The Fallout 76 beta on Xbox One has came and went so I wanted to take this time to give my first impressions on the few hours I got to play tonight. For some background on my Fallout experience, I have played 3, New Vegas, and 4; Fallout 4 being the one where I put the most time by far.
It seems that as we get closer to the release of Fallout 76 that more die hard fans are voicing their pessimism with the game. When the game was first revealed at E3 this year I was genuinely excited. Putting me into a giant Bethesda world and this time I can adventure the wasteland with my friends? Sign me up.
I am excited to say that the game feels like a classic Fallout game. For the most part. If you played and enjoyed Fallout 4, you will have a fun time with this game. I will also say that surprisingly I never ran in any bugs while Fallout 76. Of course, this is a very small sample size and it is a huge game. There are bound to be bugs somewhere. There were times in combat that my frames dropped badly, and a couple of lag issues, but overall not as bad as I was expecting.
Fallout 76. As you walk to the vault’s door, your “tutorial” is passing by boards that hand you a few useful items and vaguely explain things. When you reach the outside you are set free and you could go anywhere you want to. Like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, you are offered the entire world right off the bat.
Bars for your thirst and hunger are added in to give even more of a survival game feel to Fallout 76. Of course with everything irradiated it is hard to find anything that does not make your RADs go up. Cooking food and boiling water is offered as you continue through the game and certain perk cards take away from the constant radiation. There did not seem to be a way to completely avoid radiation though. As someone who would use radaway almost every time the smallest red bar appeared on my health in previous Fallout games, this bugged me to no end.
Story
What seems to be the “Main Storyline” of Fallout 76 is finding the Overseer (the person put in charge of Vault 76). While getting ready to leave, a recording mentions that she has another mission. Your character has no other place to go so I guess it is just decided you should follow her? Even though it is recommended you follow her path, you can go anywhere you want. You create your own story here.
Finding the Overseer’s path gives this kind of extended tutorial. The first area you stop at is one of her C.A.M.P.s. I couldn’t tell you the abbreviation off the top of my head. This is the base building system brought over from Fallout 4. Wherever you and your friends go in the world, you can build your base (or C.A.M.P.). Crafting weapons, meals, drinks, and armor is going to be a key part of Fallout 76 so it is important that the game gives you flexibility to do this wherever.
However, moving your base will cost caps to put all your previously built items away. Unless you are absolutely rich, it’s not a great idea to consistently put your base wherever. Honestly, I never cared about base building in the previous game and I don’t care about it in Fallout 76. It might come in handy though at some point.
Multiplayer
The West Virginia wasteland feels even more empty than other Fallout games, but exponentially more social at the same time. Following the Overseer’s recordings you hear her explain that the area is a ghost town. That’s because she left the vault before anyone else. She did not get the same experience you will as you run into other people periodically.
My first steps outside of the vault I ran into another person that had a mic and he suggested we team up and we did. Times like that is going to help Fallout 76 differentiate itself from past games in the series. If you want to play alone, you can. At the same time, if you want to play with others you can do that to with essentially no risk of griefing.
Playing in a party is completely optional. While I chose to play with someone else, I believe my experience would have been relatively the same alone. Loot seems to be randomly generated in most instances and when its not all people get a chance to grab the same items. Chat in the game is proximity based. To hear other people that are not in your party you have to be a certain distance apart. Of course if you run into someone you don’t want to hear you can mute them.
Missions
One complaint I have with the party system and missions are that even if you are on the same mission, progress is not completed when one member finishes. For example, in my gameplay multiple times me and my teammate would be working on a mission and for whatever reason we would get separated and do things at a different pace. This could be because one of us ran into enemies while the other was continuing the mission or one of us decided to go exploring.
Any mission that I completed before him would still tell me that he had to finish each part. Sometimes I had already forgotten what terminal I looked at or what I had done to complete it. Essentially, I did multiple missions a couple times in a row just to get him through it and get the notification off my screen. That being said, I love that you are not forced to be with your teammates at all times. You can completely load into a building that they are not in and go on your own mini-adventure.
The mission tracker also gets very confusing. Even if you only have one mission tracked, the top right of your screen gets quickly overflowed with objectives. If I finish a mission, I don’t care where my teammate is at in it. The compass is confusing because so many different objectives are marked with the same exact symbol. To truly understand what you are chasing, it is always best to stop in place and look at your map.
Enemies
Besides the other players you run into in the world, there are no other humans. Your interactions with NPCs will either be robots or the many deadly nuclear creatures of the Wasteland. In the first few hours of playing the game, they felt like small bumps in the road. The usual radroaches, ghouls, and supermutants make their presence known plenty of times. Like in the past, they are no hurdle to defeat. At least so far.
At one point, my teammate and I went to go on a journey away from the main mission objectives. We wanted to see if we could find anything that would be out of our league to fight. We wanted to fight a radscorpion or maybe even a deathclaw. However, we never found anything like that because as we got to the next town over, we found more missions that took up a bunch of our time.
We literally were trying to get away from the missions and find something overpowering to us and we got distracted into doing missions again. Enemies do have levels themselves, so I do not know if those levels rubber band up with you wherever you are, or if the levels depend on the area. The beta was too short to do any big time exploring.
VATS and Pip-Boy
Speaking of enemies, a lot of people’s concerns with Fallout 76 has been how will the VATS system work. When activating VATS your targeted enemy gets zoomed in on and all focus is on them. Of course, in a multiplayer game, there is no time stopping so everything keeps moving.
The VATS system for me seemed to always aim for the area that was most likely to get a hit on the enemy. If you have a gun, your percentage chance of hitting is given and you can try for critical shots. There are perk cards you can attach to aim for other body parts than the core. With a melee weapon, you lunge more for the enemy. Overall, I think Bethesda did a great job of making such an iconic system for the Fallout series adapt to still be useful. Normal gunplay is still not fun. I enjoyed swinging around my melee weapons more than shooting.
The Pip-Boy is still your inventory system. It also does not stop time in Fallout 76. I had a moment where I was fighting three supermutants and I wanted to get to an item that I had not set to my favorites wheel. The favorites wheel is awesome for selecting the weapons you want to use, but if you get into a fight with the wrong weapon you completely leave yourself exposed for the duration of the time it takes to pull the right one out.
Conclusion
Overall, I am still very excited for Fallout 76. There is no way I see it competing for game of the year like Fallout 4 did in 2015. This game will differentiate itself from past games by creating new friendships and the insane adventures you go on with others. Throwing you and your friends into a wasteland to fend for yourself is going to be fun. For Fallout veterans, you should have a great time either alone or with others. For newcomers to the series, you will be lost in the beginning, but with the counter-actions Bethesda put in to combat griefing if you find someone to play with you can enjoy this as well.
