Bethesda What Are You Doing With Fallout 76?!

Bethesda is well known for its fantastic single player RPG’s from the Elder Scrolls Series, and The Fallout series but lately since Fallout 76 they seem to have completely changed.

The once great studio who delivered such amazing and creative experiences has honestly dropped the ball since Fallout 76. Fallout 76 was promised to be an experience unlike any other, merging the amazing lore and world of Fallout into a multiplayer experience, a seamless game with no restrictions on how much fun you can have. The E3 presentations were amazing but then it was announced that NPC’s wouldn’t be in the game, only robots to give quests. To say this was met with disappointment is an understatement, the whole point of Fallout was the way that you could interact with a living and breathing world, NPC’s would see you and judge you based on your actions and it truly felt like your actions meant something. The whole point of Fallout was that it was your world to shape but Fallout 76 completely lost all of that charm of the previous games and felt like an empty shell.

Fallout 76’s controversies didn’t end there:

• The canvas bag outrage – People who pre-ordered the most expensive edition were promised canvas bags and unfortunately they only received cheap nylon bags, it turned out that influencers and journalists got the real deal and people who spent money didn’t get it.

• The launch was a catastrophic mess – When Fallout 76 launched it was one of the most broken triple A games ever launched on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in a long time. The servers couldn’t handle the players, the game was full of glitches and game breaking bugs, exploits were found and instead of fixing the issues were just switched off or bans were handed out. The game was an absolute mess, it was rushed out the door to quickly and promises were not kept.

• Nuka Rum – Again another lie where the item was cheap plastic and apparently tasted awful.

• The Atomic Shop – Despite Bethesda promising there would be no pay to win sadly pay to win items were added later to the cosmetic only store.

There are a lot more controversies but lets go into what they did to rectify at-least some of these issues. Bethesda did fix some of the issues, they did listen to players about a few of the complaints and added from what I hear, a decent battle royale mode. It seemed the players who loved 76 stuck with it and carried on playing making wonderful communities and really transforming the game into what we wanted. Bethesda then announced the very welcome NPC’s update that brings wastelanders to the apocalyptic world of Apalachia which really made people think, maybe Fallout 76 will become the game we wanted. Ahhh Bethesda, what happened to you?

Bethesda the other day announced Fallout 1st a premium membership for £12.99 or $12.99 per month and $99 or £99 a year (screw the exchange rate I guess?) and gamers around the world face palmed all at the same time. The membership lets you have a private server with up to 7 of your friends, an exclusive Fallout ranger armour and 1650 atom points per month which lets face it, doesn’t get you much on the quite expensive store. The promises hardly seem worth the cash.

Bethesda the once great studio and I mean no disrespect to the developers and artists and creators, this is obviously a business decision from the board rather than the true talent. Sadly the studio has fallen into the depths of greed, instead of supplying players with incredible experiences, it’s now more of a cash cow. These are features players wanted from the start but not for that amount of money. I feel like it would be much more understandable to charge this much for the features promised if Fallout 76 was the magical game that was promised and it was extremely popular and was loyal to it’s fan base but taking a game that was already in trouble and stamping this on it is disgusting. Why is gaming becoming more about shareholders than it’s audience? Any good faith that Bethesda had with the dedicated fans has gone. I myself am a Fallout fanatic but for the first time ever I felt like putting the game I spent £45 twice! One for me on PlayStation and one for my son on Xbox One in the bin. Perhaps an overreaction but this kind of move from Bethesda feels like a real “fuck you”.

For those who will buy it, it’s your money, your choice, for people who disagree with me, well we’re all entitled to an opinion but the state of triple A gaming is falling so fast, it’s becoming more about how we can bleed a player dry rather than how can we impress the players? Isn’t that sad?

• Update – It is reported that the private servers are not working properly and other systems are broken too. Not only does it cross the line by being expensive and unreasonable but it doesn’t work either.