How Does Fallout 76 Compare to Previous Fallouts? [Spoilers]

just watch to get balls up in [Music] as a fallout fan from back when the isometrics were all we had I personally already had my moment of disillusionment with modern direction of the Fallout franchise back with fallout 4 there were so many things I wanted that game to be and in the end it wasn't any of them fallout 4 was thematically sloppy and dramatically limp and difficult to connect with on any level beyond mechanical with the Far Harbor DLC they did reverse course and made something more traditionally fallout 4 Harbor was stronger tighter written and more memorable than the name game by far far Harbor though was a deviation from the new vision of what a fallout game is supposed to be like rather than the new norm the last DLC for fallout 4 was the most prophetic Nuka world was the fallout aesthetic boiled down to a literal theme park where a new end game for the main world was introduced the levee raid of the settlements you'd been you'd spent so long building up ensuring that any sense of meaning or permanence he might have held on to dissolve us into a pool of caustic novelty fallout 4 was often beautiful it was exciting it was engaging in its own ways which were principally mechanical to enjoy fallout 4 I had to let go of my own expectations for the game and try to figure out what the game was trying to do instead if it wasn't living up to the fallout in my mind's eye fallout 4 was such a frustrating transformative experience that I paid almost no attention to fallout 76 at all when it was being developed it was centered around multiplayer after all not single-player it was a reiteration of fallout for his crafting loop but even fiddly ER it would have no living NPCs no player dialogue at all every revelation about the game seemed almost precision-engineered to irritate me and diminish my interest now that it's out its Bethesda's worst reviewed game in years and years and the backlash has been massive this puts me in a bit of an awkward position though I had zero expectations about this game I thought it was going to be a miserable disaster I was ready to hate it but I played it for like 116 hours went down damn near every Road found close to nearly every marked location and I have to say I liked it a lot more than I ever did fallout 4 its aggressive artificiality and lack of meaningful storytelling your player choice aren't so much new drew actions as they are honest reckonings with something that's always been true about the Podesta fallouts believability of character and concreteness of world have never been priorities compared to visual like or nog raphy and expensive dungeoneering fall at 76 is truly the full flower of a seed that was planted back and fallout3 when you could choose to detonate a nuclear bomb and destroy the town of Megaton because you and some old man in a tower thought that it would be kind of fun fall at 76 is utterly disconnected from the original games and the approach to RPG design on display in Fallout New Vegas this disconnection is counter-intuitively what makes Fallout 76 more likable than Fallout 4 it's not pretending to be interested in things that the developers clearly aren't actually interested in like dialog like environmental consistency or believability like somatic depth and player choice so instead of Fallout 4 where it tried to include those things in incomplete unenthusiastic ways this time it simply chucks them out the window entirely to focus on what follow it means to Bethesda as an action first experience and a consumer franchise a lot of the reaction to fallout 76 has been a kind of wounded surprise holding up how estranged the game is from what made people fall in love with the setting and the franchise in the first place I'm not saying those people are wrong on the contrary I do largely agree but I don't agree with the surprise Nuka world wasn't just the final DLC for fallout 4 it was a statement of intent it was a way of looking at fallout that saw the wasteland as a theme park right of the radon blaster stop for a delicious iguana on a stick pose for a picture with a real lie of Google visit death claw island to be sure to hit the gift shop on the way here out it confused the choice to set the apocalypse in a fifties retro future from its original purpose as a source of black humour and cultural critique with a genuine celebration of mid-century consumerism fall at 76 not only continues but doubles down on that trend in fact it's a more materialistic game than even Diablo for the most part the large and small parts of the game's crafting loops all come back down to stuff always needing more stuff always needing better stuff every second of play is fundamentally motivated by and oriented towards acquisition of stuff previous fallout servers have revolved around frontier politicking races against the clock fulfilling an iffy prophecy even fallout 4 was in the end kind of about choosing a vision for humanity's future in the Commonwealth from the four options provided fallout 76 has one plot one moral one law shop till you drop then respawn and shop again the reason there hasn't yet been a global thermonuclear conflict is the thing called mad or mutually assured destruction it's not just that two large arsenal is going off will cancel each other out it's that enough nukes going off at once will poison the entire planet in drastic irrevocable ways the largest is a thing called nuclear winter the idea is like how volcanoes can block the skies for days and weeks and how the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs filled the air with impenetrable smoke for months and years a global nuclear war and its resulting fire storms will kick up so much radioactive dust and debris into the atmosphere that it will create a barrier to light that will kill forests and kill the ecosystem and then the radioactive particles will fall all over the world as part of the literally apocalyptic weather that that kind of disturbance would kick up this could go on for years decades even this is why previous fallouts and post nuclear media in general has once verdant areas portrayed as desert once the air clears there will be little left alive on the ground from the tallest tree to the lowliest Moss land laid to waste wasteland fallout 76 takes place just 25 years after the bombs fell making it by a huge margin the closest fallout in time to the especially severe part of the nuclear apocalypse that the nuclear winter represents so when I heard that was the year the game was set I expected an extra broken extra burn extra cruel environment instead fallout 76 takes place in a verdant paradise where everyone is dead anyway from a pandemic of plot convenience the idea is that the bombs didn't directly fall on West Virginia being of limited strategic importance and so it was spared the kind of devastation that marked the capital wasteland at the Commonwealth sure there's mutations galore and that questionable inclusion of iconic enemies like super mutants and radscorpions but fallout 76 tries to channel the natural rural splendor of real-life West Virginia by ignore the effects of nuclear winter and assuming that life will find its irradiated way just fine and dandy when you look at the Chernobyl incident for example how nature made a comeback into the area and how one of the most dangerous places for humans is now one of the safest places for wolves you can see how they might creatively arrive at the idea but a meltdown at a power plant and a world war are two different categories of atomic disaster 20 years after the war is close enough to the nuclear winter to show wasteland at its rawest and most devastated Paulette for was set two hundred years after the war for reference so the tentative and sickly plant life in that game did feel appropriate than sensical there's nothing though to explain the eternal autumn of Fallout 76 as Appalachia that makes sense unless you stop for a moan and considered the game in context with its peers and the current cultural moment of the United States although it features no living humans the game expresses the anxieties of the pop cultural zeitgeist that was created in much more than any previous entry in the series in many ways the question is less how does fallout 76 compare to previous fall outs and more why does fall at 76 compare so directly to far cry 5 both games use massive open worlds to present a kind of idealized American pastoral image to use the frivolous violence and condensed visual artistry of the video game medium to try to articulate a hopeful reaffirmation of the old tropes of rugged individualism and self determined frontier morality that fallout 76 ignores a nuclear winter is kind of a big deal it's a well known widely understood consequence of nuclear war to portray that consequence though would be to put would be to put creative emphasis on the cycles of predatory consumption that define pre-war American fallout as a terminal disease one that killed the host eventually instead West Virginia is changed but in many ways spared this colorful backdrop allows the game to sell the old stories and Western myths at face value we're a wastelands bitter and implacable emptiness would always work to subvert those things instead players get to live out what's essentially a frontier homesteading fantasy with that pesky nuisance of existing civilizations and cultures surgically removed from the equation to give the player the blank hissed canvas possible so the vault opens the people pour out and the cycles of consumption and destruction begin again free of guilt free of memory a world where the shelves are always full and the flowers are always blooming you can even nuke it again yourself and in four hours time no one will even know it happened the system is designed to keep fallout for in perpetual motion to keep the player in an end game hamster wheel where the game is never truly over in the traditional sense where some of the most discouraging frustrating features of that game yet in fallout 76 the cyclical pointlessness of clearing an area feels less arbitrarily discouraging and more compellingly necessary due to the mandatory always-on multiplayer of the games design fall at 76 is neither massively multiplayer nor only small group co-op instead it puts 24 people on a discrete server if you have friends you can join their server and vice versa each server keeps track of items in its world separately so a location you loot on one server may be fully stocked and untouched on another nukes fired on one server did not affect another so if you leave one server where you've detonated a nuclear weapon that last zone will no longer be available to you the map is extremely large and generally speaking it's unusual to come across another player but you do more frequently find their handiwork dead enemies and empty shelves if a lot of players are in one region like the low-level areas around vault 76 on launch day then the experience is frustratingly competitive fallout 76 does create individually instance loop tables for individual players when looting containers and corpses but items on the ground and items on shelves usually the best items refresh only once every so often enemies recycle frequently but you can't loot enemies who haven't had a hand in killing personally so there is a major incentive for scavenging to be done not only away from other players but away from places that other players frequently traffic in a general sort of way most often you'll find other players while doing events repeatable side quests which you can travel which you can fast travel to on the map even if you haven't discovered the area yet so even if you've been alone for a while if you do a cool event there's a good chance someone will drop in to share the fun then you'll make a friendly emot-- and part ways again off to pursue your own agendas and that's it fallout 76 is moderately multiplayer this way a social space whose vast distances and demanding crafting loops discouraged actually sharing the space and fallout 4 when I cleared a place and a day later it reset its enemies and items like I'd never been there at all it made me feel like I'd wasted my time now I'm kind of grateful for it because if I go to a place and find it mostly barren and picked clean already I know that if I simply come back in half an hour I'll get the whole cornucopia of desk fans and typewriters and precious precious duct tape as a multiplayer experience there's an understood that nothing can ever truly be resolved because the conflicts have to remain available for other players to come along and be the hero for it it takes the sting out of stuff like Preston Garvey's infinite quest log there and fallout 4 you turn in a randomly generated quest and immediately receive a randomly generated quest and a one for one loop that can never end a single-player role-playing game ought to allow the player to conclude what they do to see some sort of climax to their effort fallout 4 is constant undermining of the value of the players actions with its perform action a at location B for reward C structure a procedurally generated hamsterwheel quests diminished the sense of the players concreteness in the world their agency their meaning and fallout 76 there is no expectation of resolution no one goes to Disneyland rides the Indiana Jones ride and then says what's everyone waiting in line for still we already escaped the temple it's not a narrative it's an amusement even if it is still an officially licensed Indiana Jones Adventure you can go get a hot dog and a soda you can come back you can do it again you can come back in here it'll still be the same save for the stalactites of chewing gum under the seats being larger this is why most activities in the game by a big margin are events and not side quests ride the ride get your friends get back in line do it again fall at 76 isn't a role-playing game in any meaningful way not any more than Grand Theft Auto online can be with players pretending to be cops and robbers it Snuka world made manifest as its own gigantic game there are even at least three actual a mutant parks in the game world all with events that function as carnival games like a scavenger hunt for a jangles the moon monkey doll or a time trial for putting coal in little hidden ore carts having adjusted my expectations for Bethesda's fallout cannon down to a half-hearted shrug with fallout 4 and I was able to ignore what I wanted the game to be and focus on the bazaar carnival that it actually is I don't expect an amusement park to have narrative consistency as much as I expect them to have funnel cake and fall at 76 straddles that line between artistic experience and coin-operated frivolity more precariously than nearly any other triple-a game I've played in the past few years fallout 76 may not be much of a fallout game when put side-by-side with the originals but if you liked the originals and can stomach the idea of essentially visiting in ultraviolent absolutely colossal digital chuck-e-cheeses with fallout themed attractions and iconography for a time then you know what there's a good chance you'll still enjoy the time you spend with the game this is the guiding design principle of fallout 76 nothing is permanent nothing is quite believable but fun is king and there are prizes galore let's bend the driving paradox of the game for me it ought to be something I don't like and it's certainly something I didn't want when it was described to me before release but every time I play it I end up having a great time no matter how dumb it is no matter how badly it breaks no matter how low the framerate dips I just keep sitting there playing it in a pleasant fog even if it's a little more than an amusement park it is genuinely amusing take the way most quest rewards are set up with a few exceptions among the main quests and the more complicated side quests you typically receive your reward immediately after completing your objective you'll kill a giant monster or find a hidden cache and suddenly your HUD will light up like a slot machine in a selection of useful items from food and drink to armor pieces magically appear in your inventory you can fast travel for a handful of caps from event to event mainlining thats canarian reinforcements right into your eyeballs completing maybe a half dozen events in half an hour more if you're lucky in the Maps generating a lot of activity you'll never have to slow down by returning to a quest giver and most quests begin with a blast of dialogue over the radio so there's often no concrete quest giver in the first place to return to since the rewards often give you a handful of resources that are more geared toward simply keeping you playing than enriching your character in any serious way no single event is likely to quench an appetite for progress in a given play session we'll have to do quite a few to see meaningful gains and even then the resources you use to complete an event might far outweigh what you get as a reward putting you out a net negative and things like ammunition and rare repair components so to supplement the event side questing cycle it's important to layer in scavenging diversions most locations of the hundreds marked on the map and hundreds more on marked locations don't have any kind of formal content associated with them many don't even have a consistent enemy type repopulating with something new after you or some other player temporarily clear the area out sometimes there's a little skeleton tableau to see and notes to read with a little luck sometimes these notes and skeletons even contribute to a broader understanding of the world and its past events unlike fallout 3 and to a lesser extent fallout 4 most locations in the game world are not separated by a loading screen if they exist in reasonable architectural proportions in full integration with the landscape surrounding them they're dense and quick just like the events this makes repetition easier to bear even if you get sent back later on or find yourself sweeping through on a scavenging run or playing the area with someone who hasn't seen it before you're never committing more than 10 minutes or so to a single task and then the depth and density of the map means that you're never more than 2 minutes away from the next thing to do perhaps most critically of all because there is minimal narrative motivation and an extreme pervasive mechanical motivation to acquire and consume returning to an area is just as rewarding the second time you do it as the first the monsters will generate a new closer to your current level the shelves will automatically restock but you know where they are now the chest will roll a new loot table you might even find new scraps of actual story you may have missed fallout games have always used character and dialogue to shape the world and paint the player within it that's still somewhat true here but less than ever it's stuff that shapes the world stuff that binds the player to it and stuff that all self justifies the game's design to the point where it can survive without the thematic literary elements I always thought were the heart of Fallout as an isometric game in the late 90s fallout could not lean too heavily on visual storytelling pullet 1 & 2 are astonishing for how much they accomplish with comparatively little visually speaking but the hope was always that you would see vistas and details in your imagination more impressive than what your monitor could display even in combat the percentages to hit and miss took second stage to the little green text box that would describe your hit the sound of the impact the expression of the attacked the violence of a targeted shot to the head and the agony of a targeted shot to the groin but let's look at one fallout one city in particular the necropolis it's huge but narrative ly barren aside from the main quest and a few spare side quests it's just tumble down building shuffling ghouls and dark sewers exploring every corner of the necropolis is pointless and a little boring the narrative focuses the players activity and the lack of value in the old TV dinners and flip lighters that line the shelves of the ruined city makes scavenging feel if not pointless then at least largely optional once you get to the hidden vault at the center of the city the plot really gets rolling but little of the surface areas really mean much besides the impression of desolation they give much of it is functionally useless as a physical space in the game world fall at 76 may not have the story that led a player to them Acropolis back and fallout 1 but neither does it have any physical space as underutilized as the necropolis surface fallout 1 asked how do you make a player see a world beyond what's on the screen and it's gears turn primarily on these longer-term arcs of character and narrative progression that paint these portraits in the imagination fallout 76 asks how do you make a storage closet interesting every time and pivots much more on the concerns of the extreme short term real-time combat and navigation that retain their excitement in the face of terminal repetition and follow it won a place that's narrative Lee Baron is mechanically baron as well and fall at 76 there is a larger effort to use every part of the animal as far as how the player engages on a minute-to-minute basis with the game world most of the commonplace items in fallout 76 from glam co mac and cheese to buff out to mr. handy the robot Butler were creatively developed for Fallout 1 what was lost when Bethesda modernized the series with fallout 3 was item descriptions the short paragraphs that put this junk in context with your character's journey for example you can find old boxes mac and cheese just like in fallout 76 way back and fallout 1 but instead of providing food value or being monetarily valuable it's just cheap detritus whose item description emphasizes how your character having grown up in the vault isn't quite sure what instant mac and cheese even means as a phrase the thing is a valueless mystery of a gone away world so having picked up one box of eighty-year-old irradiated noodles and read the description you're unlikely to do so again it offers minor thematic value and then becomes a useless part of the game world a prop in Fallout 3 and forward these food items can provide healing yet pick them up because they're no useful in a minor way they now provide nutritional instead of thematic value fallout 76 is low-key survival mechanics insisting that your character eaten drink on a regular basis further increases the desirability of these formerly decorative objects but that's food what about all the typewriters all the screwdrivers all the random junk that a Bethesda game still allows you to pick up fallout 3 gave you a gun that let you shoot junk as ammunition and Fallout New Vegas made certain junk items meaningfully valuable as trade items but it wasn't until fall out for that Bethesda made all of this stuff purposeful with that game as with this one every single object no matter how inconsequential has some kind of scrap component inside of it it can be broken down to use and then these scrap components can be used to create modify and now to repair guns and armor as they would grade fallout 76 requires truly massive amounts of scrap in dozens of varieties to keep advancing your inventory in place with your effective character level they're parallel symbiotic avenues of progression you need stuff to kill creatures and finish quests killing creatures and finishing quests will lead you to stuff if one of these systems of progression falls out of pace with the other the difficulty feels awkward and the combat balance feels wrong so no matter how mundane a place from a gas station to a shattered apartment building even if it has no story value each room in that building has a roll of the dice on something meaningfully valuable to the core experience of navigating the world of Fallout 76 was it worth it to walk three minutes towards a map marker that's a little more than a moldering farmstead absolutely they had duct tape for adhesive and a wrench set you can melt for lead to make ammunition they had 25 year-old Twinkies to eat and equally ancient Cola to be used in making grenades little was learned a little of consequence happened what enemies you killed and what things you took will return in time and yet in every corner of every room of every building on the property are little tiny hits of positive reinforcement that tell a player they found something useful and valuable and have done well in being so clever as to have found it at all the flow of minor accomplishments is so fast and so wide that's hard to notice sometimes the absence of the more esoteric complicated things I'd thought that I would miss more instead I float atop the superficiality of fallout 76 and a little boat made of my own ego casting out a fishing line that Hook's treasure disguised as trash no living NPCs mean that there are no real towns that don't functionally double as dungeon areas there's no culture that isn't written down in journalist or recorded on holotape still clutched by the withered fingers of the long dead the 24 players spread across the Knapp rarely create towns unless they already know each other in person or over voice Chet I can think of perhaps once that I ran across an actual building laid down by another player and even then it was only a single structure what this means to a player though is that like the scavenging loop or the experience loop the explorative loop yields the same level of constant undifferentiated positive feedback anywhere you choose to go there's no hub of quest givers no settlements to assist enemies in the scrap have value but enemies in scrap are everywhere occasionally events and quests will supplement and enhance the value of the scrap or the number of the enemies yet screws adhesive led ceramic all the crafting materials are equally important at level 50 as they are at level 5 more so really since you need so much more of them the craft items rated at higher level and you need to break down dozens and dozens of the same weapon to unlock the more impressive modifications for it a single weapon from crafting de modification can use something like fifty screws in the 60 adhesive yet these materials are only available in proportions that make sense a house might have a toaster in the kitchen a fan in the bedroom and a typewriter on the desk all with one or two springs and screws per item load a newsroom or the Capitol building though and there's typewriters go or a barn might have a lot of metal and glue a garage might have oil and circuitry towards the end of the main quest you access a bunker with shelves and shelves full of useful things but the most exciting by far for me was the 30 clipboards all on a shelf 30 springs what a haul that's a dumb thing to get excited about but I'm not even conveying how much of a thrill it was at the time for fallout 4 there were a ton of quests and ton of NPCs but it was rare for them to be memorable its revered them to have names their blandness pulled focus from the freeform wandering that's been a critical part of the experience since fallout 3 fell at 76 his quests are technically long requiring multiple stops and pinballing a player to multiple corners of the map but any individual part of the quest is quick simple and requires no choice or input besides obeying the monk the map markers exploring the map and coming into contact with the unstructured parts of the game is something like half the focus of the structured scripted content enemies will scale to a player's level with some variation between regions like the woodland around vault 76 always being low level and the cranberry bog being relentlessly high level with every variety of building offering a sensibly scaled and rewarding variety of salvaged and every enemy type dropping a different sort of ammunition or animal scrap it is impossible to go in a direction that is an equally worthwhile and enriching since some of these elements are randomized and all of these elements regenerate even repeating content you've seen before it can yield new rewards fallout 76 has successfully crafted a moderately multiplayer game environment where 80% of the map remains useful and viable to a player through the very end game facilitating some significant freedom of choice when it comes to where you want to go and the best parts have fallout three and four where the parts spent wandering scavenging piecing together the lost histories of the world skeletons fallout 76 is only that part of the modern fallout experience with everything else surgically removed and strategically replaced a big part of me is still very reluctant to simply accept that the dialogue-driven expositions I loved and the old interplay fallouts in new vegas just doesn't matter much to the bethesda modern franchise but it is self-defeating to ignore all the positives that this total reorientation towards the aspects of visual interactive world building that bethesda is known for being good ad represents fallout 76 is not the game for those still mourning van Buuren or new vegas it'll piss you right off but it is a significant compelling evolution of the design values Bethesda has been playing around with and refining since fallout 3 think back on how followed three was covered by critics on release it was a pretty universal comment that the best storytelling in the game was accomplished with skeletons and props remember the actual dialogue of the game have you seen my father a middle-aged man well it's every six honestly feels more closely tied to fallout 3 than four sometimes and how philia pivots to that game strengths and excises its weaknesses consider how followed four is partial integration with the fallout shelter mobile game and its settlement mechanics meant that no settlement had a strong defined identity it was instead left the player to build those details from scratch themselves they in let you build your own damn vault in the DLC it was a lot too much to take charge of while also following your curiosity across the landscape based on quim and quest marker like you didn't fallout three in new vegas fallout 4 was juggling a lot of sub games at once parts of fallout 3 parts of fallout shelter a new crafting loop the players camp involve in fallout 76 is a fun amount of customization that fits in more elegantly with the players other concerns than settlements ever did and the general rhythm of play is more consistent in fall at 76 than it was in fallout 4 the removal of dialogue is a bitter pill to swallow sure but it is a minor part of the overall fallout 4 experience anyway Bar Harbor excluded the dialogue wheel they're generally only served to add some slight personalization to yes in no responses and even in fallout 3 the choices between good and evil were typically binary and often very silly like deciding whether to fix or poison the water purifying system or whether or not you want it to be a slaver paulette 76 has always on microphone or had until they decided to patch in a push-to-talk feature weeks after launch why have a dialog tree when the only people there are people who can already talk back but their real mouths words multiplayer was in this case intended to functionally replace a scripted dialogue tree a script is how you interact with a machine and the intention was for the game to be ideally a more dynamic role-playing space than that because you could speak as freely as he could at a tabletop this aspect of the design and I wonder to whose actual surprise this has been turned out to be a complete dud the kind of intentions they had for player behavior are obvious with the way factions are implemented in the game but ESDA made a big deal about these factions before launch which struck people is strange since there are no living NPCs how are they supposed to work well the main quests are designed as a tour of the map and tour of the factions first is there's their responders wasteland good guys and good Samaritans but function like the Minutemen only difference is the Minutemen were focused on settlements and the responders were focused on individuals and need to benefit with a removal of settlements and the premise of emergent multiplayer play if you're trying to be nice in the game a helpful sort doesn't that kind of make you a responder ish then there's the Raiders who took me a while to realize don't actually exist in the game at all Raider strongholds dot the mountains that divide the game as middle filled with weapons and corpses the first few times they went through I saw the Raider corpses and thought another player had killed them then I realized how complete the removal of NPCs was Raiders are replaced by the scorched which are like a new variety of feral ghoul with a central consciousness and who used weapons even the Raiders cannon fodder since the very first game are two sentient to coexist with 24 rambunctious players still the Raiders have a robot with whom you spend a lot of time and you get to know their values shootin Luton then the brotherhood of steel technology hoarders that they are and lasted the on play of dangerous manipulate even though the Enclave our traditional villains all players must complete their quest line to complete what there is of a main plot and reach the endgame the idea seems to be that these factions will represent the kinds of play styles and self directed goals and attitudes that a player might develop over the course of the game a faction system that runs itself right just ad players unfortunately the game world is so artificial and so thoroughly gamified that there's no pressure to actually role play anything little motivation to even speak to other players at all plus an always-on microphone is intimate in a way I don't think they planned on rather than encouraged role-playing it pulls the outside world into the game in immersion damaging ways you hear bong toks loud crunching and munching screaming cackling arguments between children frustrated parents and spouses demanding the players take a pause and then those players testily explaining that that can actually pause the game and Jesus would you hold on two seconds please it feels awkward to even contemplate doing an in character out loud role play when nine times out of 10 the other person is just gonna take a DAB belch and loot the room while you prattle on and creating an amusement park environment they've created an amusement park mood just because you're in the same photo on the log ride doesn't make you brothers in arms' it's obvious to everyone involved that the stakes are low and the environment completely artificial that shared understanding of a lack of meaning becomes a shared attitude and attitude wildly intensified by unfiltered access to the living room soundscapes of total strain perhaps in later updates there'll be some mechanical system for faction Allegiance but at the moment they're just a naive hope that will never materialize without organizational guidance from the game systems themselves the faction system that there is is detrimental to the general storytelling as well because those factions are so obviously centered around potential playstyles and player interests more than they are humanistic principles of values and vision the responders are a reasonable idea but that they should be a whole PowerBlock seems weird or the free states a collection of bunkers built by American secessionists they've got one of the longest farthest-reaching back stories in the game with terminals and environmental clue is painting clear and clear a picture of who they were and what they wanted essentially there at doomsday prepper movement given a kind of moral authority by the plot extremely close to how far cry if I have articulated one group of Preppers as being the good ones and the world of Fallout it makes more sense the government actually is demonstrably lying to and experimenting on its citizens in gross and cruel ways not trusting vault-tec is a great call but there doesn't seem to be more than a dozen or so people in the free states with small families having their own shelters thematically it's a working-class nuclear family rebuttal of alt-text elitist social engineering and some of the game world's more cynical political commentary their presence in the script to end the landscape is disproportionately large compared to their actual number and strength or the Brotherhood of Steel's presence in the game which is a little absurd - given the lore of the franchise consider the last major spin-off Fallout Tactics it needed the Brotherhood as a foundation to build a military squad combat game off so it sent them on a Zeppelin driven journey following the super mutants as they moved east following the climax of Fallout 1 its canonically a little dubious taking place in the Midwest and making it seem like that was the furthest east the Brotherhood had ever gotten fallout 3 takes place afterwards deeper into that mutant migration they pick up where Fallout Tactics left's left off so those guys in fallout 3 made sense and then fallout 4 was geographically right next door to fallout 3 and chronologically afterwards so that goes to follow as well however having both super mutants and the Brotherhood in appalachia 25 years after the war only makes sense from a marketing perspective not a lore driven one bethesda released a very catty response to fan grousing by saying they won't be creatively beholden to the errata of twenty-year-old games but for me the issue is that in choosing to recycle these elements they're making a choice not to be creative within the new setting relying instead on post-hoc justifications to maximize brand recognition and trailers and advertising material for example even though the scorched clearly began as a way to replace the Raider class of enemy the main plot steady unraveling of their origins is interesting and finding their source is one of the games few truly engaging mysteries nuking the fishery at the heart of their nest network releases the Scorch beast queen boss of the whole game world a raid creature intended to be defeated by eight players or more by contrast the super mutants are there because there were vats of green goo just like the military base and followed one here too saying that ATS is fun but it's hardly a mystery just an entertaining call pack that makes for an adequate explanation of their prisons the amount of effort put into making it seem reasonable for the Brotherhood of Steel to be operating in the region though is intense there are hollow tapes that would be a lure junkies dream in days past like audio of the formation of the Brotherhood and the opinions of the men and women who forged it's strange and insular culture would be anyway because the whole thing feels so desperate to explain the choice to include them at all that it makes the lore seemed somehow dubious it's Bethesda's world now they make the creative calls all of this is official stuff but listening to this retro fit backstory now addendums and modifications to the lore of the very first game it makes me a little sad had they made something up entirely from scratch I would have been more engaged by it I would have respected it more fallout 76 is brash and bold and its rejection of elements of the old games it doesn't mechanically automatically want and I'm willing to meet it there in those novel places that it is so damn insistent on taking me but with the Brotherhood of Steel this nostalgic self-cannibalism runs aggressively counter to that spirit of novelty and emphasizes the differences between this game and the old ones in an unfavorable way setting up parallels between the old world weary Maxon from fallout 1 the young domineering presence unfollowed 76s holotapes only highlights how much more natural the old storytelling felt if I'm willing to give up on what I wanted in favor of being open to the new thing that they've actually made I really wish that they were bold enough to take off the training wheels and put as much confident novelty into the writing as they did into the structural design I mean there's so much of this game that makes it seem like they just didn't give a [ __ ] but it doesn't apply universally the enclaves role in the game is merchant and nuclear command center is even weirder by making every player a member the Enclave is utterly defined of any thumb attic significance or weight they're just another ride at the park good evil those are illustrations on the side of a soda cup like the rebels and the entire at Disneyland you'd think after everything you've seen you wouldn't want to launch a nuclear bomb or do the dirty work of the villain from both Follett's 2 & 3 or that any kind of honest attempt role play in the world would reckon with this as a dilemma a dilemma though would mean that you wouldn't get to ride the biggest most dangerous ride in the park fall at 76 doesn't want anything to stand in between you and the front of the line for the thermonuclear thrill coaster the flipside of the plots sometimes frustrating writing is that you encounter it sporadically and casually so when something good does come up you remember it more some that can be extremely well-written like the overseers logs her character feels rounded and real in a way that the game rarely does when rusty dented nanny robots are sending him to look for children who went missing two decades and an apocalypse ago and many individual journal entries are emotionally weighted well written it's the cumulative picture though it's tonal inconsistency and the obvious favor shown toward marketability over creativity in some key areas that eats away at the mosaic of believability that these fragments of creativity are trying to create the whole know NPCs rule starts to feel very arbitrary by the end of the game since robots fulfill NPC functions anyway by delivering dialogue starting and ending quests even providing occasional flavor dialogue like two BOTS I came across in an endless loop of questions or the mr. prize BOTS who rose up out of the wilderness to give you exciting coupons and certificates for businesses that no longer exist the biggest exception is a sly rare one there's a wandering super mutant named Graham who will sell you things that's all just a merchant of an enemy type that already exists in the game but this exception kind of breaks the rule or at least renders it extremely suspect I came across him twice in 116 hours of play Graham may be insignificant but if Graham why not the world I feel like I get the basic concept what they did to make his face that players aren't capable of significantly disrupting even with the nuclear missiles you aren't allowed to nuke the starting area and it's an intentional function of the endgame they've accounted for it think though on that scene from HBO's Westworld reboot where a guy a player drunk at the card table gets up and starts killing everyone around him laughing at the sport of it the park workers who come in to clean up after him and reset the saloon are incredibly irritated by his outburst there's only so much time before other customers other players show up who will want bartenders to be alive to pour them drinks and saloon girls unblemished soing deliberate chaos in a single-player game is controllable you have only your own save file to break sewing troll ish chaos and a connected multiplayer environment is a more difficult thing to manage by far if they make a town with people and lives what's to stop some number of those 24 players from just relentlessly [ __ ] with them for no good reason until the game breaks it makes quests easier to shatter it makes everything more complicated still other MMOs have been dealing with this for decades by simply making key NPCs immortal if you've played World of Warcraft you have certainly seen a town or two full of corpses with three quest givers still standing incapable of perceiving the things aren't quite normal that day this is awkward but certainly no more awkward than the total removal of non player humans the overseer is still alive during your journeys after all her final holotape comments on players launching nuclear missiles she's against it for what it's worth a moral player that means very little against the endgame crafting loop that requires you to venture into these last zones all the other characters on the holotapes are dead she's just absent it's strange to be chastised by someone who's kind of theoretical as a character couple that with Graham though a living NPC functionally functioning normally if fall at 76 isn't a hundred percent committed to not having NPCs why did they go 95% of the way in that direction of course there's more to fallout 76 than is available now every numbered vault in the game which is all of them except vault 76 vault Tec test vault and white springs bunker are sealed off and inaccessible it turns out that Bethesda did say prerelease that this was how it was going to be but I had missed that and I was extremely frustrated by the bolts closures point is though that the volts represent whole new areas systems and features that are as of this writing not yet implemented paulette 76 is part of a new era of games as service and by withholding this content they provide a reason to come back later I think that's sketchy and frustrating but like I've said I'm not the one in charge of Fallout perhaps there will be NPCs there finally maybe you'll meet the overseer maybe there will be some kind of closure to the plot besides nuke the scorch beasts to make them larger who knows but the whole know NPCs rule is a perplexing rule that they've already functionally broken many times over having everyone dead is intended to provoke a kind of pervasive melancholy but the structural ramifications and the naked artificiality of the decision never let that melancholy come through very well from me like fallout 3 I felt like the world I was in was rough dangerous but also irredeemably ridiculous and silly certain moments certain vistas can absolutely feel desolate and meaningfully bleak but the moment is fragile ensure to pass weather effects are varied and impressive from radiation storms ala fallout 4 - more mellow instances of morning fog lit by brilliant Sun or regular rain falling heavy through shadowed forest sometimes though the moments of beauty struggled to rise out out of the technical problems that the game has certain regions especially the toxics valley in the central north part of the map seem washed out and muddied much of the time other areas like the mire are Moody and beautiful on a consistent basis the mire in particular leans heavily on the colored fog and Gadre effects that the lighting system is particularly skilled at the forests of the starting area can look incredible close up and in the middle distance but look underwhelming in the long view of the landscape noticeably more artificial and bland than some of its contemporaries like Far Cry 5 for instance then there's the ash heap to the southwest one of the one truly apocalyptic part of the landscape it does look incredible and its name sure scales well from levels 15 to 75 it's got deathclaws ghouls protest suppression robots in these great stout fellows called mole miners who grunt and scream creepily through their old air filters it feels the most traditionally fall out of any of the regions and as such has some of the best vistas smoked blackened skies towns and roads torn apart by shifting ground and intimidating and gorgeous excavator towering over everything the final region of the game is the cranberry bog and heavily mutated swamp it's cranberry forests towering otherworldly trees that puff out gorgeous clouds of colorful spores are the most exotic thing in the game although underutilized as yet in terms of plot and quests the bog is interesting it's got ruptures in the landscape deep trenches hidden by foliage on the one hand these trenches are annoying as hell when trying to get from point A to point B especially in power armor on the other the cranberry bog has the highest concentration on the map of scorch beasts that totally not dragons have fallout 76 these trenches give the player cover for moving around even when pursued by two or three of the Scorch beasts which is not an uncommon situation the closer you get to the southeastern corner of the map there the thing about the map in these regions though is that they are absolutely enormous the ash heap seems about the size of four harbors map for example and it's one of the smaller regions of the world the starting areas cover twice as much physical space as that at least a Smoky Mountain paradise of falling leaves and modern farms that goes on for hours and hours the tremendous scale of the physical space is the canvas on which the whole game is painted the idea of coop driven repetition is palatable if there's so much to see that he rarely repeat the same things the variation between the regions is pre shovel and each has its own Beauty to it from rugged industrial mountains to moody sickly little sickly swamp to soft and mellow forests filled with golden light glitches get in the way it's not always a gorgeous sight but when it works there's something to the look of the place that is unique with a full wasteland like New Vegas or Fallout 3 it's a lot of Brown fallout 4 it was much more deliberately colourful but more in accents than primary hues fallout 76 goes full fantasy in its range of color far beyond any previous Fallout title it may not make total sense have such a Verdun world but it's pleasing to the eye and resonant with the spirit and that's all an imaginative landscape really requires when you get right down to it followed 76 is landscape actually does its best rolled building once you've explored around thoroughly and gotten a solid sense of where things are and what they meant before the bombs filled the greatest example is the monorail system despite his rural composition Appalachia is home to a state of the art thoroughly atomic era monorail system stretching across the entire southern reach of the map its transit takes it across some of the highest level areas through some rough and strange territory the concrete support loops that the tracks run through now shattered in many places rise up and down the hills like a column of forlorn soldiers when the monorail reaches a stop like a scenic monument at the highest elevation in Appalachia or a park and ride at the automated city of Watauga there's usually a monorail car stuck at the station filled with skeleton suitcases and precious valuable miscellany the games most interesting and impressive piece of architecture is a key part of that monorail system unconnected to any quests or events it's an elevator for the monorail x' to get up a series of sheer cliffs taking a train and rotating at thousands of feet and ago with the with a massive kind of vertical centrifuge that were at Woking would swing the train up in a circle like a ferris wheel car moving from the bottom to the top where it switches off again and carries on the view from the top of the elevator is the most scenic in the game and you can even jump off it in power armor for a quick thrill with scorch beasts in the distance thick fog over what's left of Watauga and the range of subtly changing light trickling in over the clouds it is the place where the game kind of clicked for me all the way is it a little too close to Skyrim for comfort yeah that is it frustrating in many ways sure yet looking out over the top of the monorail elevator the old fall out feeling really does come through a giant landscape familiar in some ways but exotic and more filled with possibility and lurking danger The Melancholy of a once-great civilization toppled at its height by its own failings the sense of both isolation and prowess that comes from surviving and persisting in a shattered world that's outgrown its human inhabitants the monorail elevator doesn't have any law or terminals associated with it that I could find but its purpose and mechanism are clear just by looking at it and the thing evokes perfectly the optimistic vision of power in the old world if this existed today it would be a world-famous engineering marvel yet here it is in the West Virginia backwoods why well the large scale environmental storytelling answers that - also mostly without journals are written more consider the route and what's at either end of the monorail line this is an expensive excessive piece of equipment to put in monorail elevator is deliberately scenic going up and over the tallest mountain when it would have been much cheaper to go around well at one end in the eastern part of the ash heap are the retro futuristic mansions of the two wealthiest families in Appalachia before the war you can scavenge both mansions there amazing some of the most stylish engineering and fall at seventy six more to the point though is that these gigantic mansions are on stilts that quite literally have them looking down on the working men and women to the west if you go west you find the remnants of a massive labor protest against automation skeletons still holding signs with barriers laid across streets and pro-union slogans sprayed on the walls of the towns businesses above the skeletons riot suppression robots still roamed the neighborhood still eager to kill after all these years the monorail doesn't service any of the actual cities and towns of pre-war Appalachia save one Watauga the center of all the automation that's being protested at the far end of the monorail is the region's robco corporate headquarters Watauga is one of the most interesting areas of the game and one of the last you'll visit it's a pre-war automated bureaucracy that's still trying to function it's got elevators that pop out wave after wave of robots some dangerous but most of them clerk bots with little suits and ties spray painted on the chassis if you can automate the miners can't you automate the white-collar workers as well the pre-war corporate vision for Appalachia was one where only one class of people remained employed the executives they would ride their silver monorail through the treetops and over the mountains from one office to another and then home again in time for a sumptuous robot prepared dinner all of this safely to the south of the major population centers whose jobs were drying up only fast piece this understanding of pre-war Appalachia doesn't come from any one thing it's a dozen audio logs and journal entries from skeletons and debris x' on the ground from graffiti from looking at the map and trying to think about why it is the way it is sometimes why it is the way it is is silly sometimes it's inexplicably frivolous in its world building but not all the time in many ways fall at 76 is world can be satisfying like complete the thing of it is is that it takes miles and miles of exploring and hours upon hours invested in the game world before finding that clarity for it to become apparent part of the reason I kept playing I think is that despite the many frustrations let downs and glitches the more I played the more complexity I did discover I'm not saying fall at 76 is a genius game after all but I am saying that the first impression the game makes is only a sliver of what's there it's not secretly deep the game is what it is on the surface but that surface stretches well over what horizon you can see from the hill you step out on when you leave the vault it is a mightily inconsistent work though for each concrete interesting piece of world building there's a real eye roller to go along with it there's a quest line and fall at 76 that's a variant on fallout 4 is silver shadow quest line this time joining the mistress of mysteries and her crime-fighting crew she was a comic book character in a radio serial star before the war but after the war she decided to actually do it and build herself a super team and a super hideout the only thing saving this from total cheese is how the quests are honestly more about character driven family drama than comic book mayhem when you get into the holotapes it sends you off to fight the Raiders who are all dead on behalf of the order of mysteries whose corpses also all eventually make an appearance the whole thing falls a little flat is it the writing I'm not sure the writing is above average for a Bethesda actually more grounded and character than most of what they did with the silver shroud it's more than performing present-tense activities for past tense characters based on dramatic circumstances that resolved themselves something like a decade previous your involvement is difficult to feel much urgency about of course you'll be rewarded magically and automatically for completing the quests and at the end of it the story but these are weak motivators what really got to me though wasn't the structure it was the reward the sword of Bastet it's a great melee weapon it's fast with bonus armor penetration good damage you can upgrade it to a point to keep it current with your level so whenever I was low on ammunition which happens a lot later on as enemies become real bullet sponges at higher levels I had a magic sword dues I found myself wandering through this autumnal forest fighting goddamn wolves and zombies with a magic sword and man it pissed me off because even though I did enjoy Skyrim I wanted more concrete creative separation between the two franchises than this the weapons that legendary creatures drop work the same way and with bonus attributes that are often flat-out magic nonsense it was the same way with fallout 4 but here it feels especially frustrating when paired with all the other absurdist design choices take for example a vampiric power fist that transfers health on a successful hit it's a common fantasy enchantment how it got here I don't know yet I wouldn't have been able to solo the launch site silo at the end of the name quest without it I used over 900 rounds of ammunition in the dungeon and barely got over halfway through I ran out of stimpaks all that was left was circle strafing and punching and that turned out to be enough I'm grateful for having had an enchanted gauntlet when I needed one but I'm still irritated by how it further arose the franchise's unique setting and pursuit of a kind of full spectrum bethesda game middly borrowing freely from other games in the bethesda back catalog you'll find yourself looking for mines with the same icon they've used for mine since Oblivion and then go delving in them for ore and coin of the realm it's not like fallout hasn't always drawn certain parallels between its setting and fantasy ones especially with the Brotherhood of Steel and power armor but usually referentially and never so experientially as this the overall feel of fallout 76 is still primarily fallout but some individual moments are infuriatingly ambiguous when it comes to being able to tell exactly which bethesda game it is your plane it makes a huge difference that whatever game it happens to feel like in a given moment you can play this game with other people I played the game about half solo and half with my friend Nate and my time spent in coop was the most fun by a good margin when playing solo I found myself going slower and being more thorough I read a lot of journals I picked a lot of locks and co-op though there's an impetus to move a little faster than that player voice chat drowns out most radio messages and holotape stories and to people grabbing items off the shelves and stuffing their pockets makes the whole process of scavenging and exploring a location go very quickly Plus co-op party has mitigate the difficulty of game quite a bit and the rhythm of combat feels most exciting and least grindy with about 2 to 3 people more than that and you're competing for kills and resources excessively remember you can't loot enemies that you didn't damage while they were alive in those small groups though the space feels casually social in the way that I can only imagine that Bethesda did intended to before release there was a lot of action trailer for fallout 76 featuring hollywood youths and vault suits dancing to the Beach Boys while firing guns in slow motion it was worryingly stupid but I get it now I do the scale the comfort of repetition the games is service trickle of updates and new content the quick and easy question so much of what makes fallout 76 unusual or perhaps uneven in the rhythms of its single-player come together to make the co-op experience light fast and fun fallout 76 is theme park atmosphere coupled with group chat via the game client or over discord is relentlessly effortlessly entertaining it's a truly giant space in which to hang out and have fun Nate and I live over a thousand miles apart but it felt like the same room when we were just hanging out and killing super mutants together chatting about our days in our lives well the game went on almost like a secondary background activity fallout 76 was a platform for socialization not the subject or the focus of that socialization it was here actually that the legacy mechanics from fallout 4 do cause some problems first carry weight seems to be overall reduced from earlier games with each point of strength adding five points to your maximum carry weight instead of ten so even with the many perk cards centered around weight reduction you're usually only looking at a hundred pounds or so of spare room to work within her inventory if you can find a work bench of some sort you can break all those inventory items down into less weighty versions functionally though this translates into the equivalent of an inventory bladder that you have to drain every 10 minutes or lose your ability to run due to over encumbrance if you're over encumbered and your party isn't they'll leave you behind in a flash unless they're just being polite that way the game pivots entirely to acquiring dismantling and modifying loot and garbage and it's game loops and yet the game is very quick to punish a player for trying to take everything there is to take inventory management is the number one mood and a momentum killer in the game though in single-player it's a little less urgent and how annoying it is there at least the inconvenience is yours alone to bear here fast travel is also disabled not only for over encumbrance but also if you're dehydrated or starving there were many many times where I found myself separated from my party for over 10 minutes waddling around trying to find the workbench to reduce my inventory load and find food to satiate the parasites coiled in my gut surely at some point in the extensive play testing they must have realized that constant inventory micromanagement is a rhythmic choke point of the gameplay yet there's no alternative that I can think of that wouldn't just cause more problems just think of the stash box drama you can access your junk hoard from anywhere you find one of the stash boxes that hoard maxed out at 400 pounds though which is functionally an inconvenient lilo number it was the top requested change from the beta period to expand with a stash limit it took weeks to implement the change though because the 400 pound limit was arrived at and not 4 player comfort but because having the world tracked significantly more objects than 400 pounds worth caused massive stability problems for the game the amount of variables being tracked across 24 players a server is just outrageous and solutions that seem obvious like a chest raised the stash limit why don't you are often bound up in mathematical complications imperceptible to the player the scavenging loop works OK in co-op but taking it up and not only wouldn't that negatively affects the difficulty for a player to have significantly more carry weight it would also be a major numerical burden for the game engine itself it's kind of the thing about fallout 76 there's a lot of stuff that seems ill-conceived and weird but that stuff is baked into the game so deeply that it's hard to imagine a solution to these problems that isn't actually just a different game entirely the best example of one of those on ultra bleah strange game features is the climactic one launching a nuclear missile anywhere you please save the flatwoods area out of mandatory courtesy to low-level players it's the end of the main quest chain every player who seeks to finish the story finishes it in a nuclear fireball and let's get this out of the way it's dope it's wicked sick it's like kaboom and I'm like what whoa and if you're expecting more out of it than that well buddy I have some bad news for you this is the only actual decision you get to make as a character in the plot where you personally would like the extremely big boom to happen the special effects for the nuclear explosion really are something impressive you hear it whistling you see the missile disproportionately large but meant to be visible and then this giant explosion the shockwave the mushroom cloud it adds violent orange and red smoke and fire to a smaller area than you'd think around the blast and then spawns new high-level enemies and resources in the nuclear haze myself I chose to nuke grafton I didn't care much for the overly cheerful robot mayor there but it's too much to ask the nuclear bomb to actually scar or deform the map instead the nuclear blast is applied like a decal to the surface of the world grafton was completely intact after nuking it and functioned normally for events and quests that were going on previous to my nuking it the enemies were just a bit more numerous and difficult for four hours grafton would carry these altered enemy spawns and loot tables then it would return completely to normal again this makes pragmatic sense for a 24 person multiplayer environment it's also a bizarre betrayal of one of fallouts most traditionally obvious opinions which is that nuclear war is bad actually the overseers logs off even reiterate this within the game world but who's listening to her when it means not listening to the almighty quest to come it's constructed as the climax in every way from the structure of the main quest to the progression of the player as an engine of destruction to the inevitable terminal end point where a player has seen just about all the world has to offer and what's left is to just poke it with a stick until they get bored followed for his Nuka world operated on the same principle as the very last piece of DLC for that game once you've finished that bonus map you unlock a new feature to raid the settlements that he built and once protected from that exact same sort of Raider assault what changed not your relationship to the inhabitants they were never more than sims resource in the settlement minigame to be complicated with crops beds and defenses you'd have to believe in these people to be bothered by betraying them it's a relationship to the game that changed instead it's over and you're twisting the rag for that last ounce of novelty the worth of using nukes is weighed by many of the factions in the game with Fallout 76 initially the overseer meant to use them against the scorched so did the Brotherhood of Steel even though they never got that far and the Enclave well they just enjoy blowing stuff up it gives their computers mustache a real nice twirl it's only at the last minute that the overseer had two big epiphanies one is that the factions in their self-interest doomed themselves by not overcoming their differences in banding together against a greater threat to is that launching the nukes is just the sort of careless destruction humanity will have to move past to win battle and isn't that true the nukes just make the monster is much much worse which is fun but bad right what else Oh fun fallout 76 is moral dilemma here is like a ten-year-old child's yeah it's supposed to be bad to set off fireworks inside the house but what if it's really cool and everything turns out fine maybe mom and dad are wildly exaggerating how bad the firework in the house situation will be this is the five Megaton explosion that breaks the camel's back when it comes to any kind of thematic depth or meaning it all kind of falls away in the face of using the most dangerous and destructive device ever created recreationally I desperately want to believe in appalachia because it can be quite beautiful rugged and strange in the best of ways but it's not a world in the end it's a toy it's an amusement the early fall outs in New Vegas painted pictures of a world that was strange but consistent believable they made sense you launched a nuke in New Vegas in a similarly climactic moment and it was hard not to see it as a kind of crime you could elect not to launch the missile at all if you didn't want to if you decided to anyway a new area would open up with either caesar's legion or the NCR or both turned into ghouls and horribly deformed what you did made the world worse it sunk it deeper into their radioactive pit that it was trying so hard to climb out of here and fallout 76 that nuke is a game mechanic and integrate savage playgrounds for players to come together in hunting it's an activity you can repeat it three times a week gaben it's just about the most serious thing you can do in the Fallout universe and ours for that matter but here it's presented in a way that Rob's it of all dramatic weight in favor of pure gleeful novelty fallout 3 did do the same thing with Megaton but even there you could only do it once in that very particular circumstance by making nuking whatever you like a repeatable mechanic in fallout 76 even the novelty sees diminishing returns when a game revolving around nuclear apocalypse trivializes that apocalypse to the point where people are in danger of growing comfortable and bored with it party even go as a franchise I don't think Bethesda actually walked this idea all the way to the finish line I think they got too big boom looks V cool underlined it on the whiteboard and here we are it is maddening that an unmarked monorail system satisfactorily explains itself in a way that expands your understanding of the world and the climactic act of the whole sprawling experience is comparatively shallow absurd and creatively counterproductive how does a game get to that point well here's where we come back around to Far Cry 5 hope County and Appalachia are twin worlds the new Far Cry is even going to literally split the little difference there is between the two games with a verdant post-apocalypse set a couple decades after the nuclear hellfire at the end of Far Cry 5 4 farcry new dawn both Hope County in Appalachia portray in America of good honest rural people under siege from both the nefarious conspiracy and a modern economy that's pulling away from hope County was predicated on an economic recession foreclosure crisis the feeling that everything was falling apart it led to a separatist movement of bunker dwellers independent of the US government some good some bad pre-war Appalachia was predicated on the popping of a consumerist bubble the looming specter of it of automation and massive job loss the feeling that everything was falling apart it led to a separatist movement to bunker dwellers independent of the US government some good some bad can you articulate the difference between the whitetail militia and far cry 5 and the free states of Fallout 76 because I can't more than the individual details though it's the attitude of wolf games in wolf game worlds it's what the overseer says the peoples of Appalachia are all dead because they couldn't overcome their factionalism and unite for an optimistic future she's a vault tech employee all the way she went to vault Tech University trained all her life to lead vault 76 it's only luck of the draw that the overseer didn't wind up in charge of one of the crueler social experiments would she have simply gone along with it if she did wind up in charge of one of them it's hard to say she means well despite being a figure of suspicious Authority same with far cry 5 you were a sheriff an outsider to the community but a beacon of order and establishment nonetheless hull County and Appalachia take a simple but strong scent central stance on present-day actual America by choosing to focus on the essential goodness of rural communities after the 2016 elections there was a realization that these Heartland areas were being left out of pop culture and failure to engage with their stories was carrying a price in the cultural conversation at large so far cry fives Montana and fall at 76 is West Virginia conceptually come from what the developers want to say about those actual places first before any fiction is applied the way the locals and landscape are portrayed is a reaffirmation of old stories and old sentiments the idea that we're all Americans together when put under pressure even if we fall apart in our moments of wealth and pleasure no doubt many of the developers are of the age to remember that post 9/11 sentiment the last moment of national unity that I can personally recall feeling tangible and even that was a fragile passing thing just a couple weeks there all those responder stories in Fallout 76 isn't that what it reminds you of a bit you take an idealized version of these landscapes golden rolling hills and deep forests dotted with red farmhouses and cozy towns where the gas station still has the old style of pumps and the diner is always packed then you add monsters and you add conflict the fiction you make the bad guys evil just fundamentally bad so you can have an antagonistic force that opposes the Norman Rockwell Brigade well never actually articulating a viewpoint that would have to stand in contrast to some American principle or belief that way what constitutes American principle and belief remains ambiguous it redirects to the people their bravery and compassion under extraordinary circumstances putting these perfect beautiful places in danger and then letting the player tackle that danger puts the player in the position of actively reaffirming these mythological self conceptions the homesteading frame of fallout 76 really gives it all away with the whole 300 years of America's celebration being the very first thing you see when you step out of the wall America broke but it's okay you can fix it you can put it back how it was before however you happen to personally conceive that before to be this nostalgic centrism is causing some strange ripples in what games have been saying lately or more often not saying there's real anxiety behind fall at 76 and far cry 5 yet that anxiety never finds actual release in the game's fiction because of their deliberate lack of specificity and concreteness of perspective the overseer in fallout 76 says that if we can't all ignore our ideology and come together we're all gonna die trick of it is ideologies are the cornerstone of so much sci-fi world building you ask what if why not you use an imaginative tapestry to try to paint a world of ideas in conflict and then you let those conflicts play out think of all the ideologies and factions in Fallout 1 and 2 factional conflict is the whole structural foundation of Fallout New Vegas fall at 76 is anxious the division is tearing us apart and that fear has left it utterly unequipped to tell a believable story about putting it all back together again differences are what make can drive a story if you take away everything but we can what we can all agree on what are we left with we're left with that it's exciting to shoot monsters and take their things that it's good to have fun with your friends and that big explosions are very pretty all those things are true and they all do contribute towards making the game a genuinely enjoyable one to play it's fun it is fun fallout for me though has never been so much about fun as it is an escape into another world the depth specificity and boldness of the storytelling always used to take me there to that transcendent other place inside my imagination as fun as fall at 76 can be it never transported me like that poet 76 is shallow its world is absurd its world is broken and furthermore I'm surrounded by strangers who are all trying to burn the place down because it's entertaining and we're all pretty bored that is too close to my own world for comfort thanks for watching this video and all the videos that I do on this channel are crowd funded by the web site patreon I'd like to take a moment to thank by name some of the people who are currently donating 10 dollars a month or more to keep these videos going people like Arturo por la Rubus Paniagua Dirk wardrobe lo Beyonder Brandon boat vacuum mason gallic Josh Dewey Brian Puckerman Christian David Carlson Sean Jacobs siegelman Nek Jemison Bobby Sands Portman scanning David Betancourt Josh parkus Ashley rain nobody Leoni Oh Chris larkey - immune Dylan ball Michael Coonan Jereme Sanders seee keen Eric Jepsen Tyler Dow Z Roman Alexa probably some Las Olas Darian desitin Fergus Foley aurelion Noah Kantrowitz Tom Roddick your local Lulu Tom Vickers Danny Kilpatrick calling lutein Connor MacLeod cybot D Daniel painting Nate Williamson Alexander Sinden Ethan closet Tim Marsh abdul rahman al aBSI ray dev a Koi Andrew tap Mark Phillips Adrian Kamal a Schuyler Vasiliy Colby Howard Nathan Janzen argos swift sorcerer dave has an bar booty hairy eyeball free morpheme rich Stewart David Oren Christensen Khasra Fidel Savard Matthew Casa de David Hart straight I cannot fly Sharif Kazemi Wesleyan Greg Rucka Matt bargain wast QA x edward small zach be Erica moon soo Colin Basnet Jordan climb Jessie Denton signing near fall Tyler rush they fake emic name scorpion strike Cassie Jared Ozersky Elie Wiesel Colin Alex be pewter Casper sick Andrew for Byron Kalin Michaela airstone Daniel Moore miry Brad Smith Micah Shalom Kissimmee Martin meets NV Mitchell Eric Joyner Ryan Van Dyke the soul James Pascal Marais Michael at well Ian Boudreaux Nikolai Lucas Bernard Brennan Richie Lucas younger boy Alex Nikiforov Cameron booth Gordon Graham Stephen Hein max Pantoja San bill Mayer Trivium art history flimsy Hans QP R Devin Fitzpatrick Joaquin Coleman Steven potluck Andrew boysson Oh Ivan young chef anxiety cat play a Harrington Philip coffee Erik Robinson Kyle Zener alex is a lot of crow pork Steven Garrett Dave jean-philippe melamine will Edwards Robert Glover Jeanette Anthony gallant Maurice Despereaux the noble gainer Nemo Vanderburgh nice profit Jack Harvey Thomas Kistner Andrew opener April callosum little Wargrave Noah I know you're reading this out loud Patrick Magana gang again had Sebastian Perrone a will dominance alexander krong's McMurphy Jean Hendrick handsome Tom painter Oscar Sangan Berg Edward Clayton Andrews tin foil pancakes Samuel procopio Xavier Dominic Carlin Kim Winson Devon Vernon Jake Jacob in the camilan highs are the carrion medal of Connor Jody Warren Elisha and Nelson robot ghost reg Milla's Aidan ak-47 Josh Bray tech Sean Webber Andrew breka Gary Hercules Johnson Luton sigh : Alexander Romanov Jesse Wilkinson Alexander a photo Lucas mark on Dez de Moura toad heart Aaron all Bach Matthew Sutton William Homs Manuel Reitman Zak corpse team Ryan Schneider Lara's Ingvar Anderson Dana stupid care in Glasgow Jeremy McQuaid Niklas Roma Jorgenson hitter blink blink Tim dies Jack 887 788 Kevin Shou Anthony bar dill Andrew Montebello Jared Meyer Andrea slicin Brian Hill Laura's breakin Igor bad nuke den Thompson Cameron vision Alexander leister Morgan Muller world war ii freak Aaron Darwin Eli Berg mats Dennis Clark Daniel Pennybacker koribo Phil Jack Dawson Nick Cole Hamilton Carol Henderson reference error looky away residents thanks Jordan falls so a chic comfy hat Eddie Burton Gabriel Nichols Ranjha Bay Jeffrey McIntyre symbol Victor filter Edward Clayton Andrews Simon Anderson Jonathan see Mitchell James Mosca Tyler rush Adam look my bird learns Hurley transient tiefling Jordan Falls Brent Cosman Tom Vickers conceded exes Ludo criticism Kyle kindred Pike man homophobe Aris eighty Higdon Tyler f m-- r : Mike Windsor cereal aim a gandi leo Perl Oliver Ashton Daniel Rin Ford maxime carrot nom Chagnon skeptical frog next Cohen psychedelic at Marilla Jackie knew our Garrett Johnson toad heart velarium Daniel Floyd Vance Jordan follows Derek bell choir jerrod art if Lucas kilogauss key and Taysom Turner and the many more good in it don't ending a smaller amount to help out with the channel every little bit helps these videos coming and I'm deeply appreciative of all of it thank you and

Channel: Noah Caldwell-Gervais

Views: 378,914

Keywords: Fallout 76, Fallout, Review, Critique, Analysis, Deep Dive, Explained

Id: sfYQvlLylQ0

Length: 78min 50sec (4730 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 10 2018