Sixteen Times the Irony: The Curse of ‘Fallout 76’

I’m not a superstitious person, but I am sure of one thing: Fallout 76 is cursed. Every time the game enters the news cycle, I uncannily feel like I’m reading news from a satirical fiction. Every conceivable thing that could be associated with the game has backfired, gone wrong, exploited its players, and gravely reminded the videogaming community of what to avoid as consumers. 

A mentor of mine once told me that when people piss you off, they are either ignorant or malicious. The lesson I learned is to assume the best in people but be vigilant to the worst. With Fallout 76 serving as a case study, I can’t decide whether to mentally categorize the current leadership behind Bethesda Game Studios as ignorant, malicious, or both. 

I’ve explored in a previous editorial how the catastrophic launch of Fallout 76 broke the hearts of Bethesda fans everywhere. The classic era of wonderfully immersive and memorable RPGs slowly drifted away after Skyrim’s remarkable success. Fallout 76 looked like something new and exciting, a fresh take on the overly iterated series. I remember gushing with awe as I naively drank in Todd Howard’s now infamously memed line, “Sixteen times the detail.” I had spent hundreds of hours in Bethesda RPGs, so the prospect of expanding that kind of game into a shared experience with my friends excited me.

Then, November 14th hit. With the exception of Anthem, I have never seen a game get dragged from the back of the media chariot for an entire year. Fallout 76 released as a broken and buggy mess. The graphical fidelity was laughable. The servers were unstable. Quests were unplayable. And who could forget the only thing that was seemingly working as intended: aggressively priced microtransactions. Nearly every aspect of the experience was embarrassing to me as a fan of Bethesda. 

All of a sudden, within the week of release, I didn’t want to touch this game even if they paid me.

Then came the onslaught of self-immolating decisions made by the team regarding merchandising. As if the game itself weren’t a glorified beta test sold at full price, the people that preordered the game’s Power Armor Edition received a cheap nylon imitation of the advertised “canvas” duffle bag. (Later the “wearable T-518 Power Armor helmet” would be recalled for risk of mold infection.) The overpriced Nuka Cola rum that was sold alongside the game’s release was shipped in phony plastic cases instead of the seemingly matte bottle finish of the advertised product. The consumer backlash has become a self-perpetuating hamster wheel of anger and ridicule, but also disappointment. Either Bethesda was ignorant, malicious, or both.

The game itself not only broke promises to longtime Bethesda fans, who eagerly pre-ordered their game only to find themselves burned by their purchase, but broke promises to consumers at every level. The most recent broken promise is the addition of the absurdly priced subscription model now tacked onto Fallout 76: the “Fallout 1st” membership. This membership predictably exploded on social media, erupting another magmatic layer of recalcitrance to the indignity of being asked to open your wallet for nearly twice of what you already paid for. Of course, developers need to monetarily justify their releases, but here’s where the irony sets in.

Fallout 76’s release was met with so much backlash that even Todd Howard told self-flagellating jokes about the game on the E3 stage this summer. In response to that backlash, they made some announcements that include free updates like a new battle royale mode – a decision that feels a bit dated and tone deaf – and human NPCs. These updates would be free for all owners of the game and would supplement the updates and bug fixes that the game sorely needed.

Enter Fallout 1st. The paid subscription service tacks on features that were ostensibly requested by core members of the Fallout 76 community, which are basic features that should have been present since the game’s launch. Clearly the developers have been working hard on this new subscription service update, which flies in the face of everyone who was expecting the Wastelanders update that has been promised by Bethesda. Wastelanders was recently delayed until 2020, which makes many people suspicious of where Bethesda’s priorities lie. If the allocation of resources during development was split between the free promised update and the paid subscription service, and this is what players of the game were getting, then clearly the leadership at Bethesda are clearly concerned not with making good games, but with inventing problems that could only be solved if you trusted them with more money. 

At this point, with a belt striped with blatant failures and cynical pecuniary features, it is no longer a question of whether Bethesda is ignorant, malicious, or both. They are malicious. 

As we lament the loss of one of what I previously considered to be the most consistent and reliable developers, a new hope emerges in The Outer Worlds. By all accounts, this game is going to hit a home run for the people like me who look fondly back on games like Fallout 3, Bioshock, Mass Effect, and Skyrim. So as we lament the loss of what used to be a bold and memorable game company, it’s not as though we’re confined to replaying those games for the rest of our lives. With the enormous talent and goodwill surrounding Obsidian Entertainment, The Outer Worlds looks to be the noble answer to the squandering projects over at Bethesda. 

I ended my original editorial on Fallout 76 by saying this – and I don’t think I’ve ever been more wrong:

“It’s hard to imagine a future in which Bethesda doesn’t recover from the innumerable failures in Fallout 76. The game will be slowly patched up into something vaguely playable, leading players to find some diamonds in the dunghill. But will sheer time – especially in terms of the scarcity of Bethesda releases – be enough for fans to overlook what otherwise is just a broken, repackaged wasteland? And will gamers lose faith in the company after the dust settles? That remains to be seen. I don’t want to see Bethesda fail again. I hope they learn from their mistakes.”

Bethesda has not only failed to recover from Fallout 76, they have magnetically stumbled into every landmine imaginable. The game indeed has been slowly patched up, but as of this writing that patching is at a snail’s pace. Not only have fans failed to overlook the broken, repackaged wasteland, but they have amplified the failure of Fallout 76 into a meme – the kind of meme you don’t want to be associated with. And unlike my writing from a year ago, I now want to see Bethesda fail. Malicious people who don’t learn from their mistakes but instead double down on them, exploiting the goodwill of their fanbase, deserve to learn their lesson the hard way.

Fallout 76 is cursed. And the leadership at Bethesda deserve it. 

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