Fallout 76

• 1. Please Stand By

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  Fallout 76 first reached the public through a twenty-four-hour Twitch stream on the 30th of May 2018. The picture never changed. A Vault Boy bobblehead toy sat in front of a monitor showing a “Please Stand By” test pattern, a signature image of the series. More than two million people watched in total, and at any moment over one hundred thousand were tuning in. For a game that has since become notable for its negative reception, it was an enormous opening act.

  Bethesda Game Studios had never made a multiplayer game before, and this 2018 action role-playing game was its first. It sent players into a post-apocalyptic West Virginia as a prequel to everything the series had shown. How does a studio known for lone adventures build a shared world? Why did some of the people making it describe the experience in such bleak terms? And how did a game that critics dismissed later draw record numbers of players?

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• 2. Appalachian Wasteland

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  Charleston, Morgantown, The Greenbrier resort and the New River Gorge Bridge all appear in Fallout 76, copied from real West Virginia. The player controls a resident of Vault 76, a fallout shelter built to house America's best and brightest minds. On Reclamation Day, that resident steps out in the year 2102, twenty-five years after a nuclear war, to help re-colonize the Wasteland. The game can be viewed from a first-person or third-person perspective.

  The Mothman and the Flatwoods monster, both borrowed from West Virginia folklore, prowl the hills alongside raiders, mutated animals and ghouls. The player carries a wearable computer called the Pip-Boy, which doubles as menu, quest log, map and radio for makeshift broadcasts. It also allows fast travel to places already discovered. Weapons range from ordinary guns and energy-based guns to melee weapons and explosives. In a fight, V.A.T.S. can lock onto an enemy and show the percentage chance of a hit. Unlike in earlier Fallout games, it neither pauses nor slows time, so the numbers appear in real time.

  Seven attributes shape every character: strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility and luck. Together they are known as S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats. Experience points come from completing quests, killing enemies and crafting items, and each level gained lets the player raise one attribute. Strength, for example, sets how much a character can carry and how hard melee attacks land. Points in each attribute also decide how many perk cards can be equipped. Rifleman, an endurance card, increases the damage of non-automatic rifles, and cards can be swapped or removed at any time.

  Every player begins with a Construction and Assembly Mobile Platform, known as C.A.M.P. It turns raw materials into base structures, and it can be placed anywhere on the map and moved whenever the player likes. At the base, the player can craft weapons, armor and modifications. Enemies attack bases, so turrets and traps help defend them. If a server already has another player's base where the player's own should go, the player's base is removed and can be set up elsewhere.

  Atoms are the game's currency, spent in a marketplace called the Atomic Shop. They can be bought with real-world money or earned by completing challenges, such as crafting a piece of armor or gaining a level. The shop sells cosmetic items, including outfits and short character gestures called emotes. The game runs entirely online on dedicated servers. Solo play is possible, but quests are designed to be shared, and players can also trade with each other or fight. Behind the hunting, building and trading sits a mystery: something has killed off the people of Appalachia, and the player is meant to find out what.

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• 3. Story of Appalachia

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  The Overseer of Vault 76 contacts the player soon after Reclamation Day with a secret mandate. The vault was told to secure a nuclear arsenal deployed across Appalachia. The weapons sit in three missile silos that still work, named Site Alpha, Site Bravo and Site Charlie.

  The first lead is the Responders, emergency services personnel who tried to help Appalachia during the war. They turn out to have evacuated after attacks by the Scorched. The Scorched are humans infected with the Scorched Plague, and they answer to the Scorchbeasts, massive mutated bats. Those bats came into contact with an Enclave bioweapon stored in an old mining facility. The exposure made them grow exponentially and gave them a symbiotic hold over the plague. One Scorchbeast rises to become the Queen, far larger and deadlier, and steers humans and animals alike through a hivemind.

  The Free States, survivalists who kept bunkers around the region, were building a way to detect the Scorched until the Scorched overran them. Their work lets the player build a radar that reads the viral signature of the Scorched, but its short range makes it ineffective. To extend it, the player befriends Rose, a Miss Nanny robot trying to rebuild the Raider gangs that the Scorched had scared away. The player also studies Brotherhood of Steel research into the Scorchbeast, gathered while the Brotherhood tried to halt its spread from its main lair.

  Hacking a government network draws the attention of the Enclave, the remnants of the United States government. They are led by MODUS, a centralized artificial intelligence housed in a nuclear fallout bunker beneath the Whitespring Resort. MODUS wants isolated computer networks across Appalachia linked through the Sugar Grove SIGINT base, and contact restored with the Kovac-Muldoon orbital platform. In return, it offers to plug the radar into its own systems.

  The radar finally locates the Scorchbeast nest, known as Fissure Site Prime, close to where the Brotherhood of Steel had tried and failed to fight the threat. Guided by MODUS, the player sends a missile from one of the three silos into the nest. Inside the irradiated zone waits a laboratory at the heart of the nest, which the Brotherhood had also found. Its presence hints that the Scorchbeasts may have been created on purpose. The blast wakes a formidable Scorchbeast Queen, and the player has to fight her. When she falls, the shared consciousness of the Scorchbeasts shatters, and the wider wasteland is safe from them.

  In 2103, a year after Vault 76 opened, newcomers begin drifting back to Appalachia, drawn by rumors of safety and hidden treasure. Two factions form among them: the Settlers, led by Paige, and the returning Raiders, led by Meg. The Overseer worries about the lingering Scorched threat and asks the vault's survivors to befriend the arrivals and trace the rumors. First comes a vaccine, mass-produced with the Overseer at the defunct Nuka-Cola plant. It is handed out as Nuka-Cola soft drinks, after the faction leaders are convinced of the danger.

  The treasure trail then leads to Vault-Tec University in Morgantown, where a secret area once hosted executive meetings. Beneath it lies Vault 79, which holds the entire gold reserve of the United States, moved there from Fort Knox in case of nuclear war. The resident must pick the Settlers or the Raiders as allies for the raid. Inside, the crew finds the remnants of a Secret Service garrison trapped by the vault's defenses. In exchange for rescuing the agents, the crew can claim 1000 gold bars that the agents cannot reach. The resident then divides the gold: keep every bar, share half with the allied faction, or give each faction a quarter and keep half. The aim is to restore a gold-backed currency across America, but greed could trigger recession and set Settlers against Raiders in a fight for total conquest.

  Elder Maxson sends the Brotherhood of Steel's First Expeditionary Force from New California to learn what became of Paladin Taggerdy's Brotherhood. Most of the group is lost to Raider attacks on the way across the devastated country. Paladin Rahmani, Scribe Valdez and Knight Shin arrive, turn the fortified ATLAS Observatory into Fort Atlas, and start rebuilding. By 2104 the expedition is splintered by a dispute between Rahmani and Shin over its primary objective, while Super Mutants and other threats released by the Enclave keep attacking. The vault residents must decide whether the Brotherhood should protect the people of Appalachia or keep securing pre-War weapons so they never reach the wrong hands.

  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, ruined in the Great War and now called The Pitt, is the first stop beyond Appalachia. The Responders have returned and made Whitespring Resort their base, thanks to its automated robot staff and security and a working Vertibird. With the vault residents, they help the Pittsburgh Union against a raider group called the Fanatics. In 2105 the call comes from Atlantic City, New Jersey, where the Showmen, the Atlantic City Municipal Government and the Lombardi Family hold rival territory. The trigger is back home. The Russo Family has turned the old Ingram Mansion, once owned by the Cult of the Mothman, into a nightclub called the Rose Room. A hit squad ambushes opening night, and the Russo daughter then suffers severe withdrawal from a drug called Devil's Blood, which comes from Atlantic City.

  Skyline Valley, part of Shenandoah National Park, is reached through Vault 63 and is always covered by a mysterious storm. Members of Vault 63 were turned into ghouls, and the weather device responsible for the storm changed them into something else entirely. The vault residents must help the survivors choose a new Overseer and decide what becomes of the storm. In Burning Springs, across the state line in what remains of Ohio, a super mutant called the Rust King rules from an arena. After a planned rebellion is betrayed by one of its own, the Rust King names the dwellers worthy warriors and releases them. There they also meet The Ghoul, a bounty hunter who is headed back to the New Californian Republic for personal reasons.

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• 4. Borrowed Engine

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  The idea of a multiplayer Fallout took shape in 2013, while Bethesda Game Studios was busy with Fallout 4. Early ideas for a multiplayer mode were judged too large and shelved in favor of the single-player campaign. Around then, Jason Hasenbuhler of BattleCry Studios, a recently formed studio in Austin, Texas, met Bethesda executive producer Todd Howard. Several BattleCry developers had worked on big multiplayer games such as Star Wars Galaxies, and Hasenbuhler asked to build a Fallout multiplayer game. Bethesda approved the project after Fallout 4 came out in November 2015. It was already making downloadable add-ons for that game and doing early work on Starfield, and a multiplayer Fallout could fill the gap between major releases. BattleCry agreed, having just put its own free-to-play game, BattleCry, on indefinite hiatus.

  The Creation Engine, handed over from Fallout 4, had only ever powered single-player games. It still ran on code first written for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind in 2002. Worse, it loaded only the part of the map where the player stood. BattleCry decided the best way to give it multiplayer abilities was to implement the netcode from older Quake games.

  Meanwhile, a small team at Bethesda's main studio in Rockville, Maryland worked out the premise. Bethesda's last two Fallout games had been set in major East Coast cities, and the team wanted a rural place that nuclear weapons would not have targeted. In such a place, plants and animals would have largely survived and mutated, and forests could cover parts of the map. They chose the Appalachian region of West Virginia and made the map larger to make room for several players at once.

  Setting the game just twenty-five years after the Great War shaped the most debated decision of all: no human non-playable characters at launch. A behind-the-scenes documentary gave two reasons. Bethesda reasoned that hostile factions would need longer than twenty-five years to take over the area, and wanted players to know any human they met was another player. To make up for the lack of enemies with guns, the team created a new kind of ghoul that kept some mental faculties and could use weapons. In a 2022 retrospective, Kotaku quoted anonymous developers who said nearly everyone at BattleCry disliked the decision, while Howard insisted on it until after release. Executives expected a long job updating the engine for multiplayer. They decided that text-based storage devices and environmental storytelling would carry the story instead. The same developers had far more to say about what life on the project was like.

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• 5. The Project That Ate People

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  One developer told Kotaku, “No one wanted to be on that project because it ate people. It destroyed people...” Departures from Bethesda were frequent enough that developers from Starfield and from Redfall, a game by Arkane Austin, were moved over to fill the gaps.

  Leadership was a recurring complaint. Some BattleCry staff were led to believe that Howard was in charge, although he was actually busy with Starfield. He visited BattleCry now and then, but developers found his involvement inadequate. One said he shot down every new idea from the design team. Another claimed he leaned too heavily on a “bigger is better” philosophy without thinking about how it would work.

  Important details were left unanswered, including how many players a server could hold and how griefing would be handled. Resentment also ran from Rockville toward BattleCry, partly over Bethesda's choice to build a live service game. The free-to-play Fallout Shelter had grossed over $100 million in four years, so Bethesda had grown interested in games that keep earning after release. Emil Pagliarulo was singled out as a Rockville designer who ignored BattleCry. A developer said, “Pagliarulo didn't seem to want to be involved with the product at all. He didn't want to have any contact with it... or read anything that we put in front of him.” Some Rockville staff were dismayed to be building a multiplayer game after joining a studio that had only made single-player ones. Another developer said, “Bethesda has a lack of respect for folks who are working on things that they consider theirs.”

  Game testers described heavy crunch that damaged their mental health. They called it “voluntold overtime”: if nobody volunteered for weekend hours, the whole department was called in. Peer pressure grew, because testers who did not complain about crunch had better odds of being converted from contract workers to full-time employees. When these problems reached the parent company, ZeniMax Media, they were ignored or flatly denied. Testers said their breaks were timed and that some were followed into restrooms by what they called “chronic snitches”.

  Nearly every build was riddled with glitches, most of them traced to the Creation Engine. Asked which parts of the game were affected, one developer answered, “Tongue in cheek: the whole game. In general, every major bug in 76 that appeared at launch was known by quality assurance.” The engine was poorly optimized, and simply moving to a new build could break the game. Testers were forbidden to raise problems with developers directly and had to go through the quality assurance department. That detour sometimes delayed work on game-breaking glitches for months. Developers expected a delay, but Bethesda and BattleCry were on tight schedules and would not move any preset deadline. Whatever the cost inside the studios, the schedule held, and the public was about to see what that pressure had produced.

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• 6. Launch and Verdict

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  On the 10th of June 2018, Todd Howard laid out the game at Bethesda's E3 press conference and gave a release date of the 14th of November 2018. Because it was the studio's first fully online game, he also promised an open beta. It began on the 23rd of October 2018 for Xbox One and on the 30th of October 2018 for PlayStation 4 and PC. Fans of the series responded to the multiplayer-only plan with a petition for a single-player mode, which collected thousands of signatures within a day. The announcement also sent people toward West Virginia. The website West Virginia Explorer reported fifteen times its usual visitors in the following days, and the Camden Park amusement park saw more people asking to buy park merchandise.

  The E3 teaser trailer used a cover of John Denver's “Take Me Home, Country Roads”. Fans asked about the song, so Bethesda planned to release it on digital music services and donate all proceeds to Habitat for Humanity, guaranteeing a minimum donation. In Australia, the December 2018 issue of Stack magazine came with a free vinyl of the cover, a promotion run through the retailer JB Hi-Fi.

  Reviews were harsh. On Metacritic, the PC and PlayStation 4 versions earned “mixed or average” reviews, while the Xbox One version was rated “generally unfavorable”. The Guardian called it “a pointless walk in the post-apocalypse”. Eurogamer called it a “bizarre, boring, broken mess” and a “failed experiment”. IGN wrote, “The rich wasteland map of Fallout 76 is wasted on a mess of bugs, conflicting ideas, and monotony.” PCWorld ended its review early out of frustration with the technical performance. Giant Bomb declined to publish a full review, and co-founder Jeff Gerstmann said on the site's podcast, “No one on staff wants to play any more of this video game.”

  Critics also seized on the missing human characters. GameSpot argued the world was reduced to “an environmental exhibit with things to kill”. PC World wrote of the robots that “they don't talk with you, they talk at you”, and dismissed the readable terminals and holotapes as “no substitute for an actual conversation”.

  Bugs and stability problems drew constant complaints. Bethesda's first patch weighed 50GB, nearly as large as the game itself. Many fixes disappointed players by leaving notable problems alone, removing features that seemed intentional, or bringing back bugs that had been fixed before. Some fans asked for a public test server so patches could be checked before release.

  On the 22nd of December 2018, Bethesda apologized by giving every player a free PC copy of the Fallout Classic Collection: Fallout, Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel. Speaking to IGN on the 2nd of June 2019, Howard said the studio had expected trouble: “This is not gonna be a high Metacritic game.” He regretted not releasing a beta several months before launch. He still insisted that the long run mattered more: “It's not how you launch, it's what it becomes.” In the meantime, players had found a new grievance in the prices charged in the in-game shop.

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• 7. Paywalls and Missteps

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  In December 2018, Eurogamer noted that a set of Santa Claus outfits cost $20 worth of Atoms and a large sign cost $14. Players pointed out that similar money would buy the Fallout 4 season pass with every add-on. In spring and summer 2019 came items that managed a surplus inventory or improved weapon quality, both bought with Atoms. Players felt this favored those who paid real money over those who earned Atoms through hours of play. Polygon wrote that the store had “slowly warped over time”, since it had first offered only cosmetic items.

  In the weeks after release, Bethesda banned many players for using mods or exploiting technical flaws. Some duplicated items. Others got into the developer room, an off-limits testing area holding copies of every item. Many accounts were closed without warning, and some players received an email asking for an essay on why cheating and mod software harm online games. That sparked backlash from players who said they used mods only to fix graphical or technical problems. Meanwhile, hackers flooded the game with duplicated items and sold them outside the game. Some players hunted down anyone suspected of duplicating, killing a number of innocent characters. In December 2019, users added numerous NPCs and objects to the game, some taken from Fallout 4. Later that month, hackers opened other players' inventories and stole hundreds of items.

  On the 23rd of October 2019, Bethesda announced Fallout 1st, a premium subscription costing $12.99 per month or $99.99 per year. Subscribers get a private server, which they can share with up to seven other people who need not subscribe. The subscription also adds a box with unlimited storage for crafting materials, a placeable fast travel system with supplies, 1650 Atoms per month and exclusive cosmetic items. Critics saw it as audacious, partly because private worlds had been requested before launch and now sat behind a paywall. Kotaku contested the price, noting that the base game was still sold at a discount at most retailers. Problems followed. Private servers showed dead NPCs and looted areas, which suggested recycled instances. Anyone on a friends list could see and join a private server. Players who stored items in the unlimited box sometimes returned to find them gone.

  The Power Armor special edition advertised a canvas duffel bag but shipped with a nylon one. Bethesda blamed unavailable materials and at first planned no action. Eurogamer pointed out that the bag's description on Bethesda's website had been changed to “nylon” only after complaints came in. Bethesda then offered 500 Atoms as compensation, which could not buy the 700-Atom postman uniform that includes a canvas bag. Fans also learned that a different Fallout 76 canvas bag had been given free to online influencers. On the 3rd of December 2018, Bethesda said it would make canvas bags for every owner of the edition, and they were delivered in June 2019.

  On the 5th of December 2018, a glitch in Bethesda's support system exposed personal details of roughly 65 customers who had filed tickets about the canvas bag. Users could open and close other customers' tickets and see names, addresses, emails and partial credit card information. Bethesda told Ars Technica that the breach came from “an error with our customer support website”. It said no credit card numbers or passwords were leaked and promised to notify those affected.

  A 2018 partnership with the Silver Screen Bottling Company produced Nuka Dark Rum, based on a drink from the Fallout 4: Nuka-World add-on. Pre-orders opened in August 2018, but the rum shipped in late December 2018. Fans expected a missile-shaped bottle and received a standard glass bottle in a plastic cover, at a price of $80. In September 2019, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission recalled collectible Nuka Cola-themed helmets made by Chronicle Collectibles, which contained high levels of mold. Only 32 of the 20,000 manufactured had been sold. No injuries were reported, and GameStop offered full refunds. The mood around the game was about to shift, and the cause was an update that finally put people into Appalachia.

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• 8. Comeback

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  The Wastelanders expansion arrived in April 2020 and changed the scores. On Metacritic, it held 68/100 for Windows and 63/100 for PlayStation 4, based on updated reviews. IGN's David Jagneaux gave it 6 out of 10 but called it “a dramatic overhaul of Appalachia from top to bottom it desperately needed.” He added that Fallout 76 “is starting to feel like a true Fallout game”, though still less consistently enjoyable than its predecessors.

  PCWorld said the expansion injected “some much-needed personality” into post-apocalyptic West Virginia. GameSpot wrote that it brought “some of the best Fallout sequences in recent years”, though players would have to dig through enduring issues to reach them. Nate Crowley of Rock, Paper, Shotgun described the shift: “what was once hollow now feels fleshed out, and what was lifeless now feels at least intermittently busy.”

  When the game reached Steam in April 2020 with Wastelanders included, users upset about its original state review bombed it. Other users pushed back. They compared the game to Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn and No Man's Sky, which had also improved significantly after launch, and urged new buyers to ignore the negative reviews.

  Launch sales had been uneven. The game debuted third in the UK all-format charts, behind Spyro Reignited Trilogy and Red Dead Redemption 2, and fifth in Switzerland. In Japan, the PlayStation 4 version sold 73,489 copies in its first week, making it the second bestselling retail game of that week. The NPD Group reported lower launch sales than either Fallout 4 or Fallout: New Vegas, with physical sales in the opening month under one fifth of Fallout 4's, a drop of 82%. SuperData estimated 1.4 million digital copies sold by the end of 2018.

  Despite the reviews, the game collected nominations: “Fan Favorite Fall Release” at the Gamers' Choice Awards, “Game of the Year” at the Australian Games Awards, and the Tin Pan Alley Award for Best Music in a Game at the New York Game Awards. It won “Best Video Game TV Spot” at the 2019 Golden Trailer Awards.

  In November 2021, Howard revealed that the game had 11 million players in total. By March 2024 the figure had reached 17 million. The following month, Amazon Prime's Fallout television series premiered, and Fallout 76's player count hit an all-time high, with a million people logging in within a single day. That record came from a television show, not a new expansion.

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