

Let’s focus on the stuff that makes Fallout 76 special. But let’s move past the headlines that made such noise at release, however deserved, and dig a little deeper.

So: more players around at launch, and fewer game-breaking glitches. Without bigger servers there's no way to create large, persistent narratives Judging from the handful of scored and unscored reviews that cropped up following the release of Wastelanders, we’d probably be looking at a score a little higher than 60%, maybe even higher given recent updates like Worlds and Locked & Loaded. Well, to start with, it’s pretty unlikely that Fallout 76 would be sitting on a Metacritic score of just over 50%. So, what if Fallout 76 came out right now? It’s a better MMO, too, with more daily quests, endgame gear, and roleplay options. There are NPCs now, and proper quest lines with branching dialogue that make it feel more like a Fallout game. The last three years have had their ups and downs, but a few key updates – Wastelanders, Steel Dawn, The Legendary Run, and One Wasteland For All – have made Fallout 76’s world a drastically different one than players entered back in 2018. But they’re less severe than they were, and no longer laid bare in an empty world where players have little to do other than harass each other. Many of those issues remain: crashes are common, bugs still abound, and the UI is more nightmarish than any Scorched you’ll come across in post-apocalyptic Appalachia. It was prone to griefers, bereft of life, clunky, and buggy as all hell – worse than Cyberpunk, and it’s not even close.
