HeyDaniko // November 25th, 2025
It certainly isn’t lost on me that this article should probably have been written and posted about 18 months ago, back in April of last year. That would have capitalised on the surge of post–Fallout Season 1 traffic that the internet was drowning in. That same explosion of interest that pushed almost the entire Fallout series to the top of Steam’s best sellers’ chart for several weeks, and the same wave that sent Fallout 76’s concurrent player count through the roof, breaking its own record day after day for about a week. That would have been clever, wouldn’t it? But here we are. Hindsight really is 20–20.
All that being said, we’re now only about a month away from Fallout Season 2 landing on Prime Video. Season 1 was genuinely fantastic. It wasn’t flawless, but it was still one of the best “video game adaptations” we’ve ever had. Although, much like League of Legends’ Arcane, “adaptation” feels like the wrong descriptive entirely. The Fallout show isn’t a retelling of any existing Fallout story. It’s a completely separate and fully canonical entry into the universe.
Season 1 takes place in 2296, around a decade after Fallout 4, which is set in 2287 and remains the latest point in the game chronology. Fallout 76 (which I promise this article is actually about, just trust the process) is set in 2102, only 25 years after the bombs. It is, by a huge margin, the earliest entry, sitting nearly 200 years before Fallout 4 and the TV show. This, of course, doesn’t include the Fallout 4 prologue that takes place in 2077 when the bombs started falling, or the flashback sequences in the show. But is all this relevant? Loosely, yes. I hope.
Starting at the beginning, let’s address the elephant in the room: the fact that Fallout 76 had a preposterously dreadful launch, and, in all honesty, the problems started with the reveal. When Todd Howard took to the stage at E3 2018 to announce the game, the reception was “mixed” if we’re being generous. People weren’t convinced this was the right project to be making instead of a proper sequel like Fallout 5, a game that we still don’t have in 2025. It also looked very obviously adapted from and built on top of Fallout 4 as a foundation, with a large chunk of assets carried over wholesale.
Allegedly, Fallout 76 was born out of internal discussions about a multiplayer update or DLC for Fallout 4. And this explanation actually makes a lot of sense. We can only speculate as to whether the original idea was to retrofit Fallout 4’s entire campaign and make it co-operative friendly, or more likely, to add a narratively distinct multiplayer zone to the existing game. Other single-player titles have done this quite well. Rockstar built Grand Theft Auto Online into GTA V, and both Red Dead Redemption games had online components too. Even Metal Gear Solid V had Metal Gear Online. This obviously isn’t an exhaustive list of single-player games that experimented with multiplayer story modes, just some examples of narrative-adjacent online modes that found success. And Fallout 76 could very easily have ended up in this category.
But that isn’t what happened for several likely reasons. Firstly, Fallout 4 launched in late 2015. By mid-2018, releasing a multiplayer DLC or free co-op mode might not have made much of a splash, especially when 76 itself wouldn’t release for several more months. Secondly, and far more likely, the project simply grew far too large, probably very early in development.
The Appalachian setting of Fallout 76 is the largest map in the series, which it arguably needed to be since a server can host up to 24 players, who would otherwise be falling over each other on a smaller map. It’s also the most biodiverse Fallout world to date, with entire regions left untouched by the bombs, creating a striking contrast between the near-pristine forests and those classic Fallout wastelands. Building a world this large and varied was probably only achievable because the game originally promised to have no NPCs at all, heavily lessening the workload in that department. This was a fucking wild idea for a Bethesda RPG, even if it began life leaning more heavily toward survival crafting than roleplaying.
The original plan was for every character you met in Appalachia to be another player. Narratively, you were all emerging from the vault only 25 years after the bombs and were among the first people to begin rebuilding. It’s a premise that I can almost appreciate. Todd even stated that players would be filling the roles normally occupied by these missing NPCs, such as traders. And whilst that wasn’t technically untrue, since you can run a player shop from your CAMP, it was clearly not what people inferred from his comments. It was never realistic that players would, or even could, fill all of the traditional NPC roles that you would expect to see in a Fallout game, even if the servers could host enough players to feel like a living, breathing world. Quest givers, for example, a staple not only of Fallout but of RPGs in general, were damningly absent. As a result, the early story and quests were delivered through holotapes as you followed your wayward overseer’s trail. This presentation was hardly exciting and was met with just about all of the contempt that you’d expect.
This brings us neatly to one of Fallout 76’s biggest early issues – the fact that it didn’t seem to really know what kind of game it wanted to be. Innovation and genre hybridisation are great, but neither really apply here. It simply wasn’t RPG enough for long-time Fallout fans, and it was too much of a survival crafter for that same audience. Mandatory hunger and thirst management was unwelcome, especially since those mechanics had previously only existed in optional modes like New Vegas’ Hardcore mode or Fallout 4’s Survival mode – neither of which had been the default or preferred player experience for the vast majority of their audience. At the same time, 76 simply wasn’t enough of an alternative to the crafting genre incumbents, such as Minecraft, Ark, or Rust, with building being heavily limited, both structurally and geographically. It certainly wouldn’t be unfair to say that Fallout 76 just wasn’t the game that either of its target audiences actually wanted, and so it didn’t appeal strongly to anyone.
A quick but relevant side note: Bethesda originally only launched the PC version exclusively on the now defunct Bethesda Launcher, their short-lived in-house competitor to Steam. And, as expected, this massively gutted the game’s visibility. The launcher was so obscure, in fact, that when Bethesda announced its closure in May 2022, the news was met with vast numbers of people expressing that they had never even known about its existence. But perhaps that was a blessing in disguise. Who knows how much worse the game’s reception would have been if more people had actually played it at launch.
Given all of this, Fallout 76’s empty early world might have been better received as a free update for Fallout 4. But the sentiment would have been similar, and the mode would probably have been abandoned quickly. This is why I’m genuinely grateful that Bethesda released 76 as a standalone title, despite the state in which it launched. A failing DLC or update is easy to ignore, as Bethesda has proven a couple of times already. But a failing full game is not. The price tag and visibility forced Bethesda to dedicate years of fixes and updates to 76, which eventually transformed it into, dare I say, one of my favourite games.
Thankfully, I didn’t play Fallout 76 at launch, partly because of the overwhelmingly negative reception but also because I disliked spreading my library across multiple PC launchers – something that bothers me a little less these days. I only finally tried it in early 2023 after seeing a few Elder Scrolls Online creators dabble in it. And I really liked what I saw. Most of the updates that people had been praising genuinely seemed to be delivering. This obviously excludes Nuclear Winter, the doomed battle royale mode that was eventually removed. But with the Wastelanders update, roughly 18 months after launch, NPCs, human enemies, and character-given quests were finally added. It’s not uncommon to see Wastelanders described as Fallout 76’s soft relaunch, similar in spirit to what A Realm Reborn did for Final Fantasy XIV.
Seven months later, the Steel Dawn update brought about one of the most important changes to the survival mechanics. Hunger and thirst could no longer kill you. Instead, maintaining them granted buffs. This moved the game firmly toward the RPG that Fallout fans actually wanted it to be. These updates also introduced large quest lines and faction stories, the kind Bethesda excels at. Wastelanders gave us the Settlers versus Raiders arc, which many now consider to be the game’s main quest. And Steel Dawn began the two-part Brotherhood of Steel storyline, which concluded later with Steel Reign in July 2021.
Since then, Fallout 76’s content cadence has been largely hit after hit. New updates have added large narrative arcs, new features, new modes, fresh gear, rebalances, cooperative events, map expansions, and even a raid. Whilst Fallout 76 is not an MMO, largely due to the 24-player server limit, the DNA is absolutely there, and it’s clear to see the inspiration that Bethesda is drawing from and the direction they seem to be taking. At the time of writing, the game is on its twenty-fourth major content update, with the twenty-fifth arriving this December to coincide with Season 2 of the TV show. Update 25: Burning Springs promises the largest map expansion yet, taking us into Ohio. It will also include new bounty hunting missions featuring Cooper Howard, the Ghoul, portrayed by Walton Goggins, and previously only seen in the TV show. And since Fallout 76 takes place nearly two centuries earlier, I’m very curious to see how the character differs.
Of course, just because Fallout 76 has come a long way since its rough beginnings, that doesn’t mean it is free of issues. It can still be an extremely buggy mess. The problems range from classic Bethesda ragdoll physics, to falling through the map, random disconnections, lag spikes, quest breaking bugs, and always-enabled PvP that a large portion of the players have spent the last 7 years begging to be removed. Performance issues are mostly attributed to the aging Creation Engine, originally developed for Skyrim in the late 2000s. To make matters harder, the team behind the game, BattleCry Studios (renamed Bethesda Game Studios Austin in 2018), were tasked with modifying the Creation Engine to support multiplayer. They were essentially given tools built for a different purpose and told to make them work. And if the reports are true, they received far less help from the main Bethesda team than they probably needed.
One of the loudest complaints that you will often hear from players is, unsurprisingly, the monetisation. Whilst the game may be buy-to-play, and the subscription is technically optional, Fallout 76 is quite clearly engineered in such a way that playing without Fallout 1st is inconvenient at best, and intentionally unpleasant at worst. But this is how live service subscriptions usually work. Seldom do they offer genuinely premium benefits to entice in their buyers, instead preferring to monetise what should be the standard gameplay experience available to all.
Without Fallout 1st, which costs £11.99 per month or £99.99 per year, storage becomes an absolute nightmare. The subscription gives you access to the bottomless scrapbox, the only realistic way to store all of the crafting materials required for building your CAMPs, weapons, and armours. Without it, you are forced to use your regular stash, which has a limit of 1200 lbs. And this might sound like a lot, but considering the weight of your crafting materials, and just how much of them you will need in a game partly marketed as a crafting sandbox, you can easily fill your stash with what is, ostensibly, very, very little. This also has the added bane of then taking up what little space you have to store the surplus weapons and armour that you may need to keep for different builds or characters. This effectively means that if you don’t play with an active subscription you are going to be permanently encumbered and wasting enormous portions of your gaming time trying to play inventory management. At least in other crafting-centric games you can build additional storage boxes to place around your bases at will – but that can’t really be monetised now, can it?
Fallout 1st is also the only way in which you can effectively play the game in single player, as the subscription grants you access to a private server capable of hosting up to 8 players. Now, I wouldn’t really recommend playing Fallout 76 alone since the game isn’t really designed or balanced for it. But if you only care about the story and questlines, which I do think are genuinely quite good, then there’s really no harm in doing so. The game functions similarly to other live services and MMOs in that there are group and seasonal events that spawn around the map, typically not designed to be completed by singular characters. But I would argue that a solo, story-only, and preferably offline, mode should exist natively, disabling these cooperative group events for those players who don’t really care about them. Private servers for small friend groups could still be included in the subscription, as solo players wouldn’t feel exploited, and those who only want to play with their tight knit groups would be free to decide if being on a public server is really such a bad thing, That said, Bethesda clearly wants you to feel a certain way. And if even a small portion of people subscribe to Fallout 1st purely to play alone, then their greedy monetisation is unfortunately working.
Now, I know that the most fervent of defenders like to argue that, because we get all of the updates and expansions for free, this somehow justifies the overpriced subscription model. But many other players, myself included, would much rather buy the content packs at modest and fair DLC pricing, than be expected to pay for a hostile, rolling subscription that is designed solely to eliminate the carefully tailored tedium.
And lastly, we have the premium currency: Atoms. These are the true bane of all live service games, operating exactly the way you’d expect to see them everywhere else. The largest available pack of Atoms, frustratingly labelled “4000 (+1000)” instead of simply “5000”, is currently priced at £31.99 or $40. This works out at 125 Atoms per dollar, compared to the smallest pack of 500 Atoms sold for £3.99 or $5, where your dollar is only worth 100 Atoms. As always, this incentivises larger purchases through the perceived savings of buying in bulk.
Just to be clear though, one of the reasons that bulk buying (or wholesaling) works the way that it does in the real world is because it reduces the handling costs of the goods being sold. It also enables sellers to shift large quantities of product, prevents the build-up of surplus stock, and frees up inventory space for other goods, among a whole host of other economic advantages that allow the price per unit to drop.
Naturally, none of this applies to a digital product, which takes up no physical space and inconveniences no one if left unsold. To this end, you’re not actually getting more premium currency for your money when you buy the larger packs, but rather, you’re actively getting less value when you buy the smaller ones – a vindictive little corporate punishment delivered by the retailer because you didn’t give them as much money as they wanted you to.
I think it’s quite safe to say that my feelings on Fallout 76 are somewhat mixed. On the one hand, I do think it’s a genuinely enjoyable experience with friends, and it actually delivers some strong questlines and worthy narrative branches that I hope the franchise continues to acknowledge as canon in future releases. But in many ways, I’m almost grateful that public sentiment keeps leaning negative, because I really don’t want the future of Fallout as a whole to be live service–driven. Fallout is, first and foremost, a single-player role-playing franchise, though I would certainly welcome the addition of cooperative play in future titles, as long as it’s handled in the same way as Larian games, such as Baldur’s Gate 3 and Divinity: Original Sin 2. I would absolutely hate to see the predatory monetisation models of online-first live-service games begin to win out.
Not including the remaster of Oblivion earlier this year, the most recent releases in both of Bethesda’s most beloved franchises have been online games – Elder Scrolls Online in 2014 and Fallout 76 in 2018. It’s not unreasonable to worry that the reason we haven’t yet seen The Elder Scrolls VI, Fallout 5, or even a Fallout: New Vegas 2 is because Bethesda simply doesn’t feel the need to release them. We know that live service games can print disgusting amounts of money and rarely need to concern themselves with being a decent product in order to do so. And whilst I’ve played a great deal of both FO76 and ESO, I would be completely against either of them replacing what their franchises are supposed to be – and what the majority of their fans actually want to see.
I could easily allow this article to flow into a tangent of just how much I despise capitalism and consumerism, but its already taken me about a month to box this article off, so let’s just call it there. If you were on the fence about giving Fallout 76 a go, I hope this piece has served to push you in either direction. And if you do decide to play, then I hope you feel a little more equipped and understand just what to expect.
Thank you very much for your time. And I appreciate all comments, feedback, and corrections.
Daniko
Thunder's Remnant 