Merry Christmas?

This is most decidedly not a Christmas Eve post, but I've been meaning to say this for several days now although for one reason or another something else always needed to be said first and I didn't get around to it.  So it's not profound and it offers no great insight, but I wanted to say that I'm actually coming around to enjoying Fallout 76.

The game got terrible reviews upon release, and rightfully so - it was full of bugs and problems, and it has only the merest of trace of a storyline to it. I called it the worst game of the Fallout series, but full disclosure - I've only played New Vegas and Fallout 4.  But I'm sure Fallouts 1 through 3 were better than 76.

But lack of a story line isn't necessarily a vice - some of the most popular games (Fortnite, Minecraft) don't have story lines, and like those games and like No Man's Sky, Fallout 76 is a survival game, not a fantasy game.  The object is simply not to get killed in a post-nuclear West Virginia, a terrain full of vicious animals, mutated beasts, blood-thirsty ghouls, green super mutants, and worse.   And as an extra measure of realism, you have to eat, you have to find clean water, and you have to build a shelter. On top of that, food spoils with time, weapons wear out and break, and sometimes life or death hinges on whether or not you can find a handful of screws with which to put your armor back together (I spend an inordinate amount of time searching mason jars in old garages and machine shops looking for loose screws). 

The developer, Bethesda, has released a bunch of patches to fix some of the bugs in the game, but I'm not saying that there aren't still problems - the servers still crash and abruptly end the game during mid-play.  One day, my power-armor repair station didn't recognize that it was my power armor being repaired and wouldn't give it back to me, stating that "Someone else is using this station" when that "someone else" was me. Frustrating, and inexcusable.  I finally had to reboot and end the game to get my own stuff back.

But those very real criticisms aside, after playing for a couple weeks, I've actually gotten to enjoy the simplicity of the central quest (not dying).  I've gotten used to the way the massive multiplayer game operates, and I've enjoyed interacting with other players on line - the one aspect of the game I thought I would like the least. Despite what you  might have heard about adolescent gamers, the vast majority of players I've encountered were decidedly not assholes, and several players have shown me outstanding generosity and support, something I've tried to do for others in turn.

I started the game just before Thanksgiving and my goal, my hope, was that the game would keep me entertained through to the end of the year.  We had a rough week or so getting started and more than once during that first week I decided that I made a terrible mistake with my purchase, but as time went by, I've actually found myself looking forward to firing up the game.  

It grew on me, sort of like one of those mutated appendages you get in the game after too much exposure to radiation, and looking back, I'm glad I stuck with it and didn't just quit during the initial frustrations.    If you're curious about the game, don't let all those bad reviews hold you back from trying it.