Fallout 76 – Review: Fallout 76

Fallout 76 begins with the remains of a party. His character wakes up late and all his companions Vault 76 – the hangouts of the game conspiracy that must emerge twenty-five years after a nuclear war to rebuild the United States – are out and you meet dishes, confetti and little conical hats scattered everywhere. A lonely robot cleans the dirt.

In an almost poetic way, this evening is a perfect analogy to describe all the online RPG published by Bethesda as a new proposal for his post-apocalyptic franchise: playing Fallout 76, it's like coming to a party that ends. You see the trails, the clues. From time to time you see even one person or another, but in the end, you have the impression that everything has happened and that you have been lucky to arrive a few minutes later later.

And, let's face it, trying to have fun at a party that ends can be very tricky.

The result obtained by this online RPG is a hazy combination of incongruous ideas, poorly executed and accompanied by a festival of bugs and technical problems, which occur frequently even for the standards of Bethesda game. But before considering the anatomy of the disaster, you must explain what is Fallout.

Not a combined

The RPG was born of a very simple principle: what would happen if Fallout was an online game? In theory, it's quite possible – and attempts go back to the early years of the franchise under Bethesda. In practice, ideas designed to implement multiplayer mode in the Fallout framework offer a game rich in conflicting experiences.

The worst of them comes from the famous absence of NPC, machine controlled characters that, in every RPG, are responsible for flavoring the universe, sometimes creating contexts, sometimes reacting to the choices of the NPC. player. Abdicant, one of the greatest assets of the saga – the ability to shape history through his choices – Fallout 76 decides that all humans in their world are controlled by flesh and blood.

To contextualize such a development choice, it makes him juggle the script. As Vault 76 shows, the game puts you in the wake of the nuclear shelter supervisor who continued the task of rebuilding the area until you found the place ridiculously inhospitable.

The Fallout 76 graph repeats a pattern: you follow in the footsteps of the supervisor, but you never find it. The audio files left by the character update you a story that always seems to be made by other characters, and never by you. The problem hangs not only in the main plot, but also in parallel missions (another item highlighted in other Fallouts), still counted with the help of tapes and newspapers. computer.

The narration of the environment, the one you have revealed by the clues left on the scene, is a highlight of Fallout as a whole, and Bethesda has bet everything on this feature to not deprive your RPG of the exhaustion of the script . But there is a fundamental difference in the way it is used in Fallout 76 and its predecessors: the time jump between nuclear war at the origin of this whole universe.

Established just two decades after the atomic conflict between the United States and China, Fallout 76 is the closest game to the fusion of all other episodes of the saga. Previous spinoffs range from 80 to over two centuries after this conflict – enough time for complete erosion of prewar society and the creation of another. Here, the environmental narrative served as a window to this world that no longer existed, and its absurd contrasts with reality before the player.

What's left

So, nowhere to go: trying to advance in the story of Fallout 76, is crossing a world that seems to be inhospitable from day to night. The different villages and settlements you visit are ghosts or are inhabited by robots and burned (a new chain of ghouls that plays an important role in the plot). The audio tapes make you feel more spectator and less agent.

It was hoped that such a large sacrifice of such an important element for the franchise would have a positive counterpart, but what remains simply does not stand up to the concessions made by Bethesda. Other human beings are still players, but the possible interactions between them are virtually limited to some kind of violent action.

To avoid a supposed disconnect between a post-apocalyptic world and an online reality, each Fallout 76 server is populated by a few players. As a result, you see few people on the map (unless, of course, you are in a group). You can trade items with another player, you can join them during missions or temporary events, and you can confront them – but only if they oppose you. Otherwise, you are considered a killer by deleting another player.

So many interactions limited by action bring us to another fundamental problem of Fallout 76: the foundation on which it is built. In fights, he tries to masquerade as an action game but runs into the idea of ​​being an RPG. Controls, inherited from Fallout 4, is not much precision and the only system that balances this – V.A.T.S. – has been modified to lose almost all its effectiveness.

Implemented with the transformation of Fallout into an RPG in the first / third person by Bethesda, the V.A.T.S. Pauses the action and allows you to watch specific parts of the opponent at the expense of action points. Since this is impossible to implement in an online game, V.A.T.S. has become a kind of assisted cascade which, despite the improvements achieved thanks to the level progression, does not help during the fighting.

Finally, Fallout 76 also doubles the bet on one of the main novelties of its predecessor: building bases. Here, there is not much news – it is possible to produce buildings, benches to create objects, turrets, electric lights and more. The biggest difference is that they become mobile bases and can be transported to any corner of the map.

The construction at the base is associated with a survival aspect that already existed in the greatest difficulties of off-line fallout, where you have to feed and drink water to survive. By trying to combine elements that already existed in a different way, Fallout 76 seems to want to catch some of the many successful online games, creating a game. 25% Fallout, 25% Destiny, 25% H1Z1, 25% Minecraft and 0% pleasure.

Post-apocalypse of insects

Not enough concessions and conflicts resulting from Fallout's transition to the online environment, 76 delivers what is expected of a Bethesda game in its version: the bugs. This is not new: the producer herself said we should expect it What surprises us is the amount of problems, at a level higher than the one we are used to playing in the studio.

I'm telling you here about my own experience to illustrate the disastrous launch of Fallout 76 in this way. I started playing on PlayStation 4 Pro and, after downloading a fix of more than 50 GB – heavier than the game's core file – the dialogs were not displayed at the game. screen, which prevented any progression in the history of role plays. .

Faced with the problems, I decided to upgrade to the Xbox One X version in the game, to meet a game that disconnects the console control every 10 minutes, rotated my character to the screen and that the speed of scrolling was absurd. unthinkable, especially since he played the game on the most powerful console on the market.

It's possible – probably and even expected – for Bethesda to make improvements and fixes needed in Fallout 76. But they'll have to be many to bring the game closer to the promise promised by Bethesda when it's announced in the middle of the year. For now, the first online RPG of the post-apocalyptic franchise continues in a state of endless celebration.

Release

14/11/2018

Editor

Bethesda

developer

Bethesda Game Studios