Despite its rough patches, the Fallout 76 beta was full of good stories

The Fallout 76 beta wrapped up yesterday, meaning it's going to be over, but it's going to be and several times with strangers I put in the game. I've been hungry bunties and been hunted myself. I've done quests and events and plenty of exploring and crafting.

I'm a long time ago, but here are my major takeaways from my time with the beta.

Fallout 76 is full of stories, even without human NPCs

While exploring a desolate area in the north I came across a small, ruined house. Inside is a working terminal with a few short entries that mentioned the homeowner's troubled business, his young son, and the sound's nanny robot. What followed was most of an hour. I was able to track down what nanny, who asked me to find out what happened to her who was missing before the war, which led me to an investigation to find clausing involving other locations and their characters, their motives, and what happened to each of them.

Fallout 76 is full of stories like this. They'll get you in the right direction, and you'll be able to do this, and while your terminal hacking skills are too low to breach one location through it doors, I was able to find a secret entrance by snooping around). These stories are a small scale-we're talking about finding out what happened to a single person in a world where they have never been satisfied, they are still satisfying to unravel, often more so than grander, loftier, more important '(and more violent) quests.

I do not know what kind of interaction that comes into play in the game, where you can choose how you respond to NPCs and influence others with charisma checks or bribery, or roleplay the type of character you are through the things you say to other characters. It's very hard to imagine how much more we could have been to fallout 76's quests if we were allowed to really interact with other NPCs.

But that does not mean the quests and stories do not work in Fallout 76. They do. They're just a bit different. And there are stories, lots of them, everywhere, if you dig around and look. There are no humans but friendly robots are a complete delight to meet, and I'm not a huge fan of the over-the-top holotape voice acting. Most quests I've found this way to be rewarding (and not just in the material sense). I can not wait to unearth more.

You can play alone even while playing with others

I teamed up with Jarred for a few hours of the beta. We played and explored and made side-by-side at times, and drifted apart to do our own things at times. When we'd find something interesting we'd like to know about it (OK, sometimes I'd just swear or mutter and he'd ask what was happening), and we'd join via fast-travel.

Another time I was hunting down with a bounty (one of my favorite pastimes) and while he and I were trading rifle shots we got to chat about it. He said the bounty was a holdover from the previous beta, and while he did not lose his head he did not want to save money. So, I holstered my gun and swore to protect him from any other players who could show up for his bounty (none did), we visited his base so he could store his junk, and then he asked me to kill him to remove the bounty so he could get back to playing without fear of murder. We played a while together but finally went to our own thing again.

This is all to say that Fallout 76 feels like a good hangout game. You can team up and tackle a group of people, but it is also incredibly easy and safe to be on your own while still technically being part of a team. My biggest misgiving about an online game Fallout game was that I'm not a big guy, and I'm very good at it I do not like it.

The PC version needs a lot of work it can never get

Much of our focus has been made and we are already covered. We're missing all sorts of completely standard PC options, such as being able to turn off the motion or adjusting the depth of field, plus a lock on the FOV and a cap on fps. Bethesda is the beginning of all these issues, saying it will add ultrawide support and push-to-talk and is 'looking into' adding text chat.

Menu navigation is also pretty awful with a keyboard-some menus you'll be able to scroll through with Q and E, some with Z and C, you can open the map with M but hitting Escape aussi make up the map instead of the options (which requires another keypress of Z), some menus you use to get away from it all, and it's just a real inconsistent, unintuitive mess, quite honestly, and not all keybindings can currently be remapped.

On Reddit, Bethesda said it's a "do not know" platform, but the reason we love PCs give us. A lot of those options are not currently present in Fallout 76. While there will be no doubt about a big Day 1 patch, my guess is many of the issues we're going to fall back to fallout 76 launches, and some, like uncapped fps, may never come at all.