by David O’Flaherty
Our avid viewers might remember me reviewing this title a while back and since it’s never really left the news since it’s release I thought everyone might want a little catchup on my experience with it and what my thoughts are on where it’s going.
Firstly I would like to say I still think the idea behind the game was brilliant, one of my favourite gaming worlds with the chance to actually play it with friends and experience post-apocalyptic life in the fallout universe together was for me a strong pulling point in the game. Unfortunately, however, that’s now the only good point I consider to be in the game.
The execution of that idea is so piss poor it’s almost beyond embarrassing. Glitches galore ranging from simple graphic glitches all the way to full inventory wipes and stuck quests have marred this game from the start and although I admit I have been very lucky in the sense that I have personally missed most of these glitches thankfully, the fact remains that far too many reports of those glitches have surfaced too often for them to be ignored or taken as bitter players just moaning for the hell of it.
There’s no real player matchmaking so you could quite easily create a new level 1 character and spawn into a server filled with other players ranging from level 10ish all the way up into the 400+ range and the higher the level of the other players has an effect on the level of enemies spawning on that server shard meaning you could quite easily end up walking into an en masse firefight where the lowest level enemy is more than 10 levels higher than you with the equipment and power to go with it.
Going back to inventory wipes, thankfully they’ve increased to the storage capacity of your stash to 800 so you have plenty of room compared to how it was originally 400. However, if you are unlucky enough to suffer from one of the rumoured glitches that empty your stash it’s going to be little comfort for you.
Now we get on to the latest controversy regarding fallout 76 which is Fallout 1st. This new subscription-based service allows access to private servers but even that has its own host of negatives and messes.
Firstly it costs either £11.99 for the month or £99.99 for the whole year which at first glance is an absurd price you’d think but I’m going to play devil’s advocate with this for just a moment. Part of the Fallout 1st package is a free amount of atom coins in total you get 1650 for each month, that isn’t too bad when you factor in that to get the same amount you’re paying £12 anyway for the 1000 atom pack and the 500 atom pack. So without including the other stuff you get, it’s not that bad a price on paper.
However once again it’s marred with problems. The so-called private servers can actually be accessed by pure random players by them searching for the servers. Self-wiping stashes are even more of a problem from what I’ve been seeing online than they are in the base game as well as silly things like the exclusive armour you get for being a subscriber having extra paint jobs that you have to pay for rather than getting them for free as part of the subscription.
As much as I love the Fallout series and I would say Bethesda games in general, this game has become a major let down for me and although I’m hoping they manage to fix all the glitches and make it a decent game as it could be, I’m not exactly holding my breath.
Current score 3/10
Great idea marred by way too many problems and controversies that such an experienced developer shouldn’t be suffering from.
1 thought on “Fallout 76 – Review Revisited”