Joe Morgan

I started playing 76 on launch day, and it was fun until you started running into the bugs and random disconnects. On launch, streets were littered with random players bunny hopping around town making all kinds of noise because the game didn't have push-to-talk functionality. Voice communications were either always on, or turned off completely in the settings. This prompted me to turn off voice completely, since you could just get on a discord with friends instead. You would constantly get booted from the game with no warning, losing many of the items you had recently acquired. Multiple quests were bugged to the point where you just had to skip them. There were some cool looking areas in 76's wilderness, but they just felt very underdeveloped as there wasn't anything to do in a lot of areas that looked previously inhabited. Maybe they were saving those areas for future content? The lighting engine looked cool until you put some trees and landscape between you and the sun, which gave you unstoppable penetrating god rays. Most of the quests in 76 were MMO style dailies you would do over and over again, hoping you didn't get disconnected and have to start over. My only motivation for leveling was so I could equip higher level power armors, but that got old pretty fast, since the gameplay loop didn't change much. Fallout 76 has base-building functionality, but it's very limited. It has a feature that is supposed to save your base so you could easily relocate, but in the month I was playing, it never worked. This was infuriating after having played Fallout 4, where you could build vast bases and defenses spread out across a city block. In 76, you're pretty much limited to a tiny shack with a few turrets. It's possible some of these things have improved since launch, but after playing for a month with little to no changes/bug fixes, I moved on to better games. I would not recommend this game, considering there are so many other better options available. Fallout New Vegas was much more immersive story-wise and Fallout 4 was better for the base building and recruiting companions. The main story in 4 was kind of bland compared to New Vegas, but the companions you could recruit and do missions for made up for it. I've played every Fallout since the original turn-based games, so I'm used to a few bugs here and there, but 76 just blew me away with how broken and boring it was in comparison to previous titles in the series.