Fallout 76

Fallout 76
Developer(s)	Bethesda Game Studios
Publisher(s)	Bethesda Softworks
Director(s)	Todd Howard
Composer(s)	Inon Zur
Series	Fallout
Engine	Creation Engine
Platform(s)	Microsoft Windows PlayStation 4 Xbox One
Release	November 14, 2018
Genre(s)	Action role-playing
Mode(s)	Multiplayer

Fallout 76 is an online multiplayer action role-playing video game developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. It is an entry in the Fallout series, and serves as a narrative prequel to it. It was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on November 14, 2018. The game has received mixed reviews from critics.

Gameplay

Fallout 76 is Bethesda Game Studios' first online multiplayer game. Players may play individually or with a party of up to three others. All the servers for the game are dedicated, with the player automatically allocated to one of them. While the game was expected to launch with public servers only, game director Todd Howard revealed plans for private servers to be introduced some time after the game's launch. These private servers allow players to invite friends to play in order to prevent undesirable aspects of player versus player gameplay such as griefing from affecting an individual player's experience of the game. Howard described the delay as being necessary to allow Bethesda time to assure the stability of public servers. Elements of previous Fallout games are present and are modified to work with the real-time game. The V.A.T.S. system—a mechanic first introduced in Fallout 3 that allows players to pause the game to target specific locations on an enemy's body to attack—is used in Fallout 76 as a real-time system, though it still allow players to specify targets on an enemy's body.

The game features an open world four times the size of that of Fallout 4. The game world is called "Appalachia" and is a representation of West Virginia. It features recreations of real locations in the region, including the West Virginia State Capitol, The Greenbrier, Woodburn Circle, New River Gorge Bridge, and Camden Park. The game features numerous new mutated monsters, several of which—such as the Mothman and the Flatwoods monster—were inspired by West Virginian folklore.

The game includes revisions to the SPECIAL progression system. Character attributes fall into one of seven categories: strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility and luck. As the player levels up, they are able to spend skill points to boost their attributes on a scale of one to fifteen. Players are able to choose perks, or passive abilities that offer gameplay bonuses. These perks fall into each of the SPECIAL categories and take the form of trading cards. Each card has a value and the player can adopt perks equal to their respective value; for example, if the player has a strength rating of five, then they may equip strength perks worth five points. The player can merge similar cards together to create more powerful—albeit more expensive—perks. The system is designed to encourage the player to recognise the situation they are in and choose perks that aid them rather than passively selecting them and having them for the duration of the game.

Fallout 76 does not feature any human non-player characters (NPCs) as all surviving humans are other players. This required Bethesda to change their approach to storytelling as previous games in the series relied on NPCs to assign quests, engage the player in dialog and advance the overall narrative. Fallout 76 instead uses a combination of NPCs in the form of robots, recordings such as collectible holotapes, terminals throughout the game world, and environmental storytelling where the player uncovers fragments of a narrative by exploring locations that they then piece together themselves. Each of these elements had previously been used in the series, often to provide backstory for characters and the world of the game whilst remaining separate from the main narrative. According to Howard, this system allows Bethesda to tell a story whilst giving players a greater ability to create their own narratives.

The game expands on Fallout 4's settlements by allowing the player the ability to build bases at any location of the map. These creations are assigned to the player's profile and are removed from the game world when the player is offline to prevent progress from being lost. While other players are able to attack player settlements while they are online, the game preserves player creations in some form to prevent players from having to start over if their creations and progress are destroyed.

Players are able to use nuclear weapons to reshape the game world. After acquiring launch codes, the player can access missile silos and fire a missile at any point on the map. This irradiates the area, which the player can then explore to find rare weapons, gear and items. However, it also attracts powerful enemies and the player needs to be sufficiently strong to survive. The game also includes a photo mode. The player has the ability to pose their character and choose from a variety of facial expressions and filters.

Premise

Further information: Fallout (series) § Setting

Fallout 76 is a narrative prequel to previous Fallout games. It is set in an alternate history, and takes place in 2102, twenty-five years after a nuclear war that devastated the Earth. The player character is a resident of Vault 76, a fallout shelter that was built in West Virginia to house America's best and brightest minds. The player character exits the Vault on "Reclamation Day" as part of a plan to re-colonize the Wasteland.

Development

Fallout 76 uses a modified version of Bethesda's Creation Engine designed to accommodate multiplayer gameplay. Work on modifying the engine was carried out by Bethesda Game Studios Austin. The modified engine also allowed the development team to incorporate new lighting models, rendering processes and more accurate terrain mapping. These allowed the development team to create a world with sixteen times more detail than was possible with previous iterations of the Creation Engine. The game also includes a dynamic weather system that allows for localized climatic conditions and greater draw distances mean that these weather events can be observed by the player from far away. As with many previous games in the series, its musical score was composed by Inon Zur.

Release

The game was announced on May 30, 2018; the announcement was preceded by a twenty-four hour live stream on Twitch showing a Vault Boy bobblehead toy in front of a monitor with a "Please Stand By" test pattern screen, a signature image of the series. This stream was watched by a total of over two million people, with more than one hundred thousand people watching at any time.

Details of the game were announced by Howard during Bethesda's press conference at the Electronic Entertainment Expo on June 10, 2018, including its anticipated release date of November 14, 2018. As it is Bethesda Game Studio's first experience with a fully online game, Howard confirmed that there would be an open beta phase, beginning on October 23, 2018 for Xbox One, and October 30, 2018 for PlayStation 4 and PC.

Reception

Reception

Aggregate score

Aggregator	Score
Metacritic	PC: 52/100 PS4: 53/100 XONE: 49/100

Review scores

Publication	Score
Game Informer	6/10
GameSpot	4/10
GamesRadar+
IGN	5/10
PC Gamer (US)	60/100
VideoGamer.com	4/10

Edit on Wikidata

In response to the announcement that Fallout 76 would feature only multiplayer, a petition was created by fans of the series which called for the game to include a single-player mode. The petition received thousands of signatures within a day. Following the game's announcement, there was a burst of interest in tourism in West Virginia. The website "West Virginia Explorer" reported an increase of fifteen times the visitors to the site in the days after the announcement, while management of the Camden Park amusement park said there was an increase in people looking to purchase park merchandise.

The teaser trailer shown at E3 2018 featured a cover version of John Denver's song "Take Me Home, Country Roads". Fans of the series expressed interest in the song, prompting Bethesda to announce plans to release the song on digital musical services, with all proceeds from it being donated to Habitat for Humanity, assuring a minimum US$100,000 donation.

Upon its release, it received "mixed or average reviews" from critics according to review aggregator Metacritic. The Guardian called the game "a pointless walk in the post-apocalypse", criticizing its lack of non-playable characters and its unstable nature, while praising the game's design. According to Forbes, Fallout 76 was a "huge, rare, total miss" by Bethesda. Eurogamer described the game as a "bizarre, boring, and broken mess", adding that, shortly after its launch, it should be considered as a "failed experiment".

Business Insider described Fallout 76 as "a jumble of disparate video game elements set loose in an online world, held together by a string of pointless fetch quests and experience points". Newsweek said that moments of the enjoyment during their review were "outweighed by the near-constant performance issues and poorly executed game systems", adding that they were disappointed at the game despite being a fan of the series.

PCWorld ended their review early due to their frustration with the game's technical performance, and said that it still would not be a great game to them even if it "functioned properly". Metro wrote that Fallout 76 may be the "most badly made video game" they had ever seen from a major publisher. They further described the game as "a disastrous failure" whose technical shortcomings may one day be fixed, but whose "design failings and obliviousness to its own potential" suggested that it was "irrevocably broken".

Sales

Upon launch, Fallout 76 debuted at third place in the UK's all-format sales charts, behind Spyro Reignited Trilogy and Red Dead Redemption 2.