Fallout 76: Wastelanders - PC

First the technical aspects. This entire game is badly ported to PC from its primary target audience: console players. The lack of attention to detail and inability to change the most basic configurations makes this game completely unplayable relative to PC standards. Resolution capped at 1080, fps capped at 60(toss that 144hz display and SLI 1080s in the trash), FOV/DoF/motion blur settings unchangeable even in game .ini which revert back once game launches. No push to talk, instead your mic is always on by default, oh and you don't get any indication of that as a player. (Technically might violate certain laws regarding espionage in a situation where a new player only encounters others who manually disabled their mic but broadcasting their private conversations to those nearby strangers with no knowledge recording is taking place.) Furthermore the game features no text chat whatsoever, as console controllers don't support qwerty keyboard layouts, and this game is just a lazy port to PC. (Although this won't be a violation of FCC law protecting people with disabilities(mainly auditory) until January 1st 2019 in terms of release date, the lack of ethical/moral guidelines further instills doubt into either the competence of the development team or a timeline which was impossible to meet leading to yet another pre-alpha style game being sold as a finished game. I had a lot of respect for bethesda from a number of their previous games, but purchasing fallout 76 is like entering a gamble carousel about which aspects of the game will change in future updates as a significant % of the game dynamics are completely broken in this release.) Also there's no audio render selection settings, so switching between bluetooth headset/wired/speakers requires full restart of the game and spawning in new world.Now the gameplay. Relative to previous fallout games, the game uses a retooled version of the fallout 4 engine(creation), gameplay is very similar. Its a weak version of survival world(everything has weight, bullets, lockpicks, and the weight is significant) requiring lots of food/drink/inventory management. The game has no NPCs, besides a few talking robots(honestly much of the monologue seems aimed at entertaining one of middle school age, at least the early plot/terminal/dialogue selection). Fast travel is still possible, but costs caps scaled by distance. A massive controversy is the permanent storage system. A camp can be spawned almost anywhere out of town, and for the cost of caps(scaled by player level) can be moved to current location even if abandoned somewhere else. Storage is secure from other players, and accessing someone else's stash simply grants access to your own. Stash is the only form of persistent item storage, cannot be increased with building containers or leveling up, and is capped at 400lb (To put in perspective, at max strength and carry perk cards player carries 265lb and 305 in power armor, perhaps even more by stacking other bonuses). Weight reduction perks only apply to inventory, so many items are more expensive to store in stash than always carry. Junk (the most valuable resource required for all base building and gun/armor mods) has significant weight(easily 100 lb even under lv 15 with minimal looting and everything scrapped and bundled). This effectively creates an online game with an intended barter economy but no storage for any items besides a few favorites. A single minigun weighs 44lb, and almost any weapon at level 50 will have similar or higher weight effectively rendering most legendary boss fights completely useless as you have to either scrap/drop any legendary item rewards. This is a new concept to the world of fallout, and while I would not expect unlimited movable storage in a survival game, dedicated stationary storage is not available either like in previous games. Although Pete Hines(SVP of GM at Bethesda) initially stated unlimited storage, he later tweeted the 400lb is a result of technical limitation with no further details. Without a plausible technical limitation proposed, it makes very little sense to cap weight (assuming limitation has to do with too many complex entities for server to handle for each player). It would make much more sense to cap by item slot as a stack of same itemID is represented by a single integer for count. Instead the game allows incredible variety of low-weight/weightless items, completely counter-intuitive to any technical limitation claims by Bethesda (unless the true intention is to later offer storage upgrades through in-game currency(atoms), in which case you will have to shell out well over the original $63.59 for any decent gameplay experience. Selling items is also not much of an option as many vendors are linked across the map(sell your stuff to one and they are all broke for ~24 hours locked by player across any server hops), and typically carry only few hundred caps(200, 200, 400...) on hand. Basically feels like devs are so out of touch with reality they anticipate their customers to enjoy a game only for the playtime with little reward/future benefit(besides xp), in a world that's either filled with background noise from other players or a mute environment with no NPCs and most real players disabling voice chat altogether without support for push-to-talk. In terms of game time, VATS no longer slows time but terminal text for example appears much faster. Unfortunately animations, especially sit option so easy to press on accident, freezes up player actions for considerable time with no abort option even while under attack. Aid items also must be pre-set in hotkeys as navigating through the archaic storage system can take significant time. Expect to spend a large amount of time managing not only personal inventory, but a single tiny persistent storage stash, both with inadequate sort/search/information leaving the player endlessly scrolling through giant lists of items. Hey I'd say a positive benefit is improving mental math multiplying/approximating stack sizes by individual weight trying to figure out what next to drop as your gameplay is stuck with max personal and stash storage fairly often.I encountered a number of other issues, though some enraging ones did seem to get fixed after the beta(sort by weight would completely reorder all items anytime even 1 is moved). There's also a number of positives to the game, but unfortunately Bethesda's lack of transparency regarding "tech" issues with storage cap, and the general vibe of ineptitude on behalf of the dev team(especially regarding expectations of players on PC, who wants console limitations dictating their gameplay?) I'm not sure they justify the price of the game. Unless at least some of these core issues are addresses within the next 2 weeks, I will have no choice than to send it back by the return date as I no longer feel confident investing into some probability Bethesda will fix the game after such lack of transparency on behalf of general management team(specifically what tech limitations could possibly hinge stash weight limit as currently implemented, only reason I can think of to hold back real details replaced by vague statement blaming technical limitations is in poorly executed efforts to cover up dev team ineptitude in implementing a relatively tiny database of itemID quantity. Storing hard earned rare/legendary items has been the most crucial aspect of any fallout game I've grown to know and love and I would expect any such changes to at least come with some degree of explanation from Bethesda).

Love it or hate it, this game is guaranteed to grab some attention. I personally love Fallout 76. I pre-ordered, played BETA and have 30 hours since launch. I haven't had this much fun with a pc game since Fallout 4. Sure it has a few bugs, but nothing that's a show stopper. Obviously this game was developed using Agile Methodology, delivered as an MVP, and not a fully finished product; which is standard practice these days with software development and not the exception.The map is MASSIVE. I was surprised at how seldom I bump into other players, and most are cordial, if not helpful. You can play this game solo or team up with your friends or occasionally the other player(s) you might meet along the way. You can spend the first several hours (or don't) chasing around a series of holotapes left behind like a trail of breadcrumbs from the Vault 76's Overseer. Along the way you’ll find several holotapes (or stories) from other survivor groups that didn't make it, e.g., the responders, fire-breathers, raiders, and many more. There's no shortage of left behind robots and computers that can provide you with missions. One in particular is Rose, a nannybot-turned-raider. Sure, she's no Curie from F04, but still enjoyable with the darker fallout humor.This is a survival game, with several metrics you must monitor in order to stay alive. It does require a different playing style than what you’d typically expect from FPS and/or RPG. You must be more conservative with your ammo or scrounge around looting and scrapping to make more bullets and repair your weapons after nearly every conflict. Leveling up does require a fair amount of grinding, if that’s what you want to do. 76 also introduces new creatures that make the dreaded Deathclaw look tame.Many reviewers have complained about a lack of story, that it's boring, no "Human" NPCs, etc. But I strongly disagree, it has plenty of stories scattered all over the Appalachian wasteland. True, you won't find another living "human" NPC character, and I'm good with that.Understand that you are emerging from the safety of your vault for the first time into a post-apocalyptic world, and to your horror, you discover that all human survivors (non-vault dwellers) are either mutated into the Scorched or dead. It is a lonely, radiated world after all.