Good Morning!

We've been playing Fallout 76 for two weeks now and can confirm that the game is every bit as bad as all the reviews have been saying.  And by "bad" we don't mean "good" bad, or "bad-ass" bad, we mean buggy and boring and unrelentingly banal bad.

But having said that, we can also confidently report that we'll probably be playing  at least another two weeks, probably through the end of the year.  After two weeks, we're only up to Level 24, and we've met other players on line up to Level 70 and even Level 181, and the later told us he's seen players up above Level 200.  We don't know how long or how many hours they had to have been playing to get over Level 100 and that's not necessarily our goal, but it does show that at least someone somewhere has stuck with this frustrating mess of a game long enough to rack up some serious points.

Frustrating mess - the game keeps crashing on us, not because our computer can't keep up with it but because Bethesda's servers can't keep up with the on-line game.  Frustrating mess - the developers obviously haven't thought through the dynamics of day-to-day playing or what the actual experience would feel like, as they placed such ridiculously low limits on the amount of stuff you can store and carry that you constantly have to scrounge around to find food, water, ammo, and the all-important duct tape.  You can't store it - at least much of it - and food goes bad and weapons fall into disrepair with time.  Bethesda finally released a patch yesterday that increases your storage capacity by 50%, but it's still at least 50% too low and why even have a cap at all - in Fallout 4 there was no limit on storage capacity.

Many nights we find it difficult to motivate ourselves to even start playing, but once we're in, we get so caught up in the endless cycle of mundane tasks needed to survive (collect some water, find wood for the campfire to boil the water, boil the water, drink it, then start looking for more water and wood, etc., ad nauseum) that we can't stop playing.  We've all but given up on the so-called quests, most of which are just "go to some random location and then kill or collect something," and at this point we're just randomly wandering around now, killing and collecting things without participating in quests just to do the same thing.

Will the game get better at higher levels?  Will Bethesda release more patches and improve the game experience?  It's hard to say, but meanwhile we're playing the game like we live in real life - trapped in a virtual reality from which we can't escape, going through the motions of survival merely because we can't face the notion of what things are like outside of that reality.

Update:  Despite our obvious ambivalence, we just logged on to play Fallout 76 and got an error message that the servers are down for maintenance.  How long will this go on?  Minutes? Hours? Days?  Weeks?  They didn't say, just "You can't play now."  Nice.