While its disastrous launch is legendary, I believe Fallout 76 has finally outgrown its bad reputation. I purchased it on sale a few years ago and ultimately sank hundreds of surprisingly enjoyable hours into Appalachia.
It reminds me of No Man’s Sky - a testament to a development team that listened, worked tirelessly, and transformed a broken foundation into a stable, polished, and content-rich experience. I don’t recall ever spending an additional penny on the game either, so for the price of a coffee, it stands as one of my best value-for-money gaming purchases.
I want to add that this is my experience as well. You can ignore the microtransactions and still have a great time. Is it prefect? Absolutely not, it has a lot of quirks being online, but overall it was still fun
Don’t, get one of the old ones instead. In particular the first one, it’s easy to run, you can play offline and it’s actually a good game, unlike 76.
If you want a really good game and want to have co-op and building (which 76 barely achieves) get Valheim. It’s a better game than 76 in all aspects but graphical fidelity.
Also, here’s a tale from steam reviews to show you how UNLIKE NMS Fallout76 and bethesda are!
“Here’s a tale for the 21st century.
Bethesda launches a game called Fallout 76, forces you to play it through their crappy launcher during the era of mindless corporate zeal for advertising in-house IPs to a captive audience
Bethesda’s crap launcher, being useless and annoying, is later abandoned
Bethesda tells all those who bought the game that they can no longer use the launcher to play; instead, you have to migrate the game to Steam (where it should have been released in the first place)
Bethesda then tells you that, sorry, some of that content you bought for the game? We can’t migrate that. So you have to choose: either you get the game (which you bought) for ‘free’ on Steam, and give up the extra content you paid for, or you repurchase the game on Steam (and give up the content you paid for)
After repeated attempts to explain to Bethesda that this is their fault; that they insisted gamers use their launcher, which everyone knew was useless and anti-consumer; after pointing out that they never explained that you might some day have to choose between purchases made for the game and the game itself; and that you’re willing to accept the migration if they just refund the purchases they can’t carry over, even using in-game currency… you are told, repeatedly, about 7-8 times, the same generic, canned, ape-like, zero-accountability response. Not a response that in any way addresses any point made (especially that *they created this entire situation*), but which simply repeats ad nauseum their drone-like requirement that you give up paid content for the migration to happen. You are pretty convinced that you are not dealing with people, but bots.
All attempts to contact higher-ups, the ‘thinkers’ at Bethesda (i.e. anyone with basic comprehension and customer service skills, like a supervisor) end in failure. The conversation goes nowhere. You are now cooked. You’ve lost everything you paid for over a few years. They really don’t give a crap.
This company does not respect its audience.
This company does not think ahead.
This company does not admit its mistakes.
This company does not value Quality.
This company continues to charge full price for a 7 year old port of a 10 year old game’s system/assets, which even at release in 2015 wasn’t great to look at and was prone to crashes and performance issues.
But they’ve got time to linger on the development of a sci-fi game that drains all the fun out of sci-fi, because Todd Howard can’t understand the distinction between actually going to the moon as a contemporary human, and running across procedurally generated blandness as a gamer.
Now we have to wait 7+ more years for another decent Fallout game. And what’s going to happen then?
I mean, it doesn’t feel great giving my money to Bethesda, but at 3.99 for the base game, I’m gonna risk it. I have all of the previous games (well, maybe not Fallout Tactics? Not sure.) and will take a look at 76. If I absolutely hate it, I can probably get my four moneys back from Steam.
Also, about Valheim: I will look at the game and may purchase a copy, but it seems to be entirely different from Fallout. I’m not choosing my games by gameplay mechanics (I don’t know if they’re similar), but setting and world. That’s where Fallout is pretty special.
After Fallout 76 and Starfield, I have little faith remaining in Bethesda
I still never understood how people rated vanilla f3 or skyrim above ‘meh’. Their last genuinely good game made in house was oblivion.
Are people forgetting fallout 4 or…
While its disastrous launch is legendary, I believe Fallout 76 has finally outgrown its bad reputation. I purchased it on sale a few years ago and ultimately sank hundreds of surprisingly enjoyable hours into Appalachia.
It reminds me of No Man’s Sky - a testament to a development team that listened, worked tirelessly, and transformed a broken foundation into a stable, polished, and content-rich experience. I don’t recall ever spending an additional penny on the game either, so for the price of a coffee, it stands as one of my best value-for-money gaming purchases.
I want to add that this is my experience as well. You can ignore the microtransactions and still have a great time. Is it prefect? Absolutely not, it has a lot of quirks being online, but overall it was still fun
I’m gonna trust you and buy the base game now.
Don’t, get one of the old ones instead. In particular the first one, it’s easy to run, you can play offline and it’s actually a good game, unlike 76.
If you want a really good game and want to have co-op and building (which 76 barely achieves) get Valheim. It’s a better game than 76 in all aspects but graphical fidelity.
Also, here’s a tale from steam reviews to show you how UNLIKE NMS Fallout76 and bethesda are!
“Here’s a tale for the 21st century.
Bethesda launches a game called Fallout 76, forces you to play it through their crappy launcher during the era of mindless corporate zeal for advertising in-house IPs to a captive audience
Bethesda’s crap launcher, being useless and annoying, is later abandoned
Bethesda tells all those who bought the game that they can no longer use the launcher to play; instead, you have to migrate the game to Steam (where it should have been released in the first place)
Bethesda then tells you that, sorry, some of that content you bought for the game? We can’t migrate that. So you have to choose: either you get the game (which you bought) for ‘free’ on Steam, and give up the extra content you paid for, or you repurchase the game on Steam (and give up the content you paid for)
After repeated attempts to explain to Bethesda that this is their fault; that they insisted gamers use their launcher, which everyone knew was useless and anti-consumer; after pointing out that they never explained that you might some day have to choose between purchases made for the game and the game itself; and that you’re willing to accept the migration if they just refund the purchases they can’t carry over, even using in-game currency… you are told, repeatedly, about 7-8 times, the same generic, canned, ape-like, zero-accountability response. Not a response that in any way addresses any point made (especially that *they created this entire situation*), but which simply repeats ad nauseum their drone-like requirement that you give up paid content for the migration to happen. You are pretty convinced that you are not dealing with people, but bots.
All attempts to contact higher-ups, the ‘thinkers’ at Bethesda (i.e. anyone with basic comprehension and customer service skills, like a supervisor) end in failure. The conversation goes nowhere. You are now cooked. You’ve lost everything you paid for over a few years. They really don’t give a crap.
This company does not respect its audience.
This company does not think ahead.
This company does not admit its mistakes.
This company does not value Quality.
This company continues to charge full price for a 7 year old port of a 10 year old game’s system/assets, which even at release in 2015 wasn’t great to look at and was prone to crashes and performance issues.
But they’ve got time to linger on the development of a sci-fi game that drains all the fun out of sci-fi, because Todd Howard can’t understand the distinction between actually going to the moon as a contemporary human, and running across procedurally generated blandness as a gamer.
Now we have to wait 7+ more years for another decent Fallout game. And what’s going to happen then?
You suck, Bethesda.”
I mean, it doesn’t feel great giving my money to Bethesda, but at 3.99 for the base game, I’m gonna risk it. I have all of the previous games (well, maybe not Fallout Tactics? Not sure.) and will take a look at 76. If I absolutely hate it, I can probably get my four moneys back from Steam.
Also, about Valheim: I will look at the game and may purchase a copy, but it seems to be entirely different from Fallout. I’m not choosing my games by gameplay mechanics (I don’t know if they’re similar), but setting and world. That’s where Fallout is pretty special.
If you don’t have brotherhood of steel, you don’t need it, for real!
I hope you have as many enjoyable hours in it as I did. Best of luck out there!