Wasteland InfestationBy now this shouldn’t be news to anyone, but: a new Fallout game has bugs. But really, it just made me want to meet some of them.
A half-sunken church with tunnels leading into a deeper, icicle light-adorned cavern has me wondering who reclaimed this place? Was it a sanctum? A place to hide from everything outside? All of these little moments and so many more are dotted across the landscape of West Virginia, and though they’re such small things, they speak volumes about the diverse variety of lives that were led before the bombs fell and in the times shortly thereafter. A skeleton holding flowers, a bottle of wine, and a stuffed animal reveals that someone was about to take the plunge and profess their admiration when the world burst into flame. Discovering a goofy teddy bear playing pots-and-pans drums in a shack in the middle of nowhere tells me someone was here for a time, and so very bored. “Wandering the diverse wasteland of Appalachia does reveal one of Bethesda’s great strengths: environmental storytelling. And though later missions mask the shallowness with some cool large-scale battles and events, they’re fleeting moments. With the exception of some occasional goofy and creative tasks, it all feels like chasing ghosts. Because of that, the so-called main story quests to track down and eliminate the source of a spreading plague boil down to obediently following a breadcrumb trail of journals and notes.
Where past Fallout games have more than made up for some of their frustrations with brow-furrowing questions like whether to destroy the town of Megaton or what should become of the New Vegas Strip, there’s no opportunity for the morally tricky decision-making in Fallout 76 because no one talking to you can hear you. Other than 20-something other players spread so thinly over a massive map that chance encounters are rare outside of quest locations, just about the only voices you’ll hear are recordings of long-dead questgivers, robots, and AI constructs who simply deliver information at you. “When you look closer, it becomes obvious that Bethesda’s ambitious idea to replace all human NPCs with other players results in a lack of meaningful interaction with the world.
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