If you shoot at another player, you can only cause them a teensy sliver of damage until they shoot back – at which point a duel is initiated and you can do full damage to each other. It is designed neither for fun co-operation nor exciting face-offs. If the point of an online game is the interactions you have with other players, Fallout 76 makes no sense. VATS is more of a hindrance than a help … Fallout 76 screenshot. Over time the game will become more stable through patches and updates, but in its current state it seems to be held together by duct tape and sheer will. Bugs and the occasional crash are to be expected for online open-world games, but their frequency is a real issue in Fallout 76. VATS, Fallout’s automated targeting system, was so unreliable in its estimations of whether a shot would hit that it became more of hindrance than a help, and shooting things without it isn’t as much fun.Įight times in my 30 hours of play, the game disconnected from its servers and crashed, and when I reloaded I was outside whichever building I had been in and all the enemies had respawned. Enemies either wouldn’t react to my presence at all, or a large group of them would materialise out of nowhere. The loot that should have been waiting in the carcass of the large enemy that I’d wasted all my ammo on wouldn’t load. A tedious communal event involving killing endless mutants made one area impossible to traverse when I needed to go there on a mission. Whenever I did stumble across a place or a storyline that was engaging, Fallout 76 would find ways of disrupting my play. At first there is melancholic interest in figuring out what happened to the previous inhabitants of Appalachia, but constantly reading about and listening to interesting things that you didn’t get to be a part of makes the entire game feel like you’ve arrived late to a party and are left to clean up the mess. Every time you are sent on a quest to find someone (and this happens a lot), you already know that either: they’re dead, they’re not there, or they will turn out to be a robot or a computer. Instead of using characters and dialogue, the meagre story is told almost entirely through written logs and audiotapes left behind after the bombs fell, which although well written and voice-acted are overused to the point of absurdity. Real people usually run around erratically and babble into their headsets. But real people don’t provide what written characters bring to a world: context, story, connections and a sense of life and place. Fallout 76 has no supporting characters every person you see is another player.

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