Fallout 76is experiencing a resurgence right now. All the Fallout games are - the Amazon show has introduced thousands of newcomers to a franchise they’ve never played before, while old fans have been reminded of why they fell in love with it in the first place. It’s been wonderful to watch unfold and take part in as I reach Level 25 in a freshNew Vegasplaythrough. Fallout is back, and it’s damn good to see.
Out of all the Fallout games, however, 76 felt like the most unlikely to make a comeback. My colleague Eric Switzer has written about just that, touching on its controversial history along with the years it took Bethesda to rebuild it into something worth playing. But even that didn’t set the world on fire, as much as the Ink Spots might have said it would.
Yet it remains, and still receives major updates and expansions to this day. If its new influx of players stick around, it could earn a new lease of life never thought possible.
Though not a hardcore fan, I’ve been following Fallout 76 since it was first released. I covered the barebones beta, touched on the broken launch, and returned several years later to check out a major expansion that both added NPCs and promised to overhaul the game with something better than a boring wasteland and far too many robots to chat to. That was back in 2020, and you can check out the reviewhere, but I decided to jump back into this save file last week and was immediately bowled over.
Fallout 76 is not only on offer across all platforms right now, you can also grab it for free on Xbox Game Pass. It’s easy to see how the player count has ballooned so much.
So much had changed. I was Level 20 and sitting near a giant facility that doubled as some sort of radio tower. The side of my screen was filled with an exhaustive list of main and miscellaneous quests that swiftly overwhelmed me. Not to mention I had no stimpaks or healing items, while the knowledge of where to procure them had long since left my mind. Each and every battle I stumbled into saw me wiped out, like the equipment I had was rebalanced over the years I’d been away. Given this save file is over four years old, I wouldn’t be surprised.
What shocked me most, however, is that Fallout 76 doesn’t take returning players like me into account unless I’m willing to throw it all away and start a new game. There’s no refresher tutorial, no helpful tips, and no big map markers that say ‘STIMPAKS HERE’ in red ink. The only alternative to this trial by fire is spending far too long reading wikis and relearning mechanics and locations, because the game has no interest in giving me a refresher. I love the community and exploration to be found here, but damn, I wish there was a way to salvage my previous experience without seeming like a total joker.
After struggling for an hour, I threw in the towel and decided to start a new game. Four years had gone by, so everything I was set to lose was a distant pandemic memory anyway.
I can tell I was stuck inside my London flat with nothing better to do because I put 30 hours in Fallout 76 and actually enjoyed myself back in the day. How things have changed since then. Luckily for me, Bethesda has added an option to start immediately as a Level 20 character, meaning you’re bypassing the early grind and can jump right into late game quests. You still need to learn all the ropes and explore the world of your own accord, but if you’re here for the finer quests or simply want to pretend it’s a single-player Fallout game, you may do just that.
This was always the game’s primary intention, to have players work together using many of the tools and gameplay mechanics the series has become known for. But it didn’t really work that way, not to mention the lack of NPCs and reliance on robots and audio logs to fill in the gaps meant only a handful of hardcore players bothered to stick around.
As someone who walked away after a major update and came back into the fray suddenly, I was hoping there would be a way to railroad my way to understanding instead of starting all over again, but that still seems like the easier option. I have no way of knowing updates I’ve missed out on or what to tackle first, so it made more sense to cut my losses and quit all over again.
Fallout 76
WHERE TO PLAY
Taking the Fallout series into the MMO space, Fallout 76 is a prequel to the mainline games. You’ll have to traverse the massive open world of Appalachia in order to build bases, survive, and grow stronger.
