“Fallout 76” is a game unlike any in the franchise’s history, but then again, this is a series that started as top-down, turned-based RPG. Unlike its predecessors, “Fallout 76” is not just multiplayer, but entirely online, which was a bold and daring move by Bethesda Game Studios, who adopted the title.

Users can still choose to play by themselves, though they will be in a world with about two dozen other players. Because the world is approximately four times the size of “Fallout 4,” running into another player is not common outside the starting area.

Players have the option of ignoring the player or teaming up to take on the wasteland together, or they can choose to duke it out. The PvP is consent based, having players deal partial damage (a “slap”) until both players fire on each other. This is an interesting way to handle PvP, but it reeks of indecisiveness and trying to please too many people only to upset them all. Players can still kill other players with just slap damage, but it is not easy. Doing so gets the player a “wanted” status. Wanted players are revealed to other players on the map, who can be rewarded for killing the murderer. The only problem here is there is little to  no incentive for players to gain the wanted status, except just for fun.

Another reason finding other players is so rare is that other players are the only human characters players will find in “Fallout 76.” The game has no human non-playable characters (NPCs). There is a certain novelty to this idea, specifically for a multiplayer game. Quests that would normally be given by humans are now given by holotapes, a type of in-game data device. While this can be annoying at times, it is as not as much of a loss as it seems. Some of the best quests Bethesda has made in previous Fallouts either had no human NPCs in them or had human NPCs that could arguably be replaced or removed. Relative to “Fallout 4”, there are fewer quests that can be boiled down to “go here and kill this.”

The crafting system from “Fallout 4” that had players hoarding junk items with reckless abandon is back, though it has received some changes. There are now multiple ways to learn new weapon and armor mods. Many are acquired through scrapping the item players are trying to mod. Scrapping gives a chance to learn a random mod from the scrapped item. This system can be frustrating, especially at the two extremes. Unlocking specific mods for items that either have very few or a lot of mods available can take hours of collecting and scrapping that item type to get the correct mod. The core problem of this system is how arbitrary it is.

The game is as buggy as one would expect a Bethesda game to be. Allowing some to play early through Bethesda’s Break-It Early Test Application did not seem to help as significantly as some would have liked. “Fallout 76” can also be quite visually stunning, with a large part of the map covered with grass and trees that still have their leaves, since supposedly nobody would want to nuke West Virginia. The performance also seems to have taken an additional hit since “Fallout 4,” which was already taxing enough on consoles. Densely packed areas can cause frame drops at inopportune moments. All is not sure to be bleak for the future of “Fallout 76”, however, as the game is set to receive updates for years to come. An update came out Nov. 19, with another on the way. “Fallout 76” is, in its current state, very fun, but still messy, and, at times, it is a downright broken experience.

Image from Bethesda Softworks via YouTube