Bethesda's Fallout 76 Drama
By: Victoria Sitz
The Fallout franchise has been around for nearly 21 years, the first Fallout game being released in 1997 by Interplay Entertainment and Black Isle Studios. In 2004, Bethesda bought the Fallout franchise and continued it by creating Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout 4 and soon to be Fallout 76-coming out on November 14. All the Fallout games in the franchise take place in different states, Fallout 76 in West Virginia. Although West Virginia is a beautiful place and the graphics do not disappoint, fans are disappointed at the decisions for the upcoming game.
One of the biggest changes that is taking place in Fallout 76 is that it’s going to be an online multiplayer, making Fallout 76 the first Fallout game in this franchise to be so. With the
Fallout franchise and other games made by Bethesda such as the Elder Scrolls series, the Doom series, the Wolfenstein series and many other popular single player games, they are known for their award- winning single player games, and now they’re hitting fans with an online multiplayer, however Todd Howard, the studio executive, says that this is just an experiment and that there will still be a mission and a storyline, fans who have stress tested the game are not fans. Paul Tassi, a senior contributor at Forbes writes about his experience while stress testing the game. He states how he’s happy about how the gameplay itself was smooth, there were a few slip ups but nothing major. The more he played, he realized that Fallout 76 is pretty disappointing. He talks about the lack of NPC and real characters stating, “Once I cycled through the first few initial quests, I simply never saw anyone again.” Another thing he talks about is that since it’s an online game, the player isn’t able to quicksave or manually save at any point they want. One last major thing he points out, which is the most important in his mind, is how bad the VATS are. VATS is an ingame mechanic that slows down time and lets the player target specific parts of the body, while giving a certain percentage to how likely it is to hit that body part.
Instead of VATS slowing down or stopping time all together like the last three Fallout games, it is in real time and the percentages change in real time as well. So if you piece those together, an enemy moving at you in real, with your percentages of hitting them also changing in real time, it’s going to be a bit hard to use. But, this surprisingly isn’t everything fans are complaining about. They’re also complaining about how you’ll be able to nuke places in the map.
Although they have to go through various amount of work to get to the nukes, such as, wandering the country roads to find codes, solving some puzzles, fans are still not happy. It’s also more of team work than a solo person’s work, so now instead of just finding a few good weapons and armour for one person, you need to supply an entire team with ammo, chems, good weapons, good armour, and everything else that’s critical to surviving the wastes. But, once they pass all the puzzles and get all the codes, they’ll have a lot of power in their hands. Not only will they be able to choose where they want the nuke to drop, its radiation alone can spread for miles and kill people really easily, not to mention that it could wipe out an entire city or the fact that it’s nuclear weapons that put everyone in this situation. Even though they could kill a lot of people and just ruin everything they’ve worked for, there’s special drops where the nukes have dropped. Of course there’s going to be a deadly amount of radiation so they’ll need a ton of rad-x, radaway and probably a radiation suit or some power armour to keep them protected from enemies and radiation at the same time. (Rad-x and Radaway are just chems in the game that players can take to help with radiation while Power Armour is just some of the armour featured in the Fallout franchise) Tia Viruet, a student at Perry High School, let me get her opinion about the entire online multiplayer game that Fallout 76 is. When asking her about Fallout 76 as whole she said, “I like the concept, but not the multiplayer or online aspect.” She also talked about how she doesn’t like the idea of how little to almost no NPCs that there will be in the game. Because she is “...more interested in talking to NPCs then getting (stories) off of holotapes (things sort of like customisable CDs). And if you are in a multiplayer world and there’s limited holotapes for different missions, that’s going to be a problem.” Her thoughts are the same as a lot fans. Many, like her, are thinking twice about actually getting Fallout 76 to play because of what they’ve heard/seen so far.
Although Howard insists that this is not the downfall of Bethesda's amazing single player games, fans disagree. If Bethesda makes more Fallout games like Fallout 76, in a lot of fans’ opinions, the Fallout franchise is just dead at this point. We’ll have to rely on older games to fulfill our Fallout fix. There are some fans that think this is a great idea. So Bethesda is basically making a few fans happy by making the rest of the fans unhappy. Bethesda has wanted to make a multiplayer game for a while now, so it’s good that they’re getting out there and doing what the want to do, but they shouldn’t make their fans disappointed at the same time.