All the way back in part one of this diary, I was full of hope for a brighter Fallout 76. A multiplayer version of one of my all-time favourite RPG series, riddled with the joy of a shared post-apocalypse situation. What more could a person want?
Well, a game that didn’t need a 50-odd gigabyte patch would have helped. It took until the end of the week before my creaking internet from 1963 was able to furnish the Xbox One with the files required to play the game. But it got there. It persevered. It won the fight.
Waking in my Vault 76 bunk, probably with a post-apocalyptic hangover, I soon find out those housed in this particular bunker ‘must be our best and brightest’. I am immediately uneasy. One, because of crippling self-confidence issues, and two, because that doesn’t feel very Fallout – Vaults are about experiments, about messing with people, about ruining lives for the sake of extraordinarily questionable research reasons.
But I can dig it. I can push on. Just like I can overlook the emphasis on heroism and the American Dream, on fighting the Red Menace and all that. Even if, to me, Fallout has always been slyly anti-war, rather than bald jingoism duplicating the anti-Communist rhetoric of the mid-20th Century US. I can get past it. I’m kind like that.
Expectations jilted, but not dimmed, I step forth through the vault door into Appalachia. The journey has finally begun. This is Fallout – emerging from your underground lair into a world changed, to find corpses everywhere and trying to converse with robots. But it’s… different.
Ah Barry, your Wasteland adventures were again cut short.
No people – not even other players – are around, instead my walk interrupted by either naughty robots with evil Communist stars on them, or benevolent robots who talk a good game about how great it is to cut down trees.
Instead of drinking from toilets and getting radiation poisoning, I’m picking up wood scraps and collecting bottles. Feral Ghouls are replaced with Scorched, who seem pretty much the same but some have guns. It… it feels like Fallout, but emptier.
I find a ribcage in a footlocker then get killed by some angry park ranger-cosplaying Scorched. Must have been because I left some spoiled vegetable soup on the floor, which would of course attract bears. Murder’s not really a fair punishment for this mild infraction, I feel, but it does seem like a nice little story I to tell myself – and share with you – from my brief time with Fallout 76.
Rockin’ the apocalypse, 76-style.
Fresh off these exciting new developments – well, developments, at least – I come back to Fallout 76 the next day hoping to make more headway into the world, to set up my first C.A.M.P, to pop a few caps in an irritating dog that straight up murdered me (before being left to die by one of the few other humans I did encounter).
… Only to be met with a 48.39GB patch. Fans of the first edition of this diary may remember I’m not particularly fond of large downloads, and that my internet from AD1749 isn’t capable of getting these files onto my machine in short order.
So once again, dear reader, I’m bereft. Bethesda may as well send me a DM saying ‘No Fallout 76 for you again, Ian, because we can’t be bothered to pay for a WinRAR license and instead will send out all of our files uncompressed’.
Ah well, there’s always next week.
Coming soon – Part 3: has it finished downloading yet? – Redux
