After more than 50 hours plundering the irradiated wasteland of Fallout 76 , the greatest mystery still lingering is who this mutated take on Fallout is intended for. Like many of Vault-Tec’s underground bunkers, Bethesda’s multiplayer riff on its post-nuclear RPG series is an experiment gone awry. There are bright spots entangled in this mass of frustratingly buggy and sometimes conflicting systems, but what fun I was able to salvage from the expansive but underpopulated West Virginia map was consistently overshadowed by the monotony of its gathering and crafting treadmill.

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“ Fallout 76 isn’t a good-looking game except when viewed from the exact right angles.

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“ Wandering the diverse wasteland does reveal one of Bethesda’s great strengths: environmental storytelling.

Wasteland Infestation

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“ I’ve had quest targets already dead upon arrival, forcing me to jump from server to server until I found one where it was still alive.

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Mr. Oppenheimer's Neighborhood

“ What I appreciated most about playing with friends is the companionship and levity they add to this lonely world.

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“ Mechanically, Fallout 76’s combat falls somewhere between floaty and just fine.

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“ I’m still coming across new varieties of man-eating monstrosities, and that’s one of the few things left to look forward to.

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The Cost of Creation

“ Tracking down the plans to create new gear is one of the best-feeling measures of progression.

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“ Toward the late game, the emphasis swings almost entirely from exploration and discovery to resource and inventory management.

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The Nuclear Option

“ By this point I’d become bored with the monotony of Fallout 76’s endless loop.

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“ And that’s when I knew I was done with Fallout 76.

On the surface, Fallout 76 is another dose of Bethesda’s tried-and-true open-world RPG formula on a larger-than-ever map that’s begging to be explored. As you emerge from Vault 76 you’ll start in a relatively peaceful forest and venture out into more dangerous pockets of the irradiated wasteland. My favorite is traveling the lengths of the Cranberry Bog, where the pinkish-red fields are seemingly inviting from afar but turn out to be full of a snaking system of trenches and alien forests that hide the worst horrors of the wasteland, but there are many more.But while the lighting and art direction of these different regions are great at setting the eerie mood and tone of a destroyed Appalachia, the actual objects like trees, shrubs, buildings, cars, and more somehow look flatter and less detailed than those in Fallout 4 did three years ago. Coupling that with Bethesda’s still-unimpressive character animations, Fallout 76 isn’t a good-looking game except when viewed from the exact right angles.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. With the exception of some occasional goofy and creative tasks, it all feels like chasing ghosts. And though later missions mask the shallowness with some cool large-scale battles and events, they’re fleeting moments.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. But really, it just made me want to meet some of them.By now this shouldn’t be news to anyone, but: a new Fallout game has bugs. Yet even by the notorious standards of a Bethesda open-world game, Fallout 76 is technically shaky, and unlike the radiation-soaked radroaches and bloatflys you encounter these annoying bugs can’t be resolved by incinerating them with a laser pistol. Technical problems occupy the spectrum of severity. Some can be endearing: I’ve casually shot the head off a feral ghoul, sending both parts cartwheeling into the air at hilarious speed, and watched a hulking crustacean get caught in a small patch of trees, unable to free itself from what, to it, should’ve been a tiny weed. That’s not ideal, but in dour moments they can add an absurdist sense of humor to the otherwise-dreary wasteland environment.The list goes on and on and on. But despite their frequency and severity, most are corrected when you quit the application and relaunch - but because you can’t declare one server your home and find it again on demand, that means any server-specific things you do, like taking over workshop camps and building resource generators, are left behind and become casualties of Fallout 76’s rampant issues. Bethesda’s open-world games have always had a touch of random instability, but at least everything was usually as we left it when we restarted and came back. I imagine the fact that Fallout 76 is an online game has ratcheted all the usual problems up quite a bit.Instead, Fallout 76 is more of a cooperative PvE game, and that’s where it’s at its best since the solo experience is desperately lonely and you have to find everything yourself, rather than have your friends divide and conquer by building their gear into different styles and share finds they don’t need or want. Loot is individual to each player, so everybody gets to loot the same corpses – hence, the more players you have, the greater the payoff for each kill.The mechanical benefit of grouping brings the ability to freely fast-travel to one other, use teammates’ custom-built camps, and of course the added firepower your friends and their guns bring certainly helps later on when you’re fighting two, or three Skyrim dragon-like scorchbeasts at once, or any of the other more deadly dangers in the wasteland. But what I appreciated most about playing with friends is the companionship and levity they add to this lonely world.You can also share a subset of cards in the flexible new Perk system. Fallout has always allowed us to customize our characters by picking every so often from a handful of gameplay-altering modifiers, such as making certain items weigh less, doing more damage while sneaking, or even more creative bonuses like Cannibal, which allows you to regain health by eating the flesh of humanoids. Fallout 76’s take on this system is actually pretty clever - everybody gets packs containing random perk cards which can be assigned to your SPECIAL (Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck) slots.Mechanically, Fallout 76’s combat falls somewhere between floaty and just fine. I leaned into rifles at long range and shotguns or melee swipes up close - but always in first-person, because hitting anything up close in third-person is hit-or-miss. With only a watered-down real-time version of Fallout’s signature VATS auto-targeting available, which is really only useful for spotting enemies at a distance or taking out obnoxiously small targets, every little bit helps against the inventive and varied enemies.The recognizable insects, ghouls, robots, super mutants, and not-so-super mutant animals are all here, alongside some strange, creepy, and downright bizarre creatures that reside in the fringes of West Virginia’s distinct and atmospheric biomes. Even after 50 hours, I’m still occasionally coming across a new variety of man-eating monstrosity, and that’s one of the few things left to look forward to. Unfortunately, poor AI and pathing means most of these monsters – even the mightiest beasts – can be killed in the cheesiest ways you can imagine. That takes some of the sense of achievement out of it.One of Fallout 76’s brightest ideas, though, is your portable camp which can be built up and dropped almost anywhere in the world that isn’t too close to an existing structure. That’s a big improvement over Fallout 4, which limited you to building on specified plots.However, because there’s no real PvP, there’s little need to fortify it with buildable auto-turrets other than to lure enemies to yet another cheap-feeling death. While the defense options are impressive, like no-nonsense artillery cannons, going that extra mile is expensive and I found the budget was consistently better spent on maintenance and resource options.And like just about everything else in Fallout 76, this system suffers from a number of bugs that makes moving camp a huge hassle. Sure, you can save your blueprint, or store a completed structure for quick deployment later, but the placement system is so finicky that something as small as a rock or tree intersecting with a single part of your base means you can’t set it down. Ultimately, I was able to pick up shop and drop it down somewhere else, but the majority of attempts I would spend too long trying to find the perfect spot without success, so I would regularly need to scrap the structure and lay each piece down individually.And there are a wealth of weapons, armors, and items to collect, assemble, and mod. In the beginning you’ll be taping a pipe to a trigger and using it as something resembling a gun. Or boiling smelly leather for makeshift scraps of armor. They’re entry level, sure, but they're the best you can make and that makes them valuable if only for a short time.That’s when you’re required to build, maintain, and carry your entire arsenal of power armor, a hefty selection of weapons, and ample ammo alongside the food, water, and chemical stimulants that you have to regularly pop to render the light survival elements (consisting entirely of a food meter and a water meter) all but completely irrelevant. All of this weight easily bogs you down, and your personal stash box in your camp has an absurdly tiny 400-pound limit. Remember, this isn’t a traditional Fallout game where you could drop 15 gatling laser cannons into a single desk drawer and expect them to be there when you return 15 hours later – Fallout 76 barely has a sense of object permanence. So by the time I reached late-game levels I was spending at least five minutes of every hour I played just managing and sacrificing inventory to avoid the severe mobility consequences of becoming over-encumbered. That got old quickly.But by this point – the late level 40s – I’d become bored with the monotony of Fallout 76’s endless loop. Yet finally, after dozens of hours grinding missions, searching for launch codes, solving a cypher, my team of weary survivors approached the ultimate goal for one last thrill: we invaded a pre-war silo and fought off wave after wave of the same super-powered robots for the privilege of launching a nuclear weapon somewhere on the map.Was the slog worth it? Not really, no. And that’s when I knew I was done with Fallout 76.Finally, the fact that there’s a cash shop with obscenely expensive cosmetic items – like power armor skins that cost somewhere around $15 USD if you haven’t acquired enough of the secondary currency yet. That Fallout 76 is in need of so much other attention, but you’re still able to spend money on cosmetics from the storefront adds some insult to the overall injury.