 Hey everyone, before we get to it I want to take just a few seconds for some housekeeping. I am happy to report that I am rapidly approaching my goal of 1000 subscribers and I want to sincerely thank all of you who watch and comment and subscribe. There are a good amount of comments these days and I try to respond to as many as possible though I know I am not awesome at that, so please do continue to leave comments as I enjoy the back and forth with all you guys. To celebrate my 1000 subscribers, in my next video I will be mailing anyone who emails me their address One Oreo Cookie via first class mail. While supplies last I'm not fucking made of Oreos. Also I've got several videos in the pipeline. I want to talk about Final Fantasy 7 and why I think it's not nearly as good as the reviews seem to imply. I'll talk about Neo2 and I'm still going to get to a response video about my spec offs critique. Alright, let's get to the topic at hand. I've made, I think, three videos about Fallout 76. I did one about how awful the beta was right after it released. Then I did a review after the game came out and I played for about 30 hours. Finally, a couple of months ago I came back and played on PC one year after the game it released. I titled that video an honest replay one year later and that's what I set out to do. To give the game a totally fair shake one year out. Getting that video made, I played the campaign all the way through, fired the nukes, killed the Scorched Beast Queen, finished progression by maxing out my special stats and got to the end game. You can check that video out here if you want but long story short I discovered that I could understand what people who loved Fallout 76 saw in the game and can occasionally evoke all the things people love about the 3D Fallout games as well as be a low stress MMO light that allows players to just wander around a huge map collecting stuff and making their own fun. And the truth is there were hours where I genuinely enjoyed my time with the game but there was also no denying that it was still deeply flawed and that the lack of NPCs and a coherent quest system as well as a ton of bugs and bad combat meant the game could swing wildly from relaxing to frustrating to boring. With the release of Wastelanders Bethesda Austin set out to fix one of the game's most glaring issues by adding some Fallout into Fallout 76. I've seen generally quite positive press about this update which I find kind of surprising because while the game is certainly improved it's still pretty subpar. It just never feels quite right even with the structure of a mainline 3D Fallout added in. While playing through the Wastelanders update I kept asking myself why the game still felt so off and ended up figuring out that there are just several things that will always make 76 difficult to love. Today let's take a final look at Fallout 76. Let's give the game a final verdict about what it does well, what it does badly and why even though it's certainly improved it's still the least enjoyable Fallout game since tactics. We're going to keep this as short as I possibly can. I don't want to spend an hour repeating myself but still we'll have to talk about story gameplay and performance on our way to figuring out if Fallout 76 is finally worth your time and money after the logo. Wastelanders I'm going to be upfront here. I always completely finish a game before I write one of these reviews. In fact, I usually play it at least twice which is why my videos take several weeks after a game's release to be posted. And while I've put over 100 hours into Fallout 76 across two platforms and both completed the main campaign and the main campaign of the new update I quit three times while playing Wastelanders and had to really push my way to the end so that I could write this video fairly. There was no way in hell I was playing it again to do the final mission from the other perspective and I'm not going to do the post-campaign gold grinding or finish up the companion quests. I simply do not have it in me. In fact, I wrote most of this script with the idea that I wasn't even going to finish the updates campaign but then I felt guilty and I forced myself through to the end. I'll explain the reasons why I quit but for now let's just say it's the result of the game's core design interacting with bugs and terrible server stability in such a way as to make me so pissed off I could not continue without risking a stroke. I am very proud of myself for finishing it up to begin with and I think it's perfectly fair to give my impression of the campaign without grinding the end game. With that out of the way, let's get to the update. I generally don't do story synopsis in my analysis videos. I'm not one of those channels. I figure if you've played the game you already know it and if you haven't I don't want to spoil it for you. Plus, in most games the story is both the weakest and least important part of the package. Doom Eternal or Resident Evil 3's story isn't all that important either way really. But the new Fallout 76 update is basically all about adding a conventional story back into the game. As such there is really no way to discuss whether the update is a success or not without taking some time to actually talk about the story here. Aside from the new campaign Bethesda Austin apparently made some changes to the original story with this update but there was no way I was rolling a new character for this video. The early leveling experience of 76 is awful because the game is disgustingly slow to give you decent weapons and the carry capacity changes make the early game horrendously worse than any of the previous titles. Plus its enemy scaling is flat out broken which will touch on in the gameplay section. So because I didn't start a new tune I can't speak to how much improved the game is by adding some NPCs into the original campaign. I tend to doubt it can be all that much better because all the factions are still dead and the main quest is still scattered illogically all over the map but I imagine it is slightly better. Still all I can really comment on is the introductory quest you get at the wayward bar, a couple of companion quests, the overseer's new quest, and the main faction quest which I did both sides of all the way to the end when you have to pick one faction over the other. With that said, what's up with the story? More Fallout 4 than New Vegas. To decide whether the new story is a success we need to first acknowledge something. Bethesda game studios open world titles generally have either average or slightly below average stories with Fallout 3 probably fairing the best of all of them because it has a wide variety of interesting characters and good stories in its side quests. Bethesda open world games aren't built around their story which is why people like Joseph Anderson said Fallout 4 would have been better with no story. Newsflash that was as I commented on his video at the time hilariously wrong. A bad story is better than no story in the same way that liver and onions is better than famine. The solution to a shitty story and dialogue system is a better story and dialogue system, not no story and no dialogue. Anyway, BGS open world games and we're not counting New Vegas obviously but BGS games only really work because the total package works. You can look at a game like Doom Eternal and say the combat and levels here are so good it can carry the game on its own or The Witcher 3 and say the writing and quest design alone are worth a price of admission. That has never been the case with the house that Bethesda built. Nothing in any of these games is good enough on its own to carry a title and in many ways all of them from oblivion on end up being more than the sum of their parts. BGS games tend to be better designs than their critics admit and they're often a fine balance of free form exploration, looting, combat, world building, map design, text and audio logs and story. This is why Fallout 3 and 4 both work well with extremely different flaws and strengths. They each have a bunch of systems that are good enough and when taken together they make for enjoyable games. Unfortunately Fallout 76 ends up being a game that is much less than the sum of its parts because literally every single aspect of the design is a step back even as the story which is much much smaller is basically on par with other BGS titles. The story in Wastelanders has some good moments and some that are silly or boring. It has some good characters but like all of the Bethesda open world games it also has some moments where the voice acting is almost painfully amateurish. Like the acting on Tiny Teen I mean Ra Ra. Here watch this. In previous games Bethesda could easily get away with moments like this because they were large enough narratively that the adequate often outweighed the poor but because they're simply not all that much story here the lows stick in your memory in a way the lows of Skyrim don't. The amount of named NPCs and dialogue in 76 has been greatly increased because you can only go up from zero but it's still woefully small in comparison with every other BGS game of the last 15 years. I was so disappointed when I arrived in each of the faction settlements and saw that 90% of the residents were named settler or raider. More disappointing the few times you actually meet a named NPC you quickly realize they have almost nothing to them. In previous games almost every character had a surprising amount of dialogue options. Even random NPCs you stumbled across had something to say. In Fallout 76 only quest givers can even be talked to and there are surprisingly few. I'd be shocked if there were even 10. Any named NPC you see is little more than a quest giver with almost all of them offering only two or three lines of dialogue. If you thought you were getting New Vegas or even Fallout 3 where there were dozens and dozens of NPCs you could talk to and go down a hole of dialogue options to provide character and history and world building you'll be disappointed. There is almost no worthwhile dialogue outside of quest dialogue. What you've got here is basically Fallout 4's dialogue system using Fallout 3's UI. And to be honest while it uses the older Fallout text box it provides even less information than conversations in Fallout 4 did. The amount of times you get a long list of options to explore is dismal. I understand that only so much can be expected from one year of development but what's here feels less substantial than what you would expect from one of the bigger Fallout DLC's. And frankly with all of the systems and map already designed I expected more. Listen blood and wine puts this thing to shame and both quality and quantity obviously. But what's here is also less than lonesome road or point lookout or old world blues or far harbor. I think it's less substantial than Nuka World frankly which is why I would simply prefer that companies cut the shit with free DLC and just charge for big expansions like they used to. As to the story itself well we'll talk about how the quests are designed in a moment but as to the story being told it's one of those things where it's achingly close to actually being interesting but fails because it focuses on the least important parts of its narrative. Wastelanders focuses on two factions that have returned to West Virginia to find a rumored treasure that was hinted at in the base game a few times. You'll spend the early game here finding out that the treasure is the United States gold reserves and we've got to talk about this because I find it very odd. The two new factions which can best be described as the builders and the raiders want the reserves for different things. Foundation the builders supports using the reserves to create a new gold backed currency the raiders want the gold to buy stuff with and right off the bat the story has a fatal flaw. Neither of these ideas makes any sense at all because gold would be nearly value-less in the post apocalypse and rebuilding a currency is impossible in these circumstances. Currencies as we know them today aren't based upon intrinsic value. They are symbolic creations based upon trust. In antiquity currency existed but they were always coinage minted from precious metals. Gold and silver coins were the currency because gold and silver had intrinsic value by both being extremely rare and being coveted for their decorative value. This is why the european settlers used wampum as the currency for trading with native american tribes who didn't value gold and silver. It served the same function a relatively rare decorative item that was desired by the wealthy to denote status. Almost all currencies were based upon this value. Roman coins were gold silver and copper because all of those metals were both rare and had decorative status functions. Even in the 20th century when modern nation states had moved to the gold standard the reason a dollar kept its value was because a people could trust that the gold the dollar represented existed and that the nation backing it wasn't going to collapse into insolvency and b because gold was still highly desirable and fairly rare. Gold had industrial uses and it was still extremely important for decorative uses to denote class and status. Literally none of these things holds true for Appalachia 25 years after a nuclear apocalypse. Gold as an item has almost no industrial use anymore because industry is gone. It would no longer be rare because millions of tons of it exist out in the world in the form of jewelry on corpses or in mines and smelting facilities. Most importantly there isn't even a real society based on class and status anymore. Nobody in post-war Appalachia would trade a can of dog food for 100 pounds of gold or two assault rifle clips for a Rolex watch and of course there's no government to back the idea of a symbolic currency. Hell there's not even any tribal trust. There's nothing. Creating a gold standard currency would be needlessly complicated politically destabilizing pointless impossible and ridiculous. This would be item 4000 on your list of important society building measures. How would you know that someone on the other side of the state valued gold enough to give you water? You wouldn't because there's no trust or stable society that needs gold as a currency. Now how would you know that someone out in the wasteland would accept your paper currency that represented a fixed amount of gold they couldn't see held by people they didn't know? It makes no sense and leaving aside the absurdity of creating a symbolic trust-based currency that represents held gold there's one other huge problem with this being the main story. The wasteland has a currency. The fact is Appalachia is using caps as a currency. Let's just leave aside the retconned broken lore aspect of caps being the currency in Appalachia on the east coast for a moment. What's brilliant about the original Fallout universe is that caps as a currency makes sense. It is a very rare item that cannot be recreated or forged. It doesn't rely on some central authority being willing to redeem your caps for a useless and no longer rare medal. It can be found and collected but not in quantities big enough to devalue the currency. Caps is a vastly superior currency to the one you're supposed to be creating here in this update. No problem is solved by replacing caps with a symbolic gold standard. In fact, huge new problems are created. What happens to people's caps? How will caps be exchanged for this new currency? Why would anyone trust you enough to give you their caps for your paper money? See all the holes in the story? Basing the entire story and campaign around this idea is insane to me. Who thought it was a good idea? Simply having the vault be a strategic oil reserve or gasoline reserve or better yet a food and medicine depot would have been far more interesting and realistic. Now maybe this doesn't matter to you but all I'm saying is when the entire plot of your campaign makes no realistic sense it kind of ruins it for me. What people like me love about Fallout is that it often is an honest attempt to examine what a post-apocalypse America would look like. The isometric games were amazing at this, and the 3D games were at their best when they were doing this. So it's highly disappointing when the Plotma Guffin of Wastelanders is barely thought out and shows a very poor understanding of currencies and societies and doesn't do a good job grounding me in a real post-apocalypse America. Which again is literally what Fallout is about. If you're going to write an entire campaign around setting up a new currency you'd think someone who wrote it would really think about that. Hell you'd hope they'd spend at least a couple of weeks reading and doing a bunch of research about currencies and societies and how they come into being and if they had their heart set on making this be about setting up a new currency. The way to do that was to make the campaign about creating trust in a central authority. Setting up a functional sovereign government and then getting everyone to agree to it because unless everyone agrees to your currency it is useless. If there's any chance at all that I cannot turn my dollar into beans I am not going to keep my wealth in dollars. I will keep it in beans. This is why Metro's ammo currency is brilliant and works and this here is a total mess that makes no sense and pisses me off. It is literally absurd which is why a story about creating and choosing the leaders of an Appalachian NCR would have been a much much better story than what's here. What a wasted opportunity man. Unfortunately the truth is that the writers didn't want to write a story about new societies and how people are adjusting to the wasteland and moving on to rebuild their culture. You know the really interesting parts of the Fallout universe. Nope the writers here wanted to write a heist story. Unfortunately they simply didn't have enough imagination to realize that stealing gold is a waste of everyone's time. Either way as I said the most interesting part of this story should be the choice. Even if I pretend that I don't understand how currency works and just imagine it's actually a food and medicine depot the interesting part of this campaign isn't the race for a stash of stuff. What's potentially interesting is the ideological differences of two factions and choosing who you want to put into a leadership position in the new society that's being built. Such a shame then that the factions are boring and lifeless and the missions you do for them are generally pretty forgettable outside a few that are classically good Fallout. In the update you're presented with two factions that are not ideologically interesting. You've got the Raiders who admittedly are cleverly presented as being populated by at least some people who are once wealthy like the former Raider leader you learn was actually a ruthless corporate executive. That seems like the setup for a Fallout New Vegas style examination of class and ideology and who you think would best be able to govern the wasteland. You can have an idealistic effort at recreating a democratic group with the builders and complete rule of the strong autocracy with the Raiders. But the game only even barely touches on this and only with the Raiders and to be honest I think I might have imagined some of it. While both sides have some fun characters the actual societies are boring and unexplained. The foundation doesn't even seem to have a governing ideology. Building isn't an ideology and the builder faction has literally nothing interesting going on. What's worse is the game fails at even attempting to let the Raiders make a compelling argument for their way of life beyond fuck yeah because we can. Another tremendous wasted opportunity. The reason New Vegas is amazing is because even though Caesar is a villain his position is completely defensible. Hell not only is it defensible it's quite possibly correct. You could easily argue that because society had failed it needed to go through all its stages again. Caesar argues that the world simply isn't ready for democracy again and his proof is in the pudding. He's winning therefore his system is better. The conversations with him are fantastic because they're smart, compelling and demonstrate that the Raiders really thought through the ideology of their factions. In Rome I found a template for a society equal to the challenges of the post-apocalyptic world. A society that could and would survive. A society that could prevent mankind from fracturing and destroying itself in this new world by establishing a new Pax Romana. Caesar is totally upfront and incredibly eloquent in the defense of his system. He makes no effort whatsoever to hide his brutality. He presents it as a logical and coherent choice that a leader can make. There's no denying that the legion is less corrupt. It's more able to be responsive to threats. Its brutality means it's less likely to be opposed for any length of time and is better positioned to defend its interests. And the slave economy is a net positive for their faction even though it's repellent ethically. The fear of being enslaved means many smaller enemies simply won't risk fighting and losing. Which is exactly the hammer diplomacy the real Rome used. The legion is better able to ensure order through fear and it's got the ancient rites of conquest on its side. The NCR is who I generally side with because it's where I'd want to live but they manage to show just how difficult and slow their system is. They have no way to explain away the hypocrisy of forcing people into a representative system by violence. They're not morally coherent and they also can't offer the benefits of militaristic totalitarian rule because they lack the brutal efficiency of Caesar's one-man rule. Mr. House's technocratic corporate rule is an interesting middle ground between the two. Not as authoritarian as a legion but more willing to impose order than the NCR and backed up by centuries of western philosophy surrounding free markets and rational self-interest. It's this willingness to tell a story about complex factions that seem real that makes New Vegas better than Fallout 3 even with constant crashes, very similar gameplay and a more boring map. Fallout 76 has the factions to tell this kind of story and it sort of seems like that's what it's going to do but eventually it ends up spending too much time sending you on fetch quests and not enough time having you talk to people and factions. They didn't bother to think through much less right dialogue about these obvious questions a player who loves Fallout would have. And remember this very problem is one of the biggest complaints players had about Fallout 4 and what's worse unlike Fallout 4 here the amount of side quests dotted around to keep you distracted from the main quest is very small almost non-existent. The campaign here takes many many hours but that's only because the game is so poorly designed in other ways. The fact is that while adding NPCs and story into Fallout 76 improves it quite a bit it doesn't solve the game's many other issues and the story here isn't good enough to mask those issues. There is a fantastic dungeon that has you trying to recruit a ghoul who's created rooms of elaborate suicide machines and it is great. There's a mission where you create a robo-brain and that's really great even though it's annoyingly short. You do a mission with the overseer where you solve a mystery as part of a vault tech student simulation also great. These missions are the kind of thing that keep you playing a Fallout game. They are perfect examples of the best of Bethesda Fallout and they're just spread out enough here to give you something great right at the moment you start getting pissed off at how shitty and boring it is. In any of the previous titles these would be three out of dozens of really good unmarked side quests you'd stumble upon. Stumbling on quests like these are the game's main strength but here these are the main quest and there are only a handful that are more involved than go kill 45 ghouls and grab a thingy from the desk. Several of the characters are funny and charming though some are awful and the time Fallout 76 pokes fun at Fallout 4's main quest it had me chuckle out loud. Now go! Hurry! No time to wander wasteland doing stupid things while little child is in trouble. But again moments like this are very rare. In the end you've got a story and a dialogue system that's far closer to Fallout 4's base campaign than to Fallout 3 or Far Harbor and it is miles from New Vegas and it's amazing DLC. Fallout 76 is better for having this very short very predictable very very simple story but the story isn't even close to good enough to make playing Fallout 76 worth your time to say nothing of your money. Questing and shooting. This merely annoying short and below average story and dialogue system might not be that big an issue if the other systems made up for it. I am always harping on preferring quality over quantity after all and I stand by my assertion that Fallout 4 is an excellent game even as it's a shitty narrative RPG. Fallout 4 failed miserably at plot narrative and dialogue but it absolutely excelled at combat crafting building and map and dungeon design. Fallout 4 could be every bit as immersive and entrancing as Bethesda's very best work. Unfortunately Fallout 76 has a raft of issues that make it worse than Fallout 4 in every way. Literally every way there is not one single system or design element that isn't a step back from Fallout 4. Let's start with my biggest gripe outside of its continued brokenness. It's pointlessly grotesquely huge and tonally boring map. When you've got very few NPCs and sidequests and only one main quest and you randomly sprinkle them throughout a huge fucking map and ends up badly compounding the same problem that this game has always had. It's too spread out and empty feeling and most important of all which I only realized playing this update as I struggled again to figure out why it just felt off this map feels much more like Skyrim than Fallout. Fallout 76 in its base game has the most awfully designed quests I've ever experienced as I went over in detail in my last one hour plus video on the game a few months ago. This leaves aside the fact that quests and waypoints break at an astonishing frequency mind you. I'm not talking about that yet. I'm talking about how the quests themselves are placed within the world. Fallout 76 lays its quest out in the world in the same way that Fallout New Vegas or 4 does. That is to say the quest seemed to have been designed and then simply placed all over the map to get you traveling around. This works in previous games because the map is big but not horrendous and more importantly those maps are overflowing with interesting characters, quests, dungeons, and combat. So even though New Vegas early on has you traveling quite a distance for quests it knows that along the way you'll be sidetracked over and over as you engage in the excellent side quests and dungeons you stumble across. Even still New Vegas at least has each quest location seem logically placed in a somewhat linear progression across the map. The waypoint may be far away but it'll at least be reachable on foot. The previous games also succeeded with this formula of long travel times because and this is important fast travel is free. The unfortunate fact that none of these things are true and Fallout 76 is yet another example of the failure to fully adjust the Bethesda formula to this new genre of game because Fallout 76 isn't an RPG. It's got story and dialogue now but only the bare bones of it and the vast vast vast majority of the world is still inhabited by ghouls and scraps of paper. No Fallout 76 is a survival crafting combat game an online one. Those three systems for good and ill are the core of the design which means that when all is said and done resource and inventory management are the base systems the experience is built upon. Now this is also somewhat true in Fallout 4 and I've said I really like that game still but the difference is in the grind that is baked in here. The end game of Fallout 4 is finishing the campaign. As such the game is generous with ammo and crafting materials after the first couple of hours. Fallout 76 needs to keep you playing forever to make sure you spend $18 on power armor paint and as such it is a miserly fuck when it comes to ammo and crafting materials. I am a veteran FPS player who finds the melee combat in Fallout games abysmal. It's simply awful, floaty button mashing garbage and yet I played mostly melee because the sheer grotesque amount of time required to farm and craft ammo is sickening or you can buy it for five caps per round. In a game or a single dungeon or scorch bees can take a thousand rounds to defeat. What does this have to do with quests you're thinking right about now? Well in Fallout 4 when you get a quest and notice it's halfway across the map it is perfectly reasonable to set your waypoint and head in that direction detouring any time you see something interesting. In fact the entire core of the experience is that self-directed exploration. That's the magic fucking sauce that makes Fallout and Elder Scrolls work. It's the fun of just wandering around finding cool shit discovering interesting lore and side quests and fighting monsters. But when you make it so that any combat encounter you come across is likely to cost you money materials and half your ammo you are much less likely to simply walk across the map. You can't afford it so instead you do this over and over and over and over and because Bethesda Austin realized at some point that the way quests were laid out meant that people wouldn't want to walk to their destinations they decided to incentivize that exploration by charging you outrageous amounts of money to fast travel. I'm talking like 20% or more of your money in the early game and you know what I still always fast travel because every fight is annoying and grating as you watch each super mutant take 8% of your ammo and make you use a stim pack that you will need to farm 30 minutes to replace. The outrageous farming and stinginess of the game when it comes to ammo and materials directly opposes the core appeal of the game which is unfettered exploration. See that mountain you can go there but you should fast travel because you'll end up getting there with no ammo no food and a broken gun otherwise. Fallout 76 Wastelanders changed nothing from the base game in this regard which just stuns me. Quest markers are literally all over the fucking map. There was one sequence so fucking egregious I actually wrote it down because it blew me away how awful it was or look at this fast travel loading screen enter new hukola plant loading screen five minutes of combat fast travel the foundation loading screen walk the building loading screen 15 second talk with page fast travel to vault 76 loading screen fast travel to talk to the Raiders loading screen 10 second conversation fast travel back to vault 76 loading screen fast travel to overseas house loading screen enter overseers house loading screen talk for 10 seconds fast travel to vault tech university loading screen enter vault tech university loading screen that's one series of steps in a quest and these steps are literally each on the entire other side of the map from each other. So what that list boils down to is this. Seven fast travels and 11 loading screens to talk to three NPCs for a total of 30 seconds and engage in four minutes of combat before finally ending with a long interesting dungeon. The series of events that list represents isn't remotely rare. You will spend a truly stunning amount of time fast traveling and entering a building to talk to NPC or pick up one item and go back. It is amazing how awful it is. A shockingly terrible waste of time. Encaps. Now the people who love this game and are still playing it as an MMO will have farmed enough materials and caps for it not to be as annoying. But if you're just starting out or are coming back as a level 65 or 70 player like me you will get smacked in the face with this horrendous and depressing design. It blows my mind that the developers of this game haven't figured out that this huge flaw is a major component of people finding this game unconscionably grindy boring and frustrating. Here's the thing. Fallout 76 is a game that's just poorly thought out. The map is way too fucking big to navigate without fast travel but there are a bunch of obvious and easy solutions to that problem. The first and most common and obvious is just have quests be fucking clustered in areas. So the foundation would be a quest hub. Quests would send you on a straight line with each marker just close enough to make walking worthwhile. This is like how every other game ever deals with this. In The Witcher you arrive at a hub and do quests in the surrounding area. You don't arrive in Oxenfort and have the next quest send you to Skellige and then the next step to White Orchard and then the next step back to Oxenfort and then back to Skellige. It's insane even writing that down. Fallout has historically been more willing to send you all over the map but the previous maps weren't big empty nothings. Or if you're going to keep this horrendous design you need to tweak fast travel. Instead of letting you fast travel anywhere make it so you can only fast travel to train stations and it charges you a nominal fee of like five caps. This would accomplish their goal of pushing the player to walk around the map but wouldn't be draining your money just to play the game efficiently. As it is now exploration is almost eliminated because everything is so far away it is always a better idea to simply fast travel exactly where you're going which means the things that these games do best. Freeform exploration is literally absent from Fallout 76. You will not explore your fast travel. And apparently nobody at Bethesda Austin realized how catastrophic this is to the flow and core of a Fallout game. It's amazing. Really amazing. I have to touch on the combat. I'm happy to report that when you are fighting human enemies or ghouls or mire lurks 76 occasionally gets close to feeling as good as Fallout 4. It still isn't as good because movement is slower animations are still weird and buggy and there's still a bunch of ridiculous decisions like slowing you down by half as you reload your gun and hit detection is broken and builds are kind of boring but occasionally it still feels okay but then the game will resort to just feeling miserable. Robots and assault trunks and super mutants are grotesque bullet sponges with hitscan weapons and because stealth is fairly useless against enemies you can't kill with one headshot most of the encounters with these enemies are just awful. Oh and the new bow and arrow is the most hilariously useless weapon I have ever used in a game. It takes anywhere from 12 to 20 arrows to kill a super mutant that's 30 levels below you without a functioning stealth system and with no useful that and with movement that is far slower than the last game for some reason there's really no way to avoid damage so almost every fight resorts to either standing still or walking backwards clicking your mouse 30 to 50 times to kill each enemy and remembering to press H every so often. It's terrible just miserably terrible at times. Fallout 76 further demonstrates how important that is to the combat in Fallout. It gives it a tactical component and when it mixes with stealth and sneak attacks it can be extremely satisfying more important is the system that keeps Fallout tethered to its isometric RPG past that wasn't just useful when the game was a bad shooter it's simply a good system that's gone here and I think I mentioned this in my last video but every article about Fallout 76 and every review said something like quote because the game is always online that's of course can no longer slow time um what Max Payne 3 still had bullet time in its PVP multiplayer mode killing floor 2 slows down time in its online horde mode the game absolutely could have come up with a system that allowed bats to slow time they just didn't not couldn't didn't also I'd like to draw your attention to exhibit a in my proof that Bethesda Austin has no idea how to make a satisfying shooter examine if you will the speed you can strafe with your bowstring drawn there are just a million little things in 76 that make it an annoying shooter enemies are flail all over the place your camera shaking around when you get hit and staggered is horrendous just horrendous the way the game deals with enemy armor and health on certain monsters makes it a chore to play at times and if you're leveling through the game the enemy scaling is still completely broken I wasn't recording unfortunately but at one point I watched as a level 11 dude came into the area I was and he got repeatedly smeared into the ground by the level 64 ghouls the game had spawned in for me he would die and I revived him a couple times and he died again and then he died and respawned and died and repeat eventually he logged off after grabbing his bag of junk and running away while I grabbed the aggro but I mean it blows my mind that this disastrous and hilariously predictable garbage is still in the game when literally almost every other co-op game has solved this by having enemies be an appropriate level for whoever is fighting them in borderlands destiny warcraft the division anyone can play together and each enemy is scaled to that player so that psycho is level 63 for me and level 19 for my son but Fallout 76 is just still overflowing with awful design and it's just a huge pile of things that make it frustrating few if any of the game's crippling design flaws have been addressed outside of simply adding a below average dialogue system finally we need to discuss that subtle problem that often simply sinks Fallout 76 its map isn't a fallout map the spirit of 76 for much of my 100 plus hours playing fallout 76 that I will never get back I couldn't quite put my finger on why it felt so much less engaging than Fallout 4 or 3 or new vegas it was only recently as I was playing new vegas and doing the come fly with me quest that it hit me fallout 76 feels like playing skyrim and not like playing fallout okay real talk while Fallout 76 can look almost shockingly comically bad like so fucking bad it's embarrassing I mean look at this how can this be so awful and before you imply it is like a bug or my pc I'm playing on ultra at 1440p with a 2070 super and an i7 8700k and this looks the same every time you see it I come back many times it always looks like this this was considered good enough anyway even though it can sometimes look like an xbox 360 game it can also look downright beautiful at times most of the map is a gorgeous run of sunlight streaming through the leaves and trees bathed in moonlight and mountains disappearing into a subtle fog in the distance with a very occasional rusted gas station walking around feels relaxing and sometimes downright nice it's all fucking wrong dude fallout shouldn't feel nice or beautiful at its very best fallout often feels horrific the game has always worked best as you creep through a spooky dark dungeon or blood spattered dilapidated vault I don't think I ever fully appreciated how the fallout games often had a bit of a horror vibe going on and how often they evoked terror and depression in their mapping levels until I played fallout 76 and realized how wrong it felt tonally fallout 76 has shockingly few dungeons like an unbelievably small number of them it has a remarkable lack of spooky places to explore now it's usually trying to be funny and not enough fallout one dark humor way in a humor humor way the game is just tonally completely wrong more than anything else fallout 76 desperately needed a better real time lighting system because with the better resolution and textures the lack of good internal lighting makes everything feel far too bright it often robs the game of its mystery and sadness it's boring as shit fallout 4 is often very dark I mean literally dark like a lack of light walking the map at night in fallout 4 you need your pit boy light and if you mod fallout 4 you can get it downright scary fallout 76 even at night is so freaking bright and indoors it is never dark how does a game released so recently have like no shadows why are interiors lit so poorly it feels lazy if you watch up is not jump you can see how much changing the lighting system in fallout 4 can fix its appearance so you would think that Bethesda Austin would have at least somewhat modernized the lighting beyond pointlessly adding god rays the feeling of being in a creepy dying world is gone and instead it just feels like skyrim there are occasionally locations you'll go into that feel like someone from fallout 4 designed it with dark lighting and a creepy vibe but they are so so rare and this tonal issue extends everywhere if they were going to do a game immediately after the bombs like this they needed to do it somewhere terrible why on earth would you set up a fallout game only 25 years from the bomb in a gorgeous natural setting that feels like you're on a camping trip why does this game feel so chipper and pleasant is it to sell cosmetics or is it just having no idea what makes these games so popular what this all adds up to is the game literally feeling like skyrim with guns it is the final metamorphosis of fallout into the elder scrolls even the dungeons in 76 are really well lit they don't feel creepy or scary at all the lights all work and the game is just so much less dark than any of the previous entries walking through idyllic farms and woodlands doesn't capture what people love about the fallout series it captures what people love about elder scrolls except with a worse progression system grindy as fuck crafting system worse dialogue less and worse story and shockingly awful combat well that's also true the elder scrolls i'm not even going to bother addressing the perk card system because i could spend 30 more minutes explaining why i think it is absolutely horrendously terrible even with all these problems there's one other flaw with 76 that makes playing it impossible it is still broken just embarrassing perhaps the most amazing thing about fall 76 more amazing than the shockingly bad design more amazing than the utterly wrong tone more amazing than the poorly implemented multiplayer is the fact that the vast majority of broken elements they are still broken enemies still regenerate health and i'm not talking about legendary enemies which in at least one fix now finally give the enemy has mutated notification to let you know the game didn't break and meant to do that but i'm talking about regular enemies regenerating health invisible enemies still attack you your attacks still won't register textures won't load pop in is awful screen flickers and weird lights and transparency effects and physics bugs all of those are still a thing the servers still dump you out consistently the game's frame rate still takes a shit for no reason quests break waypoints disappear duplication bugs run rampant fall 76 is a year and a half old now it is perfectly reasonable and an always online game for new bugs to pop up all the time what's not reasonable is for old bugs to still be a thing important old bugs you simply cannot play fall out 76 for more than 10 minutes without encountering a bug that is not an exaggeration something will break every 10 minutes even if it's only a texture or a floating physics item this never ending pile of bugs interacts with a horrendous horrendous ui a metric ton of inventory management issues not enough storage space buggy crafting borked buildings to make the game incredibly incredibly frustrating to play no other game i've ever played makes me sigh so loudly so often it is totally inexcusable and it is not a small problem and it is not any better than it has ever been remember at the beginning when i said i quit this game several times there was one time near the end where i didn't play for three days because i got so pissed off i swore not to finish the campaign let's wrap up by explaining why i was doing the tiny tina i mean rah rah quest which is a dungeon with about 30 robots mr gutsy's legendary mr gutsy's several assault trons and a bunch of turrets and it ends with a fight against a century bot that is a huge bullet sponge i started this quest and finished the first two rooms that made me kill about 15 or 20 robots and use about 100 rounds of ammo before the game crashed i booted it back up and found i had to start all over from the beginning fine it happens i killed those 20 robots then even more robots four turrets and an assault tron before the quest broke and wouldn't let me continue as a robot didn't spawn and the door didn't open less fine but maybe it won't reset the whole dungeon if i just fast travel to the door i fast travel to the door come back inside and find i have to start all over i'm getting angry now another 200 bullets and grenades and stem backs and food and water gone but i want to review the game so fine i fight my way through the 30 robots and four turrets two assault trons several legendary mr gutsy's before i get to the room with a century bot and spend three minutes running around a building trying to slowly drain his ridiculous health pool i'm almost totally out of ammo and i'm using the last of my fusion cores with my laser gatling gun i finally get him down to very low health and server disconnects that was it i was done i was extremely pissed off i mean i'm kind of actually angry even reading it now this kind of stuff is a serious problem and it just goes to show how badly this kind of game works as an always online unpausible unsavable mmo light in the final analysis i will say this fallout 76 isn't a fallout game it's a lightly fallout skinned mixture of elder scrolls and rust it has its moments and the wastelanders update does improve the game but in the end it's simply not good enough for anyone other than the players who happen to love the very specific things that this game does reasonably well and to those people absolutely if this game does what you want a game to do that is perfectly valid but fallout 4 is better new vegas is better fallout 3 is better skyrim is better most people would be better surge playing any one of those games again to playing fallout 76 it has the germs of a good idea and wastelanders had the potential for a really good fallout story but a failure to think through the narrative technical problems a lack of good quests a tone that simply isn't fallout a ton of frustrating bullshit time wasting design decisions and the game being broken means it's impossible to recommend this game for anything more than like 20 there's 70 plus hours of stuff to do until you're done but it's not worth the 70 hours to do them just play fallout 4 again play titanfall 2 play new vegas which does the story aspects of 76 millions of times better i actually expected to enjoy this because that last playthrough it made me realize you can have a good time in this game if you're willing to put up with a bunch of annoyance but no there were too many fundamental flaws here to even have a good time and tragically it is still too broken to really enjoy it all all right thanks for coming i'll see you next time bye