Fallout 76: Wastelanders - PC

This is the hardest game I have ever played, and I have been a first person shooter fanatic dating back to the days of DOOM and QUAKE in the early nineties. I must have been killed and respawned 500 times in the nearly three weeks since the game was released.. However, I keep coming back because I am obsessively curious about the vast areas of the map I have not yet seen. But I do keep chipping away and getting a bit further east as time progresses.The most frustrating thing about being respawned after you are killed is that you often have no choice but to be transported back to your point of origin at VAT 76. Unless you have caps saved up for fast travel (and caps are only stingily dispensed by the software), you will have to trek the wasteland repeatedly on foot from the coordinates where you began the game. It reminds me of the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day, where you are condemned to repeat your odyssey until you finally get it right.I have come across several glitches. At one point I used my lockpicking skills to open an anonymous yellow wooden box at an airport and collected the contents. The software warned me I had just robbed the property of another player, and I was now wanted. Within a few minutes a heavily armored bounty hunter appeared and smashed me dead with one blow. In another episode, I accidentally fell through a hole in a floor and could not leave because the exit required a lockpicking skill beyond my ability. I tried to blast myself upwards with a plasma grenade, but I was disintegrated. Better to be trapped forever or die and reincarnate? You be the judge. Another time I entered a railroad car and jumped on the top of a red metal barrel, a big mistake. I was caught between the barrel and the metal roof and could not move. Time to push the PS4 button and restart the application. Yet another time I killed a super mutant and went to scavenge the remains, but as I hovered over the corpse it diasappeared, and an enraged feral ghoul emerged. What the?There are annoying Internet problems, including losing the connection and having to reboot the game, and frames frozen in place several seconds until Bethesda decides I can move again.The various complaints about game bugs, no solo campaign, and expensive software notwithstanding, it still is a fascinating game and will go down as a classic. It has an enormous learning curve, but patience pays dividends.

So people are review bombing this game. Largely because they're unhappy it isn't just a single player game. Sometimes because they're not happy with it.Key complaints with responses.1) Buggy. Yes. It has bugs. They can be annoying. They'll hopefully get fixed quickly.2) Nothing to do. Simply put, I don't know what they're talking about. The map is huge, the quest list is long. Yes dialogue is voiced from tapes instead of NPCs, not the end of the world. But it doesn't mean there is nothing to do.3) Lack of ammo. Blatantly untrue. If you can't find ammo, it's because you're not looking or killing anything. I am literally forgoing picking up ammo at this point I have so much. Maybe with fully automatic weapons you might have an issue. But with using a hunting rifle, I'm getting .308 ammo faster than I'm using it. And melee weapons are some of the most powerful in the early game anyway. It's a bit ridiculous.4) Microtransactions. Yeah they exist but they do not affect the game play at all. AT ALL. They're skins on items, emotes, and clothing. I'm actually sitting on almost 800 Atoms right now wishing they'd add more stuff because I want something else to buy. Not entirely impressed with what they have now.My friends and I are having a blast in the game. And we feel like there is so much potential for post launch.

I mean I could droll on and on about the graphics (which are good) or the sound (which is also good) or the many other things that make a game or I could simply answer the one question that basically all Fallout fans are wanting answered with these reviews. Does it play like Fallout? The answer is yes, yes it does.It has everything you've come to expect with the Fallout franchise. I mean every Fallout game starting with Fallout 3 basically plays the same with tweaks here and there to some of the systems. But for the most part when you go in to play, you expect to know how it "feels". And the same can be said of Fallout 76, the instant you log in and create your character it is already familiar. Now there are a few tweaks to the game just like every Fallout game, such as the way VATS works. No longer does the game freeze or slow down (it can't because everything is always online) but basically as it's active it will drain your AP meter with a constant drain and you fire and of course the higher the percentage change to hit will depend on if you hit or not.They brought back the settlement building introduced in Fallout 4 so you can set up a camp in this game for a nice convenient way to stash your collected goods, also a hub to fast travel to which is always welcome. Another new and honestly very cool change is the leveling system in this game. When you level up you get to pick one of your SPECIAL stats to level and then you are given a selection of cards to choose from that each have different upgrades attached to them based on which trait you went with. You then attach that card to your character and it increases your ability in that fashion. What's even neater, is that there are packs of these cards that you get from quests and other events that when opened give you a random assortment of trait upgrades that you can attach to replace other cards. Super customizeable. Also if you end up collecting the same card you can combine them to increase the strength of that card which is also very cool.So on to the things I don't much care for. Firstly it is super quiet out there. It's pretty busy right out of the vault as people are all still lingering around the starting area but as you start leveling up and moving away it gets quieter and quieter. Last night I played for a few hours and only ever saw 1 other person although I did hear gunshots in the distance so I know more people are out there. That is both pretty cool and lonely at the same time. I enjoy playing solo so i'm not bothered by the lack of people and honestly I when I see someone else I get super paranoid anyway and move in the other direction. That said, it is almost TOO quiet out there. A few more NPC's to interact with would be nice. Something to liven up this dreary wasteland. OH and this really isn't a wasteland at all, I mean from what i've seen thus far everything is still alive and lush. Of course I haven't even seen the entire map yet and there is one particular place south east of the map that looks very wastelandish.I didn't have any server problems last night when I played but it wouldn't have surprised me if there were some considering it was day 1 of the release and everyone was trying to play. I'm sure any servers problems will taper off as the load on the servers drops going forward. So all in all i'm enjoying this game a ton. If you like any of the previous Fallout games then you will for sure like this one.