Fallout 76

So Bughesda released on of my most anticipated games of this year Fallout 76, and boy oh boy what a release it was. The game is riddled with bugs and before you even open the game you can encounter one of the worst bugs in gaming history. You see Bethesda's launcher had a bug during Fallouts beta that deleted all of the games data from your computer if you pushed any key in the launcher. 50GB of data gone with a push of a button and many people lost valuable Beta time because they had to download the game again. The launcher was so bugged actually that it even released the game early on its own. Anyone worldwide could play the game if they simply waited 20 seconds after the launcher stated that the game is not out yet...

Now I have to say here for full transparency that I don’t own this game nor have I played it, but I have read tons of articles and watched tons of videos and streams of this game (I’m watching one right now as I write this). And you know this post is just my opinion, nothing more.

Right after you start the game you might hear some weird noises and that is because the voice chat is on as default and there is no push to talk, it’s just on all the time for everyone! so good luck emerging yourself at the character creator. After creating your character and leaving the vault you can start exploring the barren land of west Virginia. Now I don’t think the games world is empty or anything but it definitely lacks something that makes you emerged in the world. There are no NPCs in the game just robots and mutants, so you just walk around shooting stuff and never encountering anything that makes you feel for the world. Also being a survival game it really lacks the sense of danger. Other players can’t kill you (well they can but really really reeeaaallly slowly) unless you agree to a duel with them. Duel happens when someone shoots someone and the other one shoots back at the person who shot first. This system in my opinion is completely ridiculous. Not only does it takes away the feeling of danger it also gives the other guy time to just check his armor/health and ready explosives and just instantly annihilate you after accepting the duel ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ so PvP is a no go in this game. What also takes away the sense of danger and surviving is that you never lose your items, not even when someone kills you. You do lose your scraps that you use for crafting but that’s nothing major.  You also just spawn near where you died so you can just run back and kill the dude who killed you since you never lose your weapons so the whole thing feels pointless.

So little about the bugs. There are A LOT of them in this game and Bethesda is known for making buggy games but this is something else. They even released a letter to the fans saying basically “we’ve dumped a lot money into this project and even we don’t know what this game is. Enjoy the spectacular bugs tho! ” Enemies animations not working and them just floating in a T-pose asserting dominance. Models and props just rolling around without no worries and attaching themselves on to random things like players. Power Armors morphing players into weird monsters in their underwear and the biggest and most baffling bug in the game must be that you can speed hack simply by looking down... This is due to movement speed being tied to your frame rate...pretty bad idea.

I’m sad that this game turned out like this. I really was looking forward playing Fallout with my friends, building bases and terrorizing my neighbors with nukes. Online Fallout still sounds like a good idea for me but not like this. Hopefully they can pull Final Fantasy XIV with this game and make it better with updates but until that, this ain’t it chief.