Fallout 76 will probably go down into the books as the most glitchy and controversial game release in gaming history. It won't be known for the Fallout which did online multiplayer, it will be known for the Fallout that was released totally broken and empty, and the constant stream of lies and deceptions by Bethesda. The bugs and glitches have been so horrible and ridiculous that you really just can't help but laugh - and this is on top of the already horrendously 2000's-era graphics.

That, and the connection problems. Regular Fallout games don't have this problem because of course regular Fallout games are not dependent on online play. It's clear this dev team has absolutely no idea what they were doing - that, or they were underpaid, or underfunded, or under budget, or extremely behind schedule and just pushed it out long before it was ready. There is nothing that breaks immersion like a giant popup that pauses your gameplay and says "Disconnected From Server". No thanks!

Sure, the glitches may be patched in a few months (or not), but this game was already released as a $60 game (although it's already at $40), not a private beta or even an alpha. This game doesn't even qualify as an alpha (alpha is where game testing begins, beta is right before release in the final testing stage. Fallout 76 is effectively a pre-alpha game, that is, before pretty much any testing has been done. It was definitely not anywhere close to being ready for release, especially not as a $60 game.

Microtransactions. Sure, EA has made a killing at them, but also severely damaged their business. I would venture to say that in the long run, Microtransactions have done little to benefit EA's bottom line, since they probably lost more money from lost players than they gained from tricking 9 year olds into spending hundreds in microtransactions on their parents' credit card.

Apparently Bethesda didn't learn their lesson, and have even done some things that are illegal in some countries like putting out a deceptive microtransaction at 2400 credits ($24) right before Christmas just to drop it to 1200 credits ($12) shortly after. Everyone hates microtransactions anyway, and putting them in a Fallout game does nothing but take away from the core experience as well as put them on the hate list along with EA, the most hated company in America.

Not only that, but the microtransactions themselves even suck. Reddit user GreyTortoise has already gotten 1.4K upvotes on his comment in the official Fallout 76 Reddit which says that all he is getting in the microtransactions Atomic Shop (the microtransactions store) are items like "Sims in the wasteland" with potted plants and other home items, when what he wants is "ammo stockpiles, missile racks, barbed wire, turret skins", etc.

To their benefit, however, Bethesda promises that microtransactions will "only be for cosmetic items", and not for essential items like guns and tools; so at least it won't be a pay to win game.

Another casualty of the massive online multiplayer functionality of Fallout 76 is that it has destroyed leveling up functionality. While your player's actual level does indeed level up, the players that you encounter are not in any way consistently comparable to your character level. For example, you might be level 27 but you enter a building and have some level 1 enemies and also level 48 enemies.

The problem with this is the core underlying philosophy of the game. This isn't something that can just be "fixed" because it simply was not thought out when the game was originally developed. This is because in an online multiplayer game, you will have many people of different levels running around. As a result, a live map with people of different levels cannot possibly match 2 people of different levels at once.

In previous games, as you leveled up your player's S.P.E.C.I.A.L., the enemies which you encountered would be similarly leveled up, so that you would always encounter a challenge (instead of being a far lower level), but the challenge would not be too great for your character to handle (as opposed to fighting a character that is randomly twice your level).

In Fallout 76, though, this is not the case. For example, if two live players enter a house, and one player is level 12 and the other is level 37, then the enemy inside cannot match either player. It is a logistical issue and a fundamental problem with the entire philosophy of the game as a fallout game. This is simply another reason why Fallout does not work well as a massive multiplayer online game.

It seems that not only was the development and testing of the game severely flawed, but so was the entire game from its inception to its entire underlying philosophy. Fallout 76 simply doesn’t even know what kind of game it is, and neither did the developers, producers, or game designers who actually made this Frankenstein's monster of a game.

I haven't played a lot of Fallout 76, but many others have and the reports are coming in that the game is really quite boring. It seems that Bethesda focused too much on building out the Multiplayer that they didn't even finish or get working properly, and didn't have time or didn't care to actually make amazing missions and storyline.

Moreover, with the total and complete lack of NPCs in the game, the entire missions all add up to just listening to a bunch of holotapes (which is just an audio file) and wandering around the wasteland looking for the next holotape to listen to. Total lack of interaction. Nothing exciting here.

As a result, Fallout 76 is basically just like a shell of a game, with a failed attempt to be an MMORPG while failing to be a Fallout game as well. It like you go on and wander around an empty landscape hoping you find a stupid enemy who, by the way, are really stupid as well as glitchy.

I could see how it could be fun to play having to eat and drink and be concerned about diseases. It would be fun if you could take a regular Fallout and switch it to like a "hardcore" mode which added these limitations, but had the option to turn it off when you got annoyed with it.

Unfortunately, in Fallout 76, this is not optional. It is simply a drain on the game and makes it more stressful rather than relaxing. Not only do you have to remember to feed yourself in real life and drink water and avoid illness like sleep deprivation while playing extended gaming sessions, but now you also have to do the same for your character.

Ok, I kid, I kid. But seriously, this whole being forced to make the player eat and drink to survive is really annoying.

Fast travel is stupid now. You actually have to pay caps (Fallout's currency, like coins) to fast travel. Why? Because Bethesda has microtransactions and they want to make sure you have to use up your caps to play the game so that you will have to use real money to do any microtransactions. Also, maybe they also hope you will pay real money just so you can have unlimited fast travel.

It's clearly a ridiculous thing to make you pay for fast travel, since the whole point of fast travel in Fallout games was to eliminate one of the inconveniences of playing a game in an innovatively huge open map. They just took one of the best solutions and turned it on its head, making it equally as annoying as simply having to grind out walking long distances doing nothing.

Every aspect of Fallout multiplayer totally sucks. First of all, only 32 players per maps is totally stupid. The maps of Fallout are quite big and with only 32 other people - and no NPCs to boot - you aren't going to encounter much at all. At least with no NPCs they could have made it a real MMORPG. 32 is not massive. 32 is smaller than a small Battlefield 3 map which could hold 64 players and you could literally cross the map in about 15 seconds. Severely limited players and lack of NPCs makes Fallout 76 feel just empty.

Additionally, player versus player was created completely wrong and is a terrible experience. If you want to fight another player, which is basically the most exciting thing to do - and it isn't exciting at all, then the other player needs to actively engage you if you want to enter battle. Otherwise, you can shoot them all you want and they will just stand there, stupid, and not get hurt at all. This is totally ridiculous.

What they should have done is made it like any other MMORPG in existence. This was not a broken thing in MMORPG that needed to be solved. In real life or in any rpg game ever, if you go up to someone and hit them then there will be some consequence. In Fallout 76, if you walk up and shoot someone in the face with a shotgun, nothing will happen to them if they don't feel like fighting and don’t fight back. That is just stupid and completely breaks immersion.

Meanwhile, if you do fight someone, then the person who dies loses all their loot and the other player gets it, all your loot just sits on the ground in a paper bag where you died. Sure, I get what Bethesda devs were trying to do, but they are wrong, dead wrong.

This is not the way it should work, especially for a Fallout game. What's worse is this is why no one wants to fight back, because they don't want to lose their loot. I don't blame them. They aren't being stupid. They just want to keep what they earned instead of risking it for no reason in battle with another person.

Reddit users agree that the loot system is terrible, with one post getting 1,000 upvotes in 8 hours for saying that "Fallout 76 has one of the worst loot reward systems of any game in recent memory", referencing legendary mobs and drops and a need to improve the loot for Scorchbeast Queen.

In fact, any Fallout game I ever played I just used the infinite loot mod and collected infinite loot. Sure it's kind of cheating but hey I bought this game to have fun and I can play however I want. And personally the only thing I hate is getting bogged down with loot but I loved collecting it, so I'd rather just have infinite. Actually I did this to save time because I found that I would just find places to store my loot and then go back and forth, so the infinite loot mod saved me a lot of time.

Not in Fallout 76. Not only can't you use any mods to carry more loot, and not only do you lose all your loot every time you die, but you also can't store your loot anywhere because there are only two places that you can even store your loot. Loot is totally broken.

In previous games you could store your loot anywhere. You could give to your companion, you could put in a toolbox, you could even put in the most random stupid places. Anything you could pick up loot from you could pretty much also store loot there also. It was a core Fallout feature, and it's totally broken in Fallout 76.

NPC stands for Non-Player Character. Who knows, maybe the Bethesda guys are liberals and afraid of the NPC meme that has been going viral in the last few months in politics and on Twitter, youtube, and other social media. Or maybe the CEO was being genuine when he said "the only players you will see are going to be real people", which is totally ridiculous in practice. Either way, this just doesn't work in a Fallout game.

What's worse about not having NPCs is that is misses the entire point of a Fallout game. Fallout was supposed to be a game which explored deep philosophical issues and give you dilemmas in which you have the freedom to choose to be good, or choose to be evil and reap the consequences. Much of this hinged fundamentally on NPCs, as your choices would largely be based on what you chose to reply to the NPC characters.

Will you say "yes I'll help you on this mission", or will you say "no way, sucker" and then kill the NPC and see what the consequences are? Will you get the town mad at you or will you help the town and earn their respect like the system was in Fallout New Vegas? Whatever the case, there is none of that in Fallout 76, which is one of the primary reason that I do not believe that Fallout 76 is even a real Fallout game at all.

Companions in any Bethesda game like Fallout or Skyrim are a core part of the experience. Companions are another NPC. Fallout games since the beginning have always had companions, and without any NPCs or companions, it just doesn't feel like Fallout anymore. Sure those companions are not real humans, but they aren't supposed to be.

At least you know what that annoying NPC is going to do one some level, and you can laugh at it being stupid, rather than being annoyed at the 7-year-old real human playing a character and just standing there doing nothing or acting like an idiot. Then again, the enemies in Fallout 76 are equally as stupid, so at least there's some consistency - but that is not speaking well of Fallout 76.

The other problem with lack of NPCs is the kind-of new feature to let you build camps. Hey, camps are kind of cool. I built some really awesome castles in Fallout New Vegas, even though it wasn't really part of the game.

It would be cool to have camps like in Rust, you could even set up stores to trade with other players. Sounds great in theory, except the reality that you are playing with a bunch of little kids. And with the lack of NPCs, you have no one to guard your base when you aren't there. So, camps are simply a stupid idea for Fallout 76.

Frankly, the decision to eliminate all NPCs from Fallout was one of the worst decisions Bethesda made, and it even undermines some of the new features they put in like camps.

Microtransactions are probably a major reason why they also ban mods. After all, if people could just make mods to get the stuff they want, then why pay for it? The only way to put microtransactions in a Fallout game is to make the game totally ban mods entirely.

Sure, it's just business to want to make more money off your customers, although unethical; but the real problem with no mods (for PC players) is that the lack of mods is antithetical to the entire Bethesda experience. This is because for PC players, mods are the single most distinguishing factor of Bethesda games - their powerful mod engine which is not only built into the core of the game but actively encouraged by Bethesda.

Not only are mods part of the core experience of Bethesda games like the Fallout series and Skyrim, but they also give the ability for independent developers to actually fix all the bugs and improve the graphics of Fallout games - and ironically these are two of the greatest gripes about Fallout 76. Since Fallout 76 has more bugs and glitches than perhaps any game release in gaming history, then without mods it gives the actual players absolutely no recourse for independent users to solve these two most glaring issues with this tragic semblance of a Fallout game.

In my book, a Bethesda game without mods, on the PC anyway, is not a game worth playing.

Ok, so actually there is mod support for Fallout 76. However, trying to use them is likely to get you banned. This is unfortunate since Fallout 76 is pretty much an online game only, since there are no NPCs, meaning to have any real game experience you need to play online with other humans. Moreover, using mods is also likely to cause even more glitches.

Unfortunately, this is not only a policy change but this change is built into the core of the entire game philosophy, so I guarantee it will not change. This is because, with the introduction of "only players and no NPCs" and a totally online gameplay experience, that modders will not ever even be able to release patches because it will inevitably cause glitches for other players who do not have the exact same setup of mods, which would be impossible to regulate.

This is just another reason why Fallout simply cannot work as a massive online multiplayer game. Conversely, it would be certainly plausible to develop a Fallout game with Co-Op where you could play with a few friends (maybe 2 to 4), all you would need is a mod sync-engine to make sure that any mods on one computer were copied to any friends' games who were playing with you. Of course, that would be a logistical nightmare unless there was a central source of approved-only mods to sync, and that creates problems in itself, unless you could allow mods to work independently; but it would be plausible - just not with Fallout 76.

It would have to be implemented into a completely new Fallout game since it would take rebuilding it from the entire core of the game, and it would not work in an MMORPG since everyone would have to agree to the mods used, and it's a lot harder to get 32+ people to agree on an exact setup than a small group of 2 to 4 friends.

Modders will still try though, because in truth, modding is one of the core features of the Fallout experience, at least, to many who have played previous Fallout games.

During the presentation of Fallout 76 before release, it was touted by the CEO, amusingly, to be "the most amazing graphics of any Fallout game, ever". It's already practically become a meme, and multiple youtube videos have been made making fun of the CEO saying this and then flipping back to the real game's stupidly bad graphics. Was he just blatantly lying or just totally ignorant of what was actually going on in his own company?

In reality, the graphics actually remind me of playing PlayStation 2 - that's right I said PS2 graphics. I'm talking the days of Tomb Raider 1, original Spyro the Dragon, and Twisted Metal 2 (which all were far, far better than Fallout 76). Unfortunately, even the modders won't be allowed to fix this since they won't be able to release graphics overhauls for multiplayer, so for the first time ever, a Fallout game will be stuck looking as horrible as release day, probably forever.

It would be awesome to have a Fallout game you could play with friends. However, the way it was implemented, the game is no longer a Fallout game at all. After you take into account the broken leveling system, broken fast travel, broken loot, absence of NPCs, broken missions and story, and crappy items like power armor, and for PC users, the inability to do any mods which is a pivotal part of most PC players' Bethesda experience, this is no longer actually a Fallout game at all.

Sure it kind of feels like Fallout when you look at the menus, but really this isn't even a Fallout game at all. This is basically a pathetic Fallout-themed broken attempt at Bethesda's version of Rust to try to create an online multiplayer mmorpg combined with EA's microtransactions to attempt to monetize their users further, with none of the benefits of either Fallout or an mmorpg. Frankly, this game sucks and I wouldn't even care to play it if it were free.