10 SHOCKING Fallout 76 Horror Stories
No NPCs at Launch
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When the game was announced, people were generally excited. But one feature had people worried from the get-go: the fact it wasn’t going to have any NPCs. Your only interactions would be with robots, audio and text logs, and other players. In the end, “76” was just as desolate as everybody feared, with the entire story delivered by audio logs from people who weren’t there. It wasn’t until April 2020, eighteen months on, that the game’s “Wastelanders” update actually brought human NPCs to the game. It was a massive improvement, good enough for “Fallout 76” to start turning its fate around and pull in new players. But it’s still shocking that they thought for a moment that no NPCs in an MMO was a good idea.
16 Times the Detail
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Oh, Todd. We want to believe you, but you make it so hard! During “Fallout 76’s” E3 reveal back in 2018, Todd Howard stressed one particular point: “76” was going to be five times the size with “sixteen times the detail” of “Fallout 4”. Was that the case? No, not really. The map is absolutely huge, sure, but a lot of it was empty wilderness, much like the maps of many open-world games. There was little to see and do at launch, and it seems that the “sixteen times the detail” claim still hasn’t really come to fruition. In fact, “Fallout 76” looked more or less identical to “Fallout 4”, albeit with more colorful trees, and it would probably hurt an already demanding game even more by trying to render distant, complex weather systems.
Glitches
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Bethesda’s first-party games have always been buggy, but until “76”, they had a willing and able modding community ready to step up and stabilize their releases. Obviously, it would be better if the games worked without this, but at least SOME players can get stable, functioning RPGs from them. That wasn’t the case with “Fallout 76”, however. Thanks to it being an always-online MMO, there was no way for modders to step in and fix the glitches. So everybody on every platform was faced with relentless bugs with nobody, other than Bethesda itself, able to help them. And when help did arrive in the beginning, it left much to be desired. Some of those gigantic patches actually removed older fixes and left the game even more unstable.
Mass Bans
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From the beginning, players were finding themselves facing Bethesda’s ban hammer for all manner of things. While we don’t doubt that people were trying to cheat at the game, since people try to cheat at every game, there were many legitimate players who also faced Bethesda’s wrath. One player who sank 900 hours into the game found themselves banned after accumulating massive amounts of ammo. He did this entirely legitimately using the in-game bonuses to reduce carry weight, but Bethesda said he was cheating and banned him. Other players were banned for having software on their computers that COULD have been used to alter the game, even if they weren’t actually using it.
Tie-In Products
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“Fallout 76’s” problems didn’t stop with the virtual world, however. There were problems with numerous tie-in products. The first one to receive the ire of consumers were those canvas bags you were supposed to get with the collector’s edition. When they shipped they were cheap, nylon replacements. Bethesda eventually did manufacture the canvas bags and send them out to the wronged customers at cost. But it didn’t stop there; there were also the Power Armor helmets recalled due to “dangerous levels of mold”, and the Nuka Dark Rum bottles, which also didn’t match up to their promotional images. Rather than being a glass bottle of rum shaped like the in-game Nuka-Colas, it was a normal bottle of rum in a cheap, plastic case that leaked everywhere.
500 Atoms
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At launch, the game was clearly not as advertised. It just didn’t function, customers around the world felt short-changed, and vitriol against Bethesda was at an all-time high. However, players who received those cheap nylon bags were given a gift from Bethesda before the replacements could be sent out: 500 Atoms for the in-game microtransaction store. So, how much money are those 500 Atoms worth? The same amount as the bag, right? Well, no. 500 Atoms in “Fallout 76” is the equivalent of $5. Maybe that’s how much it actually cost Bethesda to manufacture the terrible bags. In any case, the 500 Atoms compensation was mocked relentlessly.
Doxing
Yet more trouble from the canvas bags, in order to get your nylon bag replaced, you needed to submit a support ticket to Bethesda on their website. But there was a grave error on the website. It was so poorly set up that it ended up doxing everybody who’d submitted a ticket, leaking tons of personal information including card details and customer addresses. Bethesda eventually resolved the issue and it doesn’t look as though anybody used the doxxed information for nefarious purposes, but it was still shocking to find out that the people struggling the most with the game were given yet another headache.
Fallout 1st
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A year after the game’s release, Bethesda launched the “Fallout 1st” premium subscription service. This would give players private servers, fancier equipment, and a little icon to let everybody else know that they were a “Fallout 1st” subscriber. It also cost about $13 a month, making it more expensive than Netflix and Spotify. Some people did sign up for it, and they then found themselves relentlessly griefed by the “lower classes” the subscription service had created. People formed gangs and went around to pick on the premium subscribers at the beginning. Worse, the game was still barely functioning at this point, and the fancy private servers were MORE broken than the regular ones. And the game STILL wasn’t free-to-play.
Developer Room
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Not long after launch, players stumbled across “76’s” developer room. This is a room intended only for the developers to test various in-game items, and as such, it contained basically every weapon, piece of armor, and item in the entire game, and also the means for some people to endlessly duplicate such items. A black market exploded on websites like eBay, with players selling powerful, in-game items for real money. Bethesda cracked down on this pretty quickly, banning not only all the “dupers” it could find, but anybody who accessed the room at all. Weirder yet, the room also contained a human NPC; for a while, this was the only human NPC in the whole game.
Crunch
But why on Earth was “Fallout 76” ever allowed to launch in this condition? Well, in 2022, Kotaku published a big investigation into Bethesda and “Fallout 76”. It turns out that just like most other big video game companies, Bethesda was crunching its staff relentlessly. The development team and QA testers were grossly mismanaged by project leaders who didn’t see the lack of NPCs or the game’s broken state as issues. Developers were overworked, departments weren’t able to communicate properly, and the ”Fallout 76” project took good developers away from “Redfall” and “Starfield” because it had such a high turnover. Worse, it was those developers who received so much ire from the gaming community, even though they’d been trying to tell project leads that the game wasn’t working all along.
