In Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, and Fallout 4, disaster porn archaeology plays a much larger narrative role. Fallout 2 also takes place in the bombed-out ruins of the Great War, but there are precious few moments where you spend time hunting down the narratives of long-dead individuals. But it’s not a mechanic that you’ll find much in Fallout 2.
Dozens of games have used this mechanic in the last two decades. The first game I remember playing that made great use of the ‘found holotape’ concept was System Shock II, probably in part because in that game, the last messages and final moments of the crew were digitally recorded instead of showing up as text entries in a random terminal. This was to be expected, but it also means that the single-player story component of the game doesn’t anchor players the same way FO4 did. The complete lack of NPCs means that the single-player quest chains are shorter and have much less depth. Playing the game, I found myself wishing Bethesda had either thrown it out entirely and focused those resources on improving the RPG aspects of the game or converted it into an entire stand-alone game in its own right.įallout 76, according to pretty much everyone, strips out most of the narrative and story elements, adds multiplayer, and increases the depth of the base-building concept. Some people liked it more than I did - not a difficult challenge - but it didn’t mesh well with the larger plot arcs of the primary story. This component of the game had essentially nothing to do with your exploration of the Commonwealth or efforts to find your son. You could build scrap stations that generated scrap materials, but you couldn’t build a new mechanical loom to start producing cloth from the cotton you were farming or take over the ironworks to create new sources of metal. There was no way to repair existing structures and no way to actually produce anything. I lost interest in this base-building mode almost immediately, once I realized how limited and anemic it was. There was no real endgame to the concept and, outside of a handful of minor quests, no impact on the game plot. In the settlement half of the game, you collected oceans of junk for crafting, rounded up settlers and fended off baddies in a handful of automatically generated quests, with the end goal of building somewhat better defenses and weapons. One of the biggest problems with Fallout 4 was the disconnect between the first-person base-building components, which called on you to establish a network of settlements across the Commonwealth and the narrative elements, which took you on an exploration of the game world in an effort to find your infant son. Virtually all the coverage I’ve seen mentions this issue, one way or the other. I haven’t played Fallout 76 yet and I recognize that there’s a difference between experiencing something personally and reading about it, but these descriptions aren’t unique to any one reviewer, or even any pair. The most striking thing about the Fallout 76 reviews now popping up online, at least to my eye, is how often they describe feeling as if the game is caught between two very different experiences or stretched between disparate goals. Fallout 4 was, as I wrote nearly three years ago, “ A great game but a terrible RPG.” With Fallout 76 now out, it looks as though that game has managed to magnify some of the worst problems of FO4, without moving the ball forward at all in terms of solving them.
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