resource sink 98 percent of encounters only serve to drain you of ammo and materials it's really not fun it only serves to make any fight against a large group or a ridiculously tanky enemy frustrating why plenty of games have challenging combat without outrageous health pools on normal mobs and this problem is just amplified to a disgusting degree by how the game handles enemy levels which is to say comically badly single player system multiplayer game Fallout 76's combat is never great because it's simply limited mechanically by its RPG roots but once Fallout 4 created a competent shooter a decision point had been reached either the game was an rpg and we need depth added on top of the now adequate shooting or it was going to have to be a good shooter requiring changes to stamina sprinting movement speed etc all those things we just talked about but instead there really are no changes you're left with this very random mish mash and even worse there is a garbage remnant of Bethesda single player design that absolutely pollutes Fallout 76's leveling grind in previous Fallout games enemies generally scaled with the player each area would have a level range at which enemies could spawn around you so if you went to a high level area early you would spawn very tough enemies but progressing through the intended path would generally produce a very smooth experience with enemies spawning at or around your level but Bethesda has also always had enemies scale along with you to keep a consistent challenge so like returning to low level areas would spawn enemies at your level basically anytime a player entered an area the game would spawn enemies in that area that were leveled appropriately to be fun to fight it's why a bandit at the end of the game is tougher than a dragon at the beginning of Skyrim this is a common system and it works very well in a single player game it's fine it's perfect but Fallout 76 is not a single player game knowing that they were not making a single player game it was incumbent upon Bethesda Austin to evaluate how enemies spawn and scale in their game unfortunately it's clear that they like just simply didn't just didn't just like in every other Bethesda open world game enemies scale with you within a certain range and just like previous games all the enemies in an area spawn at an appropriate level for the player who spawns them in by entering that area which means as a player leveling through the campaign you will constantly be confronted with enemies 30 to 50 levels above you these encounters are so horrifically bad it's impossible that anyone testing the game came up against them and thought it was a fun gameplay experience as a level 22 player fighting five level 64 ghouls there is simply nothing you can do fallout enemies are already not terribly interesting to fight but when they can kill you in two swipes give you a disease and take 300 rounds from a 50 caliber machine gun it is just downright unplayable Fallout 76 is a game all about resource gathering your weapons break your ammo runs out your healing and survival all require you to use resources and these fights leave you two options exit the game and repeatedly try new servers until you get appropriately leveled enemies or use literally hours of resources on these encounters that are just toxically unfun because the game just doesn't have the tools to deal with these encounters using skill or strategy you can only brute force your way through them now this is not something that hasn't been solved by other developers destiny scales enemies to each individual player at a public event someone who's a 900 power level and a 500 power level will fight the same enemy scales properly to each of them Borderlands 3 does the same thing as does World of Warcraft it not only prevents the total mess the fallout 76 is it allows friends who are wildly different levels to play together get the right amount of XP and fight enemies that are properly leveled to feel good to fight this alone is one of the most amazingly bad design decisions the game has once you get to level 43 or so the game suddenly starts to feel good because even when high level enemies spawn they are still manageable but up until that point the game swings wildly from good to just terrible all because Austin didn't want to bother addressing this obvious issue and if new players come back for Wastelanders oh man they are in for just a disastrously unfun time wrapping up okay let's wrap this up by thinking ahead to Wastelanders and trying to suss out if the game's problems will be solved by this big update on one hand simply having an actual campaign with NPCs and factions will make the game less of a slog to get through and again 76 can absolutely be fun to play when you're playing one of the game's rare good quests and one of its good dungeons and you're lucky enough to have spawned properly leveled enemies it's easy to get into a groove and lose hours of the game but many of the core issues simply can't be addressed in an update the idea behind fallout 76 is quite a bit better than it seems when the game is pissing you off crafting survival base building a large interesting map to explore all these things just work and they feel as good as they ever have but there are so many other problems that are deeply baked into the design that nothing will ever really be able to fix them other than a sequel reading notes and terminals which is awesome in the other games one of my favorite things to do but in fallout 76 it's just unpleasant because the game doesn't pause so it never feels safe to read a note or a terminal and if you're playing with other people you have to tell them to shut up that takes half of fallouts narrative and renders it kind of useless and that's not going to change for wastelanders enemy scaling I assume isn't going to be retrofitted out of the game so anyone coming back is guaranteed a frustrating combat system much of the time until they get to level 50 or so the game takes dozens of hours longer than any other fallout to start giving you weapons that are all fun to use so the one to level 20 leveling experience will still be frustrating or boring or both the addition of an actual campaign will at least kind of help cover up the problem that this is a combat focused game with combat that isn't that fun but I mean for instance the perk card system still sucks why do I need to equip a lock picking card and then unequip it or a hacking card and unequip it it's so poorly thought out and implemented all of these things the perk card system all these systems need to be completely reimagined and designed and fixed preferably making lock picking hacking ammo crafting gun crafting how all those things be passive unlocks that always stay equipped my god man or at least give us card loadouts Jesus fallout 76 though is a game that could very well have been excellent and replaying it I do finally see what the developers were imagining they were going to have but with so many systems ported unchanged from a single player game it's also in many ways hopelessly compromised even with all that what's here is easily worth $30 I think it can certainly be fun and although sometimes goes several hours without any of its disastrous issues showing when you're creeping through a dungeon with all the games excellent ambient music and sound it can be just as engrossing immersive and enjoyable as the other games but then you'll have 45 minutes where all the quest markers break an invisible enemy spawns behind you and kills you your crafting table won't work or five level 60 ghouls will kill you repeatedly as you break all of your weapons taking them out I'm glad I played it again because I was finally able to fully understand what the players who love this game see in it and there is something worthwhile here for sure and this might all boil down to your ability to tolerate all the clearly broken or poorly designed aspects long enough to out level all the garbage and finally just get to the point where you can wander explore and loot things if you're the kind of person with a high tolerance for frustration maybe coming back fresh for wastelanders isn't a crazy idea if you can get the game for under $35 I mean I'll certainly be back having it a shot but there's no getting around just what a shame it is this game wasn't given another year or two or all the time it needed to actually achieve its vision NPCs won't fix all the compromises that were made to this game's core along the way it'll be fun to watch them try though all right thanks for coming see you next time bye fucking take two fucking a man