had a free week on steam/was free to keep through amazon so i figured i'd play a bit since my friends were on. its, uh, it sure is fallout!

tried to do the main quest and it bugged out at the first real conversation and locked me out of progressing. tried leaving the room and coming back and didn't fix it so whatever. adding npcs to this actually probably made it worse. bethesda cowardly adding them in after people complained feels like a misstep--its pretty much impossible to care about anything narratively going on when it's so blatantly just an excuse for the gameplay.

but what about that gameplay? at the end of the day it plays nearly identical to every other bethesda game released in the past 20 years or so, lol. only took me like an hour to get bored of it, and probably 20 minutes of that was me trying to make david lynch in the character creator.

what new was here though i feel isnt very compatible with the nature of this game, at least as far as the learning curve goes. unless you and all your friends begin at exactly the same time you'll all be at different points and have different levels of understanding of the systems, so if you're late to the party it can feel like you need to rush to understand stuff like how you should optimize picking special cards or in what circumstances you're supposed to base build and how persistence even works on that. these are things that i could easily google but i don't want to do that, i want to play the video game. i think that mightve worked ok in a single player setting, being introduced to them sequentially and having time to digest them. but fo76 just throws you into all these mechanics with no more than a 3-minute-long hallway walk as a leadup. for me that just makes all that stuff seem kind of too annoying to learn to bother with, especially for a game i doubt my friends will be playing a week from now.

also not a fan of the servers being mostly occupied with randoms. this is a general problem I have with mmo adjacent games but there just isn't anything special about the adventure you're on if you're constantly reminded that other people are doing the same shit as you. i think you can set up private servers if you pay up but i'm not doing that lol.

overall, it's doubtless been said before, but it just feels like a worse version of Skyrim Together.

This game is amazing, the best FPS I've ever played hands down
Combat is juicy and satisfying, movement feels great and enemy variety is pretty good too

The weapons, though fewer than in other FPS games, are insanely fun to use and the game features dozens of different advanced techniques and synergies between weapons

The story is good enough, it's a pretty hilariously edgy premise but I like the characters a lot and it's not cheesy or hard to take seriously. It's never forced on you either, if you want to just keep playing then the game won't stop you

The Cyber Grind is really fun to master, though it could use some polishing since some larger enemies semi-frequently get stuck on terrain

This game's take on hell is really refreshing, as it pulls inspiration from Dante's Inferno and avoids the typical fire and brimstone aesthetic for the most part except the areas where it's most fitting (heresy)

The soundtrack is absolutely incredible, for the most part breakcore-esque rather than the usual boomer shooter heavy metal

The fact that the game is this good and still only in early access makes me really excited to see how it concludes in its third and final act