Is Bethesda's Game Good Now?

Bethesda Game Studios adds its name to the now long list of firms pointing an accusing finger at Sony for not supporting cross-platform play. That Bethesda would offer the Ranger Armor from that game as a perk for paying a monthly subscription to play Fallout 76 - a game that will likely go down as the worst in the franchise - is just too rich, and I'm sure that irony won't be lost on Fallout fans.

In December 2018, Bethesda banned a trio of players for cheating, though those players said they were only using mods and weren't using them to cheat. The game's post-apocalyptic rendition of West Virginia was overrun with supermutants, giant mole rats, and other players.

PvPers need their niche, but a game tends to shakily move along when devs try to appeal to both the players who love housing, PvE, fluff and crafting with those that love fallout 76 funny glitches their open-world PvP isn't going to do well until they focus on one or the other, or segregate the gameplay styles within their game.

Since this is a beta, the finished game is likely to vary, but at least in my experience last night, any time too many players got together, the game's performance took a big hit. In Fallout 4's case, we had to wait a little over two years from the main game's release before we could strap The Commonwealth to our skulls.

Naturally, I inferred that this meant it would work like the other Bethesda Fallouts: tracking some dork you've been told to care about around the entire game map, repeatedly finding out whenever you arrive anywhere that you just missed them, but hmm, hey, I heard him say he had a friend in Little Hydrojazzton.

Wastelanders, an update that reintroduces non-playable characters in the series, launched in April 2020. Fallout 76 is a gorgeous world that is now, thankfully, populated by people. Neither did telling the player community that game-changing features like endless storage — which is absolutely a game-affecting perk — would only be available to those who bought one.