Bethesda gave me some of my most memorable moments in gaming, mainly on the wonderful Fallout 3.
Games had never been something where I made moral choices back in 2008, but when Fallout 3 landed in my lap all that changed. From the very first decision in the town of Megaton, I was hooked. You can tell how involved I was, because I rarely remember locations from games a decade later, but along with Tenpenny Tower, Megaton stuck. Choosing between detonating the bomb and not was a big thing and unlike many of today’s so-called choices, this had further consequences than a couple of different dialogue strands.
There was credit in the bank when the buggy New Vegas landed, but it was still a treat, even if it did coin the phrase ‘but it’s Bethesda so we let them off’ when talking about bugs and glitches. To some degree, Fallout 4 was the same, a triumph that suffered from basic faults. I can’t recall the number of times Preston Garvey had me shouting at the screen when he informed me a settlement, I’d lovingly crafted needed me to go and do some little job or other. Again though, the game gave me morale dilemmas and asked serious question around synths that had real life parallels.
My love of those games, and their expansion packs, meant that when Fallout 76 landed, I wanted it to be good. Desperately. It dropped, I read the reviews and for a month or so, I steered clear. Then my brother bought it, and that dictated I had to. Paul and I played Fallout 3 simultaneously (he introduced me to it) and we often chatted about our adventures in the wasteland. He enjoyed 76, I wasn’t sure at first, but eventually we ploughed a few hours in.
I say a few hours, we hit somewhere around level 120 each, smashed all of the so-called missions and after a good 100 hours, we moved away out of boredom. Yes, it was buggy, but most of all, it was empty. Sure, it was a Fallout game, but it encourages the dropping of nuclear bombs, which felt alien to its previous concepts. The good missions were heavily focused on coop too, which was fine if I wanted to play with Paul, but I had no interest in joining up with anyone else. The previous Fallout games were wonderful single player adventures populated by characters you chose to love or hate with personalities and traits. Playing with ‘bomsdabass328’ or ‘slyguy76😊’ is not my idea of populating a world.
In fact, much of my time on Fallout 76, when Paul wasn’t online, was spent tinkering with my camp and wishing this lush, spacious world had something to do other than go to location A, kill the same enemies you did last time out and go back to base or, even worse, spamming the area known as White Springs just to keep levelling up. It was the definition of grind and not a game in which you wrote your own stories.
I moved away from it at least a year ago, filled with remorse I’d wasted triple digit hours on a game that offered me nothing in return but a nice playground with nobody to play with. Fallout relies on its NPCs to add depth and character, and reading about their last moments on terminal screens simply did not cut it.
This week, having played Spider Man and AC Valhalla, I’ve been searching for a new game. I’ve tried the Arkham Trilogy, but didn’t gel with it like Spider Man. I loaded Deus Ex, but turned it off after ten minutes of confusing intro. I even put GTA back into the console, but thought better of it. Things got so bad; I very nearly order pay-to-win FIFA 21. Yup, that’s how bad it got.
I heard Fallout had added NPCs and although I felt the game and I were done, a certain level of desperation led me back. From the minute I heard the first morose bars of music on the intro screen, I knew I wanted to like it again. Oh, how I wanted to like it.
Luckily, I do. There have been two expansions since I last logged in, Wastelanders and Steel Dawn. Both bring characters, quests and depth to the party, exactly what the game has been crying out for since launch. The Brotherhood of Steel have featured heavily in Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, so to find them back and active was a real treat, almost as much as finding previously underused areas of the map teeming with life. The crashed space station had always angered me, a wonderful piece of scenery barely used at all, but now it thrives with the scum and villainy of Fallout 3 and 4.
The new antagonists, the Cult of Mothman, are great and remind me a lot of Caeser’s Legion from New Vegas. I’m not scratching the surface of the quests yet, but finally this blank canvas has some paint on it to give it life. Finally, Fallout 76 is back on track.
It isn’t all love and light though – the power of my weapons has been sapped in the interim period. I held a host of Vampire weapons, which heal you with every hit on an enemy, but they heal you much less than they did before. Also, whereas the previous enemy rating used to be around 75, I now encounter baddies with rating of 100, which swarm and attack without mercy. On early BoS quest saw me floored six times by a Cave Cricket and Stingwing combo (sounds like a wasteland KFC bargain bucket that), with my auto-stim armour using six or seven stimpacks. Annoyingly, the bug hasn’t been fixed where the armour disperses a stimpack after you have bene killed, but hey-ho, it is Bethesda.
I’ll let you know if the excitement at seeing real NPCs living in the wasteland is matched by depth or longevity over the next few days and weeks, but for now, I can say with a huge level of delight I have finally found a game I can get back into.
Fallout has always been in a class of its own, for better or for worse, and finally 76 has decided to join the party.