u/novemberrains7991

I'm a very longtime Fallout fan since the 2000's. I had a lot of grievances with Fallout 4, but when 76 was announced, I was dying to get all my friends in on it. A ton of my friends, even acquaintances wanted to play it with me. After the launch fiasco, most of them dropped off and never bought it, and I swore I would never touch this game, ever, and that Bethesda had totally confirmed everything bad I thought about them after FO4 with how they handled the Fallout franchise. I finally decided to just try out Fallout 76, on a lark when the TV show came out, and ended up enjoying it. I still have serious problems with it, but it's definitely a playable and enjoyable little sandbox wasteland experience. I played through all of the main story and expansion story just so I could get the "real" fallout 76 experience and know what the lore is like firsthand before passing judgement on it.

I definitely did not care for some of it, all the settlement and skinnerbox legendary loot mechanics is even more aggressive than FO4, some of the lore feels like a huge stretch, like some of the cryptids existence and the BoS just walking all the way from California, and I thought the dialogue writing was severely lackluster in many places. Also that after Wastelanders they skimped out on their promises to give the game choices and consequences like a classic Fallout again. I still do not like the art style and tone change since Fallout 4, and it feels very sanitized and like a B-Quality Marvel comic book in it's style. But the exploration and world design was very fun, Skyline Valley and Burning Springs were good updates, and so was some of the new RPG mechanics that I wish was in Fallout 4.

I tried to get my friends in on it last year, and it was like pulling teeth to convince them it is decent now. I even gifted it to several friends and I got a few to play, but also many of my closest friends still said No based on principle, and refuse to ever touch it because of the launch and Bethesda. It's been years since launch but I understand exactly why they still feel that way. Overall, looking back on my playtime, while I enjoy it for what it is, I'm disappointed in 76 as being "The Online Co-op Fallout game" if it means we won't get another one. Even if you want to get your friends in on it, People hear "76" and that name is basically tainted.

I personally would have liked something more heavily story focused like FFXIV, Star Wars: The Old Republic or ESO. Many of Fallout 76's main storylines haven't seem to have gone anywhere since the Wastelanders overhaul, and several major features just get abandoned like Milepost Zero caravans and plotlines like Vault 79, the Pitt and Skyline Valley, there's a lot of "part 2" expansions that were just silently cancelled like the Pitt 3rd expedition and the Part 2 of Skyline Valley and Burning Springs, and they've left entire storylines just unsatisfyingly hanging.

It's not a completely broken buggy experience that will brick your computer, although is still very buggy, and they have massively turned the game around, but it still suffers *fundamentally* from the problems Bethesda faces with their vision of Fallout. It doesn't take it's story seriously enough, and It's even more of a lootershooter than an RPG and treats the universe like a comic book pastiche of 'Fallout elements' mashed together. There's no explanation for how a bunch of FEV Mutants by sheer coincidence resemble pre-war folk legends, there's no explanation for what exactly Mothman is, many plotlines just end, the world is still frozen in time since Wastelanders. There are lots of very, very silly moments and some that are just straight up supernatural, not unusual as the non-canon events in Fallout 2. The Atom Shop is just flagrantly non-canon and has NCR and TV Show references in it now despite 76 taking place just 20 years after the war.

There is a hard line where Fallout should stop at being silly, and I feel like 76 crosses that line often.

This isn't even getting into the MTX, the Atom Shop, and how the game aggressively wants you to subscribe to it's model just to access essential Quality of Life features. It would be forgivable if it was a great enough Fallout experience, and games like FFXIV get forgiven because of how fantastic the writing and Final Fantasy experience it delivers is. I don't think FO76 comes close to being decent 'enough' to be worth that investment.

Overall while I feel like they did a great job working on what cards they were given, Fallout 76 should not be where Fallout stops at trying to deliver a multiplayer experience. It's still heavily weighed down by it's launch reputation and by some very questionable core design choices, as well as just abandoning content and storylines.

Looking at games like Destiny, Warframe, FFXIV and others, there is a huge amount of value in a truly great online Fallout title that properly utilizes the IP that I think Microsoft and Bethesda would want to find, and 76 has a hard, hard limit in what it can offer in that respect. Both to fans and it's developers.