5 Reasons to Love Fallout 76

Fallout 76 debuted in mid-November 2018 and almost instantly became the most hated game of the year. In the months following the release, scandals were abundant, and the game seemed cursed. A year and a half later, there's still many people who wish this game had never happened, but the fact of the matter is that it's still developed, still making money.

The Internet courts have pronounced the sentence – all the players lacking the taste, honor, dignity and common sense who are still playing Fallout 76 and (o horror!) having fun are guilty! The proposed punishment is resurrecting witch-hunting practices, with burning at the stakes and all that, in case of players who continually spend money in the game, filling the pockets of a ruthless corporation.

As an Internet parias, an owner of a collectors' edition of the latest Fallout and a subscriber of Fallout 1st, I shall try to explain why I dared falling in love with Fallout 76 in the first place.

Atmosphere

I remember I was very skeptical about Fallout 3 moving into the third dimension, when that decision was announced. When, after a long delay, I finally finished the decent Fallout 3 and the phenomenal Fallout: New Vegas on one fell swoop, I breathed a sigh of relief – it was still the same Fallout, only modernized.

And what is the single element, universal across all Fallout games? It's the atmosphere. The American dream of the 1950s was brutally smothered by the atomic holocaust. I had a great time in the world of Fallout 4 because all the elements worked perfectly together – the cartoonish, idealized American suburbs, characters suspended at the intersect of two realities, acting as if the bombs were never dropped. Plus the soundtrack – the classics from Diamond City Station accompanying us the extermination of hordes of ghouls for some reason make for quite a memorable experience.

Fallout 76 is actually Fallout 4.5 – the map is bigger, there's more mutants and optional multiplayer. The atmosphere makes the story even more compelling – in retrospect (after the release of the Wastelanders expansion), I'm convinced that giving up humanoid NPCs was a great decision. Especially because every time we learned about the robotic nature of encountered independent characters at the very end of a given chain of tasks, when we were almost certain that we had finally met a man of flesh and blood. Such a vibrant world is begging to be explored, which brings me no another point.

Exploration

If I were to describe F76 in a few words, I would call it Skyrim in postapo. The creators have taken the best (and according to many – the worst) elements from Fallout 4 and moved them to an even larger world that is bursting at the seams with all the locations, which, although they don't always add much to the plot, allow for fantastic, unconstrained exploration.

In practice, it is impossible to focus solely on one task in F76– the Appalachians are alluring with plentiful side activities and secret locations. I would often find myself deviate away from my main goals, wake up an hour later in a completely different place, along the way filling my inventory and emptying my ammo. If not for all the blueprints and schemes you can find, side quests would seem completely redundant.

When exploring the post-apocalyptic North America, time really flies – I am convinced that Fallout 76, after its debut on Steam, will become a worthy competitor to Skyrim, a game in which many players have spent more than a few thousand hours, with the record game time reaching 55 thousand hours! How can we be certain? Well, that's not the time-consuming ace up F76's sleeve.

Workshop

Another brilliant element first tested in the previous installment is the system of crafting and construction. The developers slightly refreshed and modified the original concept, as we are dealing with a multiplayer game, so instead of large settlements or cities, we have to settle for our own camp, which at the same time is our safe haven and base of operations. The whole idea is seemingly simple, and all we seem to need at first is a bed, a case for items and a few workbenches.

However, over time, as my equipment became filled with more and more materials, my camp has grown and changed, there are so many options and components that it's impossible to resist testing out different combinations. Then there's the matter of power and water supply, a few defensive turrets, some visual gadgets, the colors of your faction... and all of a sudden I almost became one of those weird people who reconstruct cities in Minecraft.

It's the same with modifications and new equipment – I spent hours selecting the inventory, searching for missing ingredients, and choosing the right paint. All this allows for complete personalization of the character – the chance of meeting a clone here is close to zero.

The number of elements we can use to create our unique inhabitant of Vault 76 is truly impressive. Weapons, power armor, regular armor, faces, emoticons, backpacks, decorations – hundreds of hours just browsing the stuff. Quality time, too. And once we're fully equipped and the base is secure, it's time for...

Combat

A typical F76 fight scene – the Pip-Boy is playing Mr. Sandman, the fusion core in the power Armor slowly measures the last drips of energy, and the red-hot minigun spits out 5mm bullets, laying them thickly on the supermutants. And that happens in the game regularly. Combat in the latest installment of Fallout turns out incredibly satisfying, and, best of all, seamlessly blended with exploration.

I also like the choice of character skills and the fact that we can change them almost freely – thanks to this procedure, you can try out different types of gameplay with the same character. The only thing that's missing is the ability to chose attributes freely – now seriously limited. A full-fledged V.A.T.S. wouldn't go amiss, too, although this was a necessary sacrifice for the multiplayer.

The very immersion in the game world also depends on the type of weapon preferred. It's really amazing how big a difference your weapon of choice makes in terms of the way fights play out. For example, when a death claw, the natural reaction is to keep your distance, as the beast is pretty sizeable – if you get into a scuffle with it, you will find that its punches carry a lot of power. This element of gameplay has consistently impressed me since Fallout 4 – exquisite. But that's not everything I wanted to praise the game for.

Small stories

Once we have grinded our character and equipment to the limit, it remains to delve into the amazing world, enjoying its exploration and fighting hordes of mutated enemies. It may even seem we no longer need anything to be happy – but is that really the case? The last, though seemingly insignificant element, are all the little stories that we learn along the way.

All the notes to friends, entries in terminals, unfinished meals, and other signs of normalcy violently interrupted by the power of the atom. They don't seem to bring anything important to the plot, but I often found them more powerful in their message than many of the full-flown quests. I don't know if all these are the work of a single person, or perhaps a bigger team delegated to come up with bite-sized stories, but whoever did it, deserves a huge credit.

Small stories are an inherent part of exploration, a kind of reward for the time spent thoroughly the looting locations. At times, I would find myself so touched by these few lines written in a computer that hadn't been used for decades, that I began to feel a most peculiar sentiment for their author and the place I found it in. The dramas of people deprived of humanity by war; fathers and mothers searching for lost children, children suffering without their parents – each story is a dramatic message from a world, where things finally went bad.

Summary

I'm sure everyone who has been enjoying Fallout 76 for the past few months can add a few ideas to this list. If you've reached this place, you probably deserve explanation. I am having fun playing Fallout 76. I'm not a fan of everything Bethesda does, and, like you, I find many of its recent decisions highly questionable. Yes, I am aware of all the blemishes of F76 and I'm not saying that it's a perfect game – to the contrary: it's a very difficult love, full of bugs, microtransactions, unfulfilled promises and untapped potential. At the end of the day, we'd all be better off if this was simply an expansion to Fallout 4 – oh, what a beautiful world that could be!