5 years later still an entirely nonsensical fallout game getting by on the fumes of an mmo market with little competition.
As someone with an embarrassing 500 hours in fallout 4, I can tell you all the people talking about it having the "best combat" on the series are entirely wrong. Most people are very easily tricked by the very flashy particle effects and sound design into thinking that all of the combat in the game isn't either finding an angle to cheese overly tanky ranged enemies or finding a big rock to cheese the ones that run at you. Fallout 76 enhances this hypnotizingly boring experience by adding a full second of network communication delay any time you shoot something and a whole bredth of bizarre errors any time more than one player gets into a fight with a group of enemies.
To top it all off this game also uses a directional audio system mostly in line with new cod games, where everything is almost inaudible if youre not looking at it????? Quick combat encounters in Fallout 4 are now stretched even further as youll walk away from what you think is a finished encounter, only to get progressively attacked by a train of melee enemies trailing you from the scene and doing the wonderful full second stun all melee enemies get to do.
Playing mostly solo there was nothing particularly difficult aside from overleveled raid bosses I would occassionally attempt. Even as most of my armor and guns broke down and I didn't care enough to fix them, combat was as easy as just slowly walking up to enemies and slowly unloading a shotgun into them. There was a bit of challenge in what I think was supposed to be an expansion raid, but even going up against high level enemies, half the time their AI seems to break and they either wont advance on your or will just straight up stay still and stop attacking.
Unlike Fallout 4 there are actually interesting things you can build in your base but they are of course mostly locked behind microtransactions, a subscription service and a battle pass. Even experiencing most of the actual story content and doing plenty of dailies and events on the way, progression without spending actual money moves at a glacial pace.
There are some somewhat interesting sidequests but most either have no payoff or are just lead ins to dailies. Factions are maybe some of the most dry and boring I've ever seen in a game and while I don't like to be anal about nerd timelines almost nothing going on here makes any sense. The justification for this being so early after the bombs dropped is that appalachia was untargeted as a mostly rural region, but because of time constraints there were no people at launch, so all of the human npcs you meet are talking about "coming back" to appalachia. Coming from where all the bombs dropped??? The radio announcer, possibly the worst in the series, goes on multiple therapyspeak diatribes on how hard it must be for everyone out there while cracking lighthearted jokes about how dangerous the regions is. Multiple people talk about experiencing life before the bombs, which was a hundred years ago. What the fuck is happening?????
I think the moment I turned on the game was when going to the expansion areas and seeing the insanely ugly fullbright areas that look straight out of a half baked Fallout 4 mod. I genuinely don't see how the series can come back from this because this is Bethesda fallout distilled into a science. Shoot ghoul. Shoot supermutant. Shoot deathclaw. Look its the brotherhood. Shoot raider. Just fucking nothing. Soulless. There are people who are vehemently defending this game because they fell for the hypnosis trick. It's over.
As someone with an embarrassing 500 hours in fallout 4, I can tell you all the people talking about it having the "best combat" on the series are entirely wrong. Most people are very easily tricked by the very flashy particle effects and sound design into thinking that all of the combat in the game isn't either finding an angle to cheese overly tanky ranged enemies or finding a big rock to cheese the ones that run at you. Fallout 76 enhances this hypnotizingly boring experience by adding a full second of network communication delay any time you shoot something and a whole bredth of bizarre errors any time more than one player gets into a fight with a group of enemies.
To top it all off this game also uses a directional audio system mostly in line with new cod games, where everything is almost inaudible if youre not looking at it????? Quick combat encounters in Fallout 4 are now stretched even further as youll walk away from what you think is a finished encounter, only to get progressively attacked by a train of melee enemies trailing you from the scene and doing the wonderful full second stun all melee enemies get to do.
Playing mostly solo there was nothing particularly difficult aside from overleveled raid bosses I would occassionally attempt. Even as most of my armor and guns broke down and I didn't care enough to fix them, combat was as easy as just slowly walking up to enemies and slowly unloading a shotgun into them. There was a bit of challenge in what I think was supposed to be an expansion raid, but even going up against high level enemies, half the time their AI seems to break and they either wont advance on your or will just straight up stay still and stop attacking.
Unlike Fallout 4 there are actually interesting things you can build in your base but they are of course mostly locked behind microtransactions, a subscription service and a battle pass. Even experiencing most of the actual story content and doing plenty of dailies and events on the way, progression without spending actual money moves at a glacial pace.
There are some somewhat interesting sidequests but most either have no payoff or are just lead ins to dailies. Factions are maybe some of the most dry and boring I've ever seen in a game and while I don't like to be anal about nerd timelines almost nothing going on here makes any sense. The justification for this being so early after the bombs dropped is that appalachia was untargeted as a mostly rural region, but because of time constraints there were no people at launch, so all of the human npcs you meet are talking about "coming back" to appalachia. Coming from where all the bombs dropped??? The radio announcer, possibly the worst in the series, goes on multiple therapyspeak diatribes on how hard it must be for everyone out there while cracking lighthearted jokes about how dangerous the regions is. Multiple people talk about experiencing life before the bombs, which was a hundred years ago. What the fuck is happening?????
I think the moment I turned on the game was when going to the expansion areas and seeing the insanely ugly fullbright areas that look straight out of a half baked Fallout 4 mod. I genuinely don't see how the series can come back from this because this is Bethesda fallout distilled into a science. Shoot ghoul. Shoot supermutant. Shoot deathclaw. Look its the brotherhood. Shoot raider. Just fucking nothing. Soulless. There are people who are vehemently defending this game because they fell for the hypnosis trick. It's over.