Mister Bethesda, I don’t feel so good … Find out more about the many woes of Fallout 76, after the jump.
A new release from Bethesda is usually cause for much celebration, but so far, Fallout 76 doesn’t appear to be the blockbuster sequel many were waiting for. Poor sales, rough reviews, a buggy bonanza and glitches galore have marred the launch of the latest entry in the Fallout series.
While numbers aren’t available worldwide quite yet, sales so far in the UK have been horrible. Gamesindustry.biz reported that Fallout 76 debuted at a mere third place in the week’s sales, down a whopping 82.4 percent from Fallout 4’s release. Reviews so far have also been quite harsh. On Metacritic, Fallout 76 faces a critics score of just 65 on the Xbox One and an abysmal 46 on the PS4. User scores are far worse, with just a 2.4 on Xbox and 2.7 on Playstation. Fallout 76 also suffered failure to launch on streaming platforms, with viewership on Twitch at not even half of what Fallout 4’s launch saw, according to GitHyp.com.
One possible culprit for the poor launch? Rampant glitches. While Bethesda games are often lampooned for their less-than-stable release state, Fallout 76 seems to be setting a new bar for bugs. While nukes in the game are meant to destroy portions of West Virginia, a video posted by Nickaroo93 showed that launching a few at a time can destroy the server itself, crashing it (with no survivors). One of the largest criticisms of the game has been how much appears to be copy-pasted from previous Bethesda games, and this is no more apparent than in the fact that a never-patched bug from Fallout 4 involving the lever-action rifle is also present in Fallout 76. Perhaps the best evidence of the game’s poor state and even poorer reactions from fans could be TerakJK’s video “This is Fallout 76 – AAA $60 Experience” that showcases twenty minutes of endless bugs and bad reception from streamers.
To their credit, Bethesda just released a new patch to tackle some of these bugs, but while the patch is massive in download size, it seems much smaller in actual fixes. According to Eurogamer, gamers are facing a gigantic 47GB download for the latest patch. This comes just days after a similarly sized day one patch, which was also after an initial installation size nearly the same size. It appears that the patches are downloading nearly the entire game all over rather than a more targeted patching approach usually utilized in games. Being forced to download nearly 150GB of data to essentially install the game three times in just a week has left fans with slow or metered internet angry.
With the bug-ridden release of Fallout 76, coupled with news that Bethesda won’t be moving away from the aging infrastructure their games are built upon anytime soon, the future of Fallout is starting to look a lot like the wasteland the series portrays. It almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter.