Fallout 76: The rejected child of Bethesda

Oh my, where to start? Fallout 76, the game that no one wanted. the game no one asked for, the live service of the century. Another online Survival game in a market saturated in survival games.

When Bethesda announced this instead of something like a remaster of "Fallout: New Vegas" (in my opinion the best modern Fallout game around) or some sort of equally inventive and imaginative addition to the franchise, not many people took kindly to it.

To be honest, when I heard about this I was interested. I thought, "Well, an online survival game in the Fallout universe? That's an interesting take on things." I was expecting something like Fallout 4 chalked full of NPC's, Survivalists, Raiders, and other players banding together to take on tough missions and bosses.

I had high hopes, I thought that maybe we would get to join Factions like in New Vegas and Fallout 4 and have to fight against other player enemies in rival faction's all vying for control of a fresh, and new world. That would've been a great route to take the series, if they had indeed made a Fallout game like that it would rival New Vegas for top modern Fallout games.

What we got was a shell of a Fallout game, stripped of features and elements that were beloved in the Fallout series, with Microtransactions and monetization haphazardly shoved into the mix.

However, before I go on, I must confess that I have not played since the Nuclear Winter add-on. So I have no idea what Wastelanders brought to the table, not much from what I read.

Here's the kicker, we all know Bethesda has been trying to sneak some sort of after-market monetization into their newer games, be it Skyrim's paid Mod system that they attempted to force down the player's throats, or the current skin system they pushed into Fallout 4. Unfortunately, it seems that the company made Fallout 76 solely to justify a microtransaction system in a Fallout game. They literally built the game around the marketplace, and it's disgusting.

Fallout 76, though I did enjoy playing now and then, was a rushed out shell of a game. Unfortunately, the Appalachian state of West Virginia was a vast and empty wilderness that was dotted with players here and there that barely ever crossed each other or interacted for that matter. 

There weren't any interactive NPC's that weren't robots or Holotapes that I found, aside from the legions of Scorched and the mutated creatures of the wasteland.

It seemed only after peoples criticisms of their trash, Live Service Microtransaction machine, did they add NPC's. This tells me that there was no doubt that the game was built solely as a microtransaction facilitator, encouraging the players to spend money on skins and additions to the in-game items. The only upside to their store was nothing was pay-to-win, until it was...

This makes me sad, Bethesda has the capability to make a great online game. I really enjoyed playing Elder Scroll's Online. That is a prime example of what this game could have been had Bethesda took the time to make a decent game. If they had taken the Elder Scroll's Online Formula, turned it into a Fallout-style game in the Fallout universe it would have been one of the best they had made in recent years. 

Instead, they cobbled together a bug-ridden mess of a "Survival Game", stuffed microtransactions into the mix, and then removed all the things that made Fallout Fallout, all for a quick release date.

They tragically stripped out the new VATS system from Fallout 4 and replaced it with some percentage auto-aim mechanic no one wanted, made a world devoid of NPC's, though the Factions that you discover through Holotapes and exploration would have been so interesting to interact with and join, no storyline, essentially no Fallout game.

It's frustrating, tragic, and disappointing that they went that way with the game. It had so much promise and so much potential. The reality of it is, Bethesda wanted to create a microtransaction facilitator with as little work as could have possibly been done. They pushed it out as soon as they could under the guise of a Fallout game to monetize the after-market Fallout community. I used to stream this on my channel, I thought that Nuclear Winter was fun. But it was easily put down and forgotten, as it is today. Don't buy it.