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“Jack” is a character I created in Fallout 76, an MMORPG (Massively Multipler Online Role Playing Game) in the Fallout series by Bethesda. A new dowloadable content add-on just got released for it called “Wastelanders,” which fundamentally changed the game; It added in non-player characters, altered various locations throughout the game map, and even included a new main questline.
A lot of people in the Fallout community were looking forward to the release of “Wastelanders,” due to a less than favorable opinion of the game at launch. Many features fans have liked about the Fallout series were left out of the game, like having NPCs and settlements to interact with, and getting to make meaningful decisions concerning them. Those same people felt that the game was woefully lacking because of it, and this DLC promised to add those features to it.
Having not played the game before the DLC came out, I can’t speak of its quality then. As for “Fallout 76: Wastelanders,” I honestly didn’t mind it from a gameplay perspective. The combat mechanics were, at least, interesting, regardless of whether they could be seen as objectively good or bad.
Fallout veterans will likely remember the VATS system, used to temporarily pause combat and autotarget enemies. And as this game is always in real-time, any rational person would wonder how a combat-pausing system would work in it. Well, it’s gotten a lot simpler than it used to be: instead of targeting specific areas of an enemy’s body, this new system just targets an enemy as a whole and keeps your camera centered on them. The stat system was also pretty different from what I’m used to in an RPG; more on that later.
So, who would this game appeal to? Well, if you’re an RPG fan looking for something different it might be worth trying out just for that. As for Fallout fans: It’s not quite up to par with some of the past works in the series, but it is still an enjoyable ride. It’s somewhere between Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 in terms of gameplay.
Now as for what the game’s actually about: The game starts you off in a post-nuclear fallout shelter called Vault 76. Its tutorial is extremely short; you have one corridor to walk down to get out of the vault, with tables set up that conveniently have supplies, equipment, and explanations on how it all works. It also gives you a "C.A.M.P" device (do you really need to know what an acronym like that means?) that does exactly what its name implies: You open it up in your main menu, plant it just about anywhere on the map you want, and then it gives you a certain area of land around it to build structures. You can build a Camp, a house, a restaraunt, or even a hotel for other players.
Once you leave the vault, you’re pretty much free to go wherever and do whatever you want. Though, since the vault doesn’t give you that many supplies, or even a weapon, it'd be a good idea to play through a bit of the main storyline a bit before you start properly exploring. There are two “main” questlines to go through: The game’s original one, and the new one added with Wastelanders. The original quest is, the Vault Overseer left on a secret mission, and she’s left you a mysterious trail to follow. Wastelanders’s is much of the same, only you’re on the trail of a mysterious treasure, and the people leaving you the breadcrumbs are a bunch of settlers that have recently moved to the region.
If you’re not sure which to do first, don’t worry because there’s a lot of overlap between them. For example, the first place the Overseer’s quest sends you to is her camp. While leaving the Vault entrance in its direction, you’ll just happen to run into two settlers who thought Vault 76 was the hiding place of that treasure. You can hit them up for exposition (literally if you feel so inclined), and even get a free starter weapon from them if you play your cards right. It’s just a machete, but beggars can’t be choosers. And you just became homeless.
The Treasure quest then sends you to a bar to get more information from its proprietor, Duchess. And wouldn’t you know it, said bar is right across the street from the Overseer’s camp. You definitely want to stop at said camp before you do anything else, too, because it has a LOT of supplies and building materials that you’re going to need.
If you go into the bar, you might be surprised to see a raider holding the proprietor up at gunpoint. Might be, depending on how genre-savvy you are. In true RPG fashion you have multiple options with the raider, depending on how high certain skills are. High charisma, you can talk him down. High strength, you can intimidate him. If you stopped at the farm on the way and looted the place, you can just shoot him. Once you’ve dealt with the situation however way you felt like, you can get filled in on what that guy’s deal was. After that your quest will be able to go in a couple directions. You can join in with the bartender’s plan to deal with the rest of his gang, continue following the trail of the Overseer, or just walk off into the sunset and see what the world of Fallout 76 has to offer. As with most RPGs published by Bethesda, there’s a lot of room to tell your own story.
So far, the best part of this game is its environment. Its forested landscape doesn't really seem like a good fit for a game set after a nuclear war, but is quite a sight to behold. It’s also big, though the developers did not sacrifice quality for quantity when it came to designing the world. Even in the couple of square miles immediately surrounding the vault, there's still hours worth of things to do. The combat mechanics are an improvement over the previous title, Fallout 4, and the same can be said for the camp-construction mechanics. The C.A.M.P. menu CAN be a bit hard to navigate at first, but that’s offset by giving you A LOT more options than you had in Fallout 4. Oh, and here’s one last little addition that all the previous games have lacked: One of many guilty pleasures you can have in the wasteland is to shoot the dilapidated nuclear-power cars that litter the road, then watching them explode in an awe-inspiring mushroom cloud. The past games didn’t give a good gauge of WHEN it was going to go off, leaving it up to you to guess when you should run for cover. This game gave them a health meter, removing the guesswork.
Now, what would a Bethesda game be without bugs? Although in this game, I haven’t run into much of any yet, of either the “technical issues with the game” or the “giant insects that want to eat you” variety. The only technical glitch I’ve run into is one that wouldn’t let me use the vendor shops at another player’s camp. I’d select things to buy, hit the button to finalize my purchase, and then get an error message.
So far, the biggest personal issue I have with the game is the way it handles its weight limit. Most games have some form of a penalty for carrying more items than your character’s weight limit allows. In the dark ages, the game wouldn’t let your character walk at all until you dropped some stuff. Games in recent years, like the last three Fallout titles before this one, just make you walk slower. This game lets you keep walking like normal, but slowly drains your character’s stamina meter if you go faster than a certain pace. When the meter runs out, then you have to walk slow until it fills back up. It’s not bad enough to be a major issue, but I do think it’s a little too forgiving in a hand-holding kind of way. Plus it’s honestly just more cumbersome than I think is needed, since they effectively force you to walk as slow as you normally would anyway if you wanted to preserve your stamina.
Speaking of hand-holding, this game’s stat system is a lot more streamlined than what you’d see in other games of its genre. Normally you have a small set of vital statistics, and a longer list of skills that those statistics affect, and that you get to increase when you level up. This game just gives you the small list of stats, and you can raise one of them by one point every time you level up. You can also choose one from a random set of perks, with whether or not you can take a perk being dependent on how high the stat related to it is. In previous games, you just got a full list of all the perks that were available depending on your level, stats, and skills. Like with the weight limit,I think it’s just a more cumbersome system than it needs to be. Though I admit that the system was SO different from what I’m used to, that I actually had a bit of fun just messing around with it to try and figure out how it works.
Though don’t take it from me; not everybody was fully satisfied with the changes brought on to the DLC. In his review, Ethan Gach of Kotaku was of the opinion that, while the game has improved, it’s not as much as it could have been, and even goes so far as to say that some of its attempts at adding depth to the game rang somewhat hollow. “Penelope [a person who’s mutated to the point of looking like a walking rotted corpse] is worried that the new world order you’re trying to build won’t have room for mutants like her,” he wrote. “Passing a +4 charisma check with her halfway through the quest doesn’t open up new doors or gain her trust. Instead, it reminds her that there’s a quicker way to fix [her drilling machine.] than she’d previously thought. ...You might as well be trying to hack into one of the hundreds of computer terminals scattered elsewhere in the world. I feel for Penelope. I wish we could share more than just a to-do list.”
Before release, Ferret Vaudion, the game’s lead designer, had expressed high hopes for both this new expansion, and the game as a whole moving forward. In an interview at Bethesda’s Pax East event, helpfully recorded by gamesindustry.biz, he went into what he felt did and didn’t work for the game at launch, and how that informed their decisions while making Wastelanders.
“There was quite a lot that worked at launch,” he said. “If you’re a person who liked exploration, for example, it was possibly one of the best worlds to explore that we’ve ever had. It was just huge, full of stories and stuff like that. But there was a large portion of our audience that wanted people.
They wanted an emotional connection. And if you know everyone is dead, and you come across a holotape from someone, it loses that hope that you might meet that person and help them out.
I think that what we learned from launch was htat core combat was fun, it was great to explore, there was a lot to do, but what we needed for a lot of our audience was to bring the humanity back.”
So yeah, fun game. Maybe bring your friends. I still think it’s worth trying out, even if it may end up not being as in-depth as had been promised. I mean, the map’s still huge, and there is still a lot of stuff to do in it.I can’t say too much about the multiplayer aspect, but I’ve heard the game’s a lot more fun with a party. My first experience with another player was to run away in terror because they walked up to me while I had my map out. I wish I was joking. There’s my last piece of advice: Don’t just stand there in the middle of the road looking at your menu or your map for minutes on end. Remember that the game does NOT pause, and you never know what might sneak up on you.
Before I wrap up, there IS another bug I ran into. But it's easy to forgive ones that make a game funny, which this definitely was. So, I’m walking up the road to a radio tower as part of the "Treasure" quest line, and I see a robot called a protectron walking up the road ahead of me. Apparently they can asexually reproduce, because a second one suddenly appeared in the exact same place the other one was walking. Now, keep in mind that both of them walk at the same pace. So imagine two identical robots standing so close together that their bodies overlap, walking at the same speed, making the same walking animation, and saying the same random phrases. And it gets weirder. Later they both just randomly died, from only one or two gunshots each. I have NO idea who did it, how, or why.
The full Kotaku article:
https://kotaku.com/fallout-76-wastelanders-the-kotaku-review-1843203130
Quote from Ferret Baudion of Bethesda:
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-03-08-fallout-76-wants-to-bring-humanity-to-the-game-through-npcs
At a Glance:
Multiplayer Survival RPG developed by Bethesda Game Studios
Base Game price: ~ $40; All DLC, including Wastelanders, are free.
Base Game release date: Nov. 14, 2018
Wastelanders release: April 14, 2020
My Rating: ****/5
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