Fallout 76 is easily the most disappointing game of 2018. In an industry that sees hundreds of interesting games released every year, some accolades aren't worth winning. It's easy for a good or even great game to get lost in the shuffle nowadays; for indie titles, that goes double for a release that simply missed the mark. The developer can buckle down, learn from it, and come back later with a new offering that aims to improve or change the deficiencies of the past.
Triple-A developers aren't so lucky, though. There's a certain amount of expectation created by the release of a company that has proven, often multiple times, that it can create some of the best gaming experiences in a calendar year. When that company fails to meet those expectations (or even completely miss the mark), then things can turn nasty quickly, and an entire franchise can see its reputation go up in smoke over one misguided entry. It's happened before, and it will certainly happen again.
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In 2018, that disaster occurred for Bethesda Softworks, a studio many people would have considered immune to such difficulties. Bethesda's Fallout 76 released into a nightmarish month of poor reviews, community vitriol, and a public relations fiasco that tarnished Bethesda's good will with its fans. Here's our breakdown of how Fallout 76 became the most disappointing game of 2018.
- This Page: Fallout 76's Wasteland Is Too Empty
- Next Page: Fallout 76's PR Nightmare & Microtransactions
Fallout 76's Wasteland is Too Accurate
Let's start with the actual environment that colors the interactions players have with the world of Fallout 76. Simply put, Fallout 76's wasteland is way too accurate. There's something to be said for capturing the realism of the post-apocalypse in a single-player setting, which Fallout has successfully done in the past. Long expanses of deserted rubble that is only sparsely populated with things attempting to kill the protagonist is a staple of the genre, after all. The problem emerges in the fact that Fallout 76 attempts to move past the single player narrative and into a game that is shared with other people at the same time.
For that to work, the world needs to be vibrant. At the very least, it needs to be attractive enough to sustain not just one players' experience, but the handful of players who populate each server of Fallout 76. That would, in theory, require more content than the average Fallout entry, because players may not experience the narrative at the same pace or places and will need to be able to share a certain number of "new" adventures together to remain engaged. If fans have to start retracing what they've already done, it's a failure - someone is going to be bored sooner rather than later.
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Fallout 76 is empty. There's no real way around that statement. The environment features too few NPCs, and they're all pretty inconsequential outside of shoehorning some story beats into the game. Somehow, a multiplayer Fallout designed to create adventures for multiple people fell well short of even the barest expectations regarding content. The end-game in particular is noteworthy in how repetitive and dull it becomes after just a few sessions with it.
Combat is similarly simplified. The VATS combat mechanics have been reduced to spray-and-pray battle planning, and enemies hardly vary in the way they'll approach battles. The wasteland of Fallout 76 lives up to its name far too well, and the game marks one of the first times we've ever experienced a Bethesda title run out of content well before we were satisfied with it. We're not alone, either, as lawsuits have begun to pile up regarding the game's quality and Bethesda's handling of criticism and .
Page 2 of 2: Fallout 76's PR Nightmare & Microtransactions
Fallout 76's PR Nightmare
A sub-par environment that just didn't execute on Bethesda's vision wouldn't have been enough to create the kind of negative connotations that now swirl around Fallout 76, though. A major part of the disappointment surrounding Fallout 76 stems from the way Bethesda has treated its fans during the game's launch period. For a company that had, up until this point, been most heavily criticized for an insistence to port The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim to every device it could possibly be played on, the way Fallout 76 has been handled is a complete shock.
The most egregious example of the disconnect between Bethesda and the desires of its ers came when the company finally shipped the collector's editions of Fallout 76. Bethesda had previously d a nice looking canvas bag as part of the bundle, an item that was clearly a major part of why many fans were interested based on the social media buzz surrounding it early on. When the collector's editions shipped, though, fans were instead given a tacky, cheap variation of the bag that looked flimsy and unattractive. Fans complained, and Bethesda's response was basically that it would have ended up being too expensive to print the actual canvas bags, and a decision was made to change their production - without telling anyone. The company later responded that it will ship out replacements, but the wait time is ridiculously long, clocking in at around four-to-six months.
Related: Fallout 76 is Here to Rip You Off With Its Prices
It's a bizarre slap in the face for fans who were just trying to the next Fallout game. The fact that people hadn't canceled their special editions or tried to get refunds after the game received such a poor reception was evidence of that dedication. On top of the canvas bag controversy Fallout 76 was also marred by technical issues at launch. Servers were crashing, players were experiencing game-breaking glitches that reset their progress, and so many patches were released that some people literally could no longer play the game because they had reached their monthly cap from their internet service providers. Almost everything about Fallout 76 from a public reception standpoint is regression, pure and simple. Bethesda didn't just drop the ball, but they dropped the nuke directly onto one of their own cash cows in the Fallout franchise.
Fallout 76 Just Feels Wrong
The most obvious issue in Fallout 76, though, is one that is difficult to summarize neatly into a one sentence explanation. There's just something that feels off about Fallout 76 in most of its many-faceted failures. On top of the issues we've mentioned already, Fallout 76 also features a cash shop that is quickly bordering on exploitative. A recent Fallout 76 holiday DLC release featured aesthetic options that would cost players about a third of the full game's price to purchase. Fallout 76 begins by being fairly generous with its distribution of Atoms, its cash shop currency. That dries up quickly, however, and soon players are faced with the unenviable prospect of grinding Fallout 76's near-completely absent end-game or to shell out additional cash for the items they want.
Business practices like those will quickly erode even the most staunchly embedded fan bases. Fallout 76 is by far the most disappointing major release in 2018, and it has also managed to drag Bethesda down with it, as a company that felt like a positive presence within the games community has now begun practicing the same predatory and greedy behavior that its previous single-player games fought so hard to avoid.
Given the talent that works at Bethesda, it's hard to imagine that Fallout 76 will spell the end of the developer, and will likely be a forgotten misstep once the new Elder Scrolls game is announced. Fallout 76 should, however, function as something of a reminder for all of us. No company is immune to failure, and no game series can ever stay brilliant forever. Fallout 76 is the most disappointing game of 2018, and will hopefully serve as a blueprint for what not to do for developers looking to launch triple-A titles in 2019.
