My reunion with FALLOUT 76

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Just over 14 years ago, while playing Morrowind for the first time, you couldn't help thinking how great it would be to have the chance to explore Vvanderfell alongside other adventure partners. Years later, when Bethesda took over the rights to Fallout, this fantasy grew, fueled by the adaptation of the characteristic style of Canadians to a new background as conducive to cooperation or confrontation between players as survival in an environment is. hostile.

Finally, in 2014 and with the help of Zenimax Online Studios, The Elder Scrolls Online was released. It wasn't a hassle-free release, but over the months and patches, a decent enough result was achieved to secure a good player base to ensure the constant appearance of new content and expansions. With this successful precedent it was very clear that Fallout's leap into the multiplayer gaming arena could not be delayed too long.

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This is how Fallout 76 comes to us, a title that acts as a chronological beginning of the saga. We started the game inside refuge 76, a place whose inhabitants have reserved the dubious privilege of being the first to go outside to begin rebuilding the world after the nuclear holocaust. This starting point is not anecdotal, since from the beginning it places us in front of one of the most controversial points of Fallout 76: the total absence of NPCs.

It is a decision with argumentative justification and that also creates an interesting background, since we will find ourselves in a world in which time seems to have frozen after the bombs fell. This time much of the narrative weight rests on the small stories left on documents, tapes or computers by the unfortunate people who remained outside the shelters, instead of being, as in other installments of the saga, a satirical chronicle of a world in way of a reconstruction in which Humanity is condemned to repeat over and over again the errors that led it to disaster.

In this way we will face alone or in the company of other players a good number of missions, which will be started through terminals or robots. The aforementioned absence of NPCs, along with the very low number of players per game - we will barely have 23 other people sharing the map with us in each game session -, causes a paradoxical effect: the first multiplayer Fallout has the deadliest, most lonely and boring world of the entire saga, which does not help much a mission design based on saturating the player with a huge number of errands. We will be able to spend hours and hours walking from terminal to terminal to fulfill tasks as little stimulating as collecting objects or eliminating a specific enemy located on the other end of the map, without meeting on the way, unless we play with friends, with no other human being. Attempts have been made to alleviate this by spawning events that try to focus players at a certain point to force them to cooperate, but these events are very rare and as unbuilding as the main missions.

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Another controversial point of this release has been the huge number of bugs with which the game has reached the stores. Luckily, the support has been constant and a good number of patches have been published, solving problems and adjusting numerous aspects of the game that had serious balancing problems, such as the limited number of objects that we could carry in our inventory, but there is still a lot left work ahead and Fallout 76 is, today, a title that could hardly be classified as a beta or an Early Access.

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Bethesda needs to make progress in correcting errors in order to start incorporating the promised new content as soon as possible, so that the proposed experience is more interesting. Fallout 76 remains a diamond in the rough, and previous releases in the multiplayer arena - such as Final Fantasy XIV or The Elder Scrolls Online itself - demonstrate that it's perfectly possible to recover from an initial fiasco. The next few months will be crucial in determining whether Fallout 76 becomes another success story or whether, on the contrary, it ends up being one of the generation's biggest disappointments.



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