Editing Fallout (section)

===Fallout 76===
No, you didn't miss Fallout 5 to 75. Its the newest addition to the franchise, announced during E3 2018.  It'll probably have as <strike>many expansions</strike> much DLC though...

'''Fallout 76''' takes a different approach to the game and goes for a multiplayer-focused experience built on player-player driven interaction, instead of player-NPCs (literally announcing it as being populated with real people). It also continues settlements building, except this time populated only by you and whoever stumbles across your little campsite, like in Fallout 4.

Bethesda promised the best of visuals with all-new programming, no issues with the shift to a server-based game, advanced storytelling techniques, and a rewarding social experience. What was delivered either came with problems or wasn’t delivered at all. 
The mere move of shifting from a single-player narrative to a pure multiplayer game already had the fanbase [[skub|engaging in "friendly debates" with each other]], but given the goodwill Bethesda had earned over its history (whatever the skub in the above entries may indicate, it's primarily nitpicks or a fairly small minority of grognards and contrarians who had major gripes in the past) many were willing to give it a chance, which of course worsened the backlash when the naysayers were proven right. For the record, [[EA|unlike SOME companies]], Bethesda openly stated that the game only exists to keep fan interest in Fallout going until Fallout 5, and that they're okay with fans of traditional Fallout games not getting into it the same way they don't mind fans of TES games not getting into The Elder Scrolls: Online until whatever comes after Skyrim gets made.

On November 14, 2018 the game was released and was universally reviled by all but the staunchest of fans (as well as those suffering from the sunk cost fallacy, a principle that leads people who have invested financially or emotionally into something to defend it tribally to prevent confronting a sense of having lost). To summarize, the problems were:

* A MASSIVE amount of the game is just reused assets from Fallout 4. While much of the forest environment is lush and gorgeous and people from the region in real life have praised the faithfulness to the inspiration, the actual towns and caves are mostly just recycled copy/paste work. Guess where almost every quest takes you though? Hint: it isn’t hiking the great outdoors except as a way to get from point A to point B. 
* Social interaction is awful. Besides the usual “people are assholes”, the game had no push-to-talk function on launch, so using a mic means all music and dialogue is lost to mouth breathing, dog barking, mic static-ing, and one character having multiple people voices in the background. So for PvE co-op say so long to immersion!
* Did we mention asset re-use? Because for a “new” game most of the “new” stuff either is made up of textures or animation that’s already been seen. The worst offenders are of course the two that the main plot revolve around; Scorched are just new textures on standard human models using Raider or Ghoul animations, Scorchbeasts are just Skyrim dragons turned into bats. 
* Did we mention co-op sucked? Experience and loot are split, and everything was easy. It literally made everything take longer, and sped up nothing, to play with another person. So a game made to play multiplayer where you are passively discouraged from working together. 
* PvP consists of one person attacking another as basically a gloveslap invitation to a duel, and the other player can accept by hitting them back, at which point you can now damage each other. What do you lose by doing this? Time, ammo, weapon durability, the minor inconvenience of having to respawn. What do you win? A very small amount of caps based on the other player’s current win streak. It takes a fair amount of kills to surpass 200 caps bounty, which might replace your crappy pea-shooter that broke during your duels. If you don’t accept, prepare to be harassed until you log off. So everything to do with interacting with other players sucks, and you should avoid it...in a game where everything else is subordinate to, and exists solely to facilitate, interacting with other players. 
* Base building could be fun. But when you log off your base goes with you, and if you log back when someone else has set up in your location (because you can’t build anywhere as was advertised, only specific spots) then you get reset. You can save a blueprint of your setup and apply it elsewhere, but unless the topography is the same (read: flat) in a game set in the Appalachian Mountains then it won’t work. Your base cannot be very big, basically a small tower or shack, and other players can come in and wreck it (small size means there’s very few options for defense) so you’ll probably just build crafting benches, a bed, then troll folks who still thought it was a functional part of the game. In a game thematically about rebuilding, settling down is punished. To say nothing of being suddenly nuked. 
* Usual Bethesda bugs. Corpse physics being comedic, stuff stuck in stuff, quest-necessary things never spawning or falling into the ground forever, sunlight shining through hills and buildings, things popping in and out of resolution or visibility at all as the game only adds detail to things closer to you as it struggles to maintain performance, AI never really doing anything so fearsome beasts stand still like statues being frisked while you fill them full of lead (insert joke about police here), and so on. But now you can’t find a patch fix or restart the game, now the server has to reset. Which happens often, and constant random disconnects which delete quest progression far more so. A YouTuber did go through the trouble of compiling just the ones he found in a video - said video is 3 hours long. 
* All NPCs (aside from a Super Mutant who is literally only a merchant with no dialogue tree) are robots who are mostly unaware the human race is gone. They want you to do mundane quests, from simple fetchquests to hunting for drop items to...picking up trash. Some robots grant you advancement in factions (factions with no NPCs, because everyone is dead) despite the some of the factions shouldn’t even exist, at least in the state they are, yet. While sometimes charming and not new for a Fallout game, this is almost all of the quest content of the game. According to some developers, they wanted Human NPCs at release (including survivors of the dead factions), but the suits in charge forbade them as they wanted the players to be [[Grimdark|the only remaining humans living in Appalachia]]. As this specific part became [[Derp|THE most hated aspect of an already flawed game]], it forced the suits to back down and allow human NPCs, which were added in later updates and expansions.
* Having a very small storage inventory, getting stuck in power armor, poor loot tables for bosses, being unable to respecialize meaning your leveling choices are permanent, and HUGE first week patches that not only didn’t fix problems but actually made some worse. 
Bethesda released a statement outlining planned fixes for some of the above, but that came on the tail of mass attempts to return the game being rejected and the inability to return the $200 special edition once opened...which is when you’d find out they skimped out on the promised canvas bags (so looking like something found in-universe), giving cheap nylon ones instead. 

Generally speaking all of the issues were easy to predict, given all Bethesda games for The Elder Scrolls since Morrowind and Fallout run on the same game engine, NetImmerse/Gamebryo/Creation, which is '''ancient''' by gaming standards (It was created in '''1997''', making it as old as Fallout itself). This isn’t a problem since most engines can be easily made to work with some dedication and knowhow, but Bethesda never really does it; they bring them to working states for consoles, and let modders fix it themselves for PC (usually starting with the “Unofficial (game) Mod” released within weeks of launch, sometimes mere days) while the remaining problems can all be fixes with a reload from a save when something goes haywire. For an idea of the problems with 76, know that launching nukes at the map is a feature of the game yet when one group set off three nukes at the same time it [[What|crashed their entire server]]). 

However, as of 2021 a number of improvements, content updates and design backtracking such as adding actual NPCs has improved the gaming experience. While there are still occasional bugs and crashes, the game can overall be considered somewhere between meh and fine, depending on what kind of players you encounter.

So, enough with the /v/ talk, onto the fluff then. 

There's a main questline, albeit one that plays basically the same as EVERY OTHER QUEST IN THE GAME, meaning either follow the instructions of a robot or listen to the messages from someone dead, the same kind of stuff that was always a minor quest in other Fallouts. Because of that as well as the fact that all of it is basically just the tutorial for everything else, and thanks to the lack of NPC interaction or complexity (read: any choices or conversation from the player at all) which generally is heaviest in the main plotline, its largely dismissed by the fanbase as not really being a main quest or story. All the lore in Fallout 76 comes from what before was just a type of minor quest, like delves into dungeons and one-man assaults on towns full of hostiles where you can gather the story from looking around at the skeletons, reading notes, and listening to audio records on holotapes. The bulk of these just serve either to explain monsters you fight or give minor stories to the destroyed towns, with the main quest being dealing with a new type of enemy, the "Scorched". 
Of note is thanks to few bombs dropping literally on the region and the immediate time the game takes place (so very few raiders have gotten there before the players) you get more post-apocalyptic logs of people in the immediate aftermath. Since most of Appalachia had been automated with robots (despite far more populated areas and places that literally produced robots not reaching that extent) they can deliver quests as prerecorded messages, dropoff points, or merchants, without using NPC humans or mutants (so yeah, no chance at a talking Deathclaw again). At least players being able to nuke each other explains why the quite livable Wasteland went to shit; the residents of Vault 76, the resettlement Vault, seemingly decided to nuke America many more times so it'd take another 100 years to be safe again. Fallout 76 also added a large number of new mutants and monsters (despite Super Mutants being a large focus again) which can be used later in better entries. Despite its flaws, the game is at least being praised for its construction of a fantastic world (despite reusing F4 assets) and its sometimes amazingly creative monsters which are inspired by real life folklore and urban legends. Its possible that a lot of the Wasteland folks are descended from the Vault 76-ers, and given how insane the playerbase and intended interactions are (like nuking yourselves "just because" or giving fingerguns constantly because its a simple interaction with other players) they might explain some of the bandit groups and silly side factions in chronologically later games. 

The main story goes like this: Vault 76 itself was created to celebrate the Tricentennial (for the non-Americans or just people too young to remember 1976, _____tennials are 100 year celebrations since the establishment of America in 1776 and are about as patriotic as Americans get outside of the months following 9/11). Vault 76 was one of three canon Vaults actually intended for resettlement of a post-apocalyptic world, with no sabotage experiment opening only 25 years after the bombs fell so the pre-war is still in living memory (another was Vault 3 which fans of NV knows did not go well...). Given how lush and relatively safe (or at least as safe as the rest of the world is around 200 years later) most Vaults were just redundant after the actual bombs falling, adding some extra darkness to the previous games. The Vault 76 Overseer had secret orders from Vault Tec, and the player character(s?) were selected to be among her elite group. She directs, via holotape of course, players to find a group called the Responders, made up of conspiracy theorists (more on them below) banding together with anyone with authority such as police, fire departments, and medical officials to try and save anyone left alive. The Responders were wiped out (get used to that, EVERYONE including the fucking Raiders are already dead) but left behind their stockpiles of food and water, as well as training materials (that'll be another thing you'll get a LOT of) for the resettlement of the region. The Overseer also wants her special 76 squad to take control of all remaining nuclear weapons, which was what the Vault Tec orders were. 

The problem is there's a new type of enemy to the series which are taking center stage as being possibly the apocalypse after the apocalypse. A type of fungus exists deep underground, and due to the Brotherhood Of Steel (more on them later) finding an underground lab its possible it was created by one of the mad science prewar groups. Scorchbeasts are what happens when bats that lived deep underground in a gigantic cave system beneath Appalachia were exposed to the fungus, causing them to grow to giant sizes. When food supplies in the cavern complex grows low or their numbers grow too high, they tunnel to the surface to eat humans and whatever else they find. The humans they don't burn to a crisp and/or eat are infected by the fungus, resulting in a new type of zombie-like enemy (providing a secondary type of Ghoul in the game) who look like they burned to death. Said new enemies are called Scorched, and represent the bulk of the enemies in the game. Scorched are still fully capable of remembering who they were as humans, often falling back into activities or behavior patterns they did in life, but the fungus links them to a hivemind and they behave like Feral Ghouls who can still use guns and complex melee weapons once confronted by non-Scorched. Scorched have a mineral called ultracite growing in their skin for unknown reasons, which emits a radioactive signal allowing them to be tracked as well as making them physically weak to a depleted form of the substance (no reason for any of this is given). Scorched eventually petrify into human-shaped statues, which break when attacked and release radiation (possibly also spores of the fungus, but its unstated). Scorchbeasts themselves attack partially by spreading radiation, also presumably spores. If any of that seems odd and not to go together...well, it doesn't. Be prepared for some of it to make sense in DLC updates. 

The player finishes the vaccine the Responders were working on to the Scorched Plague, too late to save anyone but the Vault 76 survivors, and is tasked with finding a group of anti-Scorched Responders called the Fire Breathers. The Fire Breathers are a combination of survivalist conspiracy-theorists (who were of course correct about most/all of their assumptions, because Fallout) called the Free States that had been in conflict with local governments prewar (parodying the homegrown terrorism of the 1980's and 1990's in real life) who began working with the Responders. Players become a Fire Breather using prewar training they had set up before finding out that they had basically set up sensors to detect them, which have now been destroyed by raiders and natural elements. After repairing them you are given a post-war plan to have the Brotherhood Of Steel (yeah, they're fully set up only 25 years later) to provide the dakka needed to take on the Scorched...but they've all been wiped out too of course. The plan of the Paladin in charge was to use the nukes to seal away the Scorchbeast tunnels, then work on eliminating remaining Scorched (has the word "Scorch" lost all meaning yet? If not, you clearly haven't played the game). 

You're directed to a bunker for government officials using info from a Senator who supported the Free States, where you ally with an Enclave AI named MODUS who they isolated from its key functions before ALSO being wiped out. You restore MODUS's ability to access government surveillance, and upon seeing that the Scorched really are what you told it they were you're given tasks so it can promote you as a member of the Enclave so that you can launch the nukes yourself, something MODUS cannot actually do. Once you have the rank you just need the launch codes and keycards, found on the corpses of government officials and robots. During this you find out the Vault 76 Overseer is dead, as well as finishing her backstory in which she had originally been selected to be Overseer of Vault 101 (the Fallout 3 Vault) but declined in order to remain in her home state, as well as rejecting her fiance for access to Vault 76 in favor of people more suited to its mission since she's a fanatical follower of Vault Tec and a true believer in Dwellers of 76 actually repopulating the world. She tracked her fiance down, finding he had become a Scorched and her last wish being for you to lay him to rest. Once that's done you launch the nuke at the main Scorched tunnel which spawns a Scorched Queen boss. In theory you kill it, but there's no actual directive for you to do so and no actual end to the game story other than launching that nuke which completes the last main story quest. This counts as the main storyline being done, with no cutscene or exit narration at any point whether you kill the queen bat or not. From here on out you just pursue minor plots and do whatever. The Scorchbeasts will keep coming and Scorched will keep appearing, so its [[Darkest Dungeon|basically your job to keep them at bay]]. Or not, its not like there's a questline for it or any major rewards anymore, and the actual preview for the game was nuking other players, so...time to fuck up the world worse in an installment that's basically canon in name only.  

The minor plots are as follows:
* Super Mutants, as always, are bumming around. This time its because of the West Tek headquarters literally being in the region. They had been working on ways to cure world hunger, and that research was abandoned when they decided to use what they were working on to instead just create the FEV virus. It was tested on a small town called Huntersville by initially abducting people and turning them into Super Mutants directly, and when the results became clear (angry hulks with diminished memories who are very aware something is wrong and thus too belligerent to take orders) they introduced FEV to the water supply in smaller amounts to see if it produced better monsters. The town was put under military quarantine, and it seems some of the healthier people were executed. The bombs fell during the experiment, and the FEV vats within the West Tek HQ were neutralized by survivors, meaning that all the Super Mutants roaming the region are the original inhabitants of Huntersville, interestingly putting a cap on the maximum number of them there can possibly be (although there could be some leftover contamination from the water, which doesn't matter given that players will drink and eat the wild agriculture from the region without mutating). So yeah, another excuse for Super Mutants but still preventing them from using the same explanation again in the future. 
* A companion to the Silver Shroud comic-book quest from Fallout 4, a character in his shared universe called Mistress of Mystery was getting a television show. You can loot the a replica of her costume off of one of several dead women the wasteland. Turns out to get in to character the Mistress of Mysteries voice actress took [[batman]] training (to geive her a leg up over some one younger who looked better on screen). Then The Apocalypse happened and all that. training and a secret base paid off. The she started taking in orphan girls and training them. then bad things happed, which is how the players find the organization. (If you wonder why there's a lot of screencaps and video of male characters all wearing the same women's dress, you now know why) as well as a nice little "fuck you" from the writers of 76 parodying fanboys angry about lore on a computer terminal. 
* In a similar vein to joining the Fire Breathers and Enclave via robot tasks and training, you can also join the army and become executive of a mining company. 
* A LOT of "robots don't know the world ended" stuff, Some [[Golden_Throne|know but can't fight their programming]]. Maintaining a theme park, fixing up a town, organizing a picnic, delivering mail, delivering emergency supplies to towns with no survivors, big game hunting to add a collection of the new mutant species to a lodge, listening to the bedtime stories of a nanny Mr. Handy that's gone insane and now talking to mannequins, be mistaken as an escaped convict from a prison, help put another town back together but instead of working as assistant to an AI mayor you instead are appointed the new mayor by the overworked AI who then becomes YOUR assistant, and so on. 
* The game continues to remind you the bombs dropped in the Halloween season with quests involving obtaining a clown costume and carving pumpkins for a robot. 
* Find out about the hippie movement of the time in a mansion full of meditation tapes...which play as swarms of enemies attack. [[trazyn|Said hippe movement is a MLM and scientology combined.]]