In June, when Bethesda revealed that Fallout 76 was not going to feature any NPCs, it met with mixed reception. The crowd that was excited about the prospect of a multiplayer Fallout 76 was mostly comprised of younger, multiplayer focused players (in another article of mine I call these types of gamers ‘phase gamers’), and ‘hobby gamers’ who get their kicks from single player, story driven experiences were not thrilled in the slightest. Fast forward a few months, after the game’s release: Fallout scored 53 on Metacritic and everyone, including Bethesda, saw that any scepticism about a multiplayer only Fallout 76 was not unfounded at all. The world was described as soulless and empty by critics and players alike, while the gameplay was deemed monotonuous and unengaging.

Red Dead Redemption 2 and its release is a different story altogether. A late sequel to 2010’s Red Dead Redemption, the game garnered a lot of hype and anticipation from the players before release and it released to the very high score of 97 on Metacritic. The game mainly got praise for its rich, highly detailed game world, excellent writing which fleshed out the characters and the setting itself quite a bit, and gorgeous visuals. Despite all this praise, they got one thing in common with Fallout 76: Gameplay-wise, they are both monotonous games. You also repeat a few actions over and over in RDR 2 and even the story missions are designed quite similarly to each other. Then, if that’s the case, why exactly these two games feel so different to play?

This is simply because Fallout 76’s world is designed as a digital playground whose existence is tied to the player’s rather than a digital world, while Red Dead Redemption 2’s setting feels like a real region that existed long before the game started and the player got involved. Fallout 76’s world feels like a park the developers crafted and then said, “here, play nice now” like a parent: There are places to explore, mutants to kill, objects to find, but all of it feels devoid of real meaning since the world is not properly fleshed out due to lack of NPCs and mediocre writing, which, in turn, makes everything you do in the said world intangible, and your attention turns to the repetitive mechanics instead. Red Dead Redemption 2’s setting, on the other hand, feels much more alive and ‘like a real place’ because everything, including the characters and the writing in general, is so detailed to the point that it is not possible for the player to find every little detail in the game world, which makes it feel similar to the real world (in that there are myriad of things to find out there in the game world but you cannot possibly find and/or experience everything it has to offer). This is why you don’t delve much on mechanics or repetition of said mechanics while playing Red Dead Redemption 2, you are engaged and fascinated with the game world itself. In other words, Red Dead Redemption 2 sells its setting and immerses you in it with extraordinary world building, while Fallout 76 fails to do so because it feels too much like a playground that doesn’t have any real meaning to and in it and exists just to ‘provide fun’.

The age of digital playgrounds are coming to an end. The players are no longer buying these kind of ‘plastic’ experiences simply because they started to see them for what they are; big parks that the developers built for them to play in that have little to no depth or meaning whatsoever. They want the game worlds to feel organic and deep, laden with details and characters which are fleshed out properly through good writing; and if you fail to deliver as a developer, or do not care about creating an organic world that feels alive, you will be punished swiftly by the gaming community at large in terms of both the Metacritic score and sales numbers.