Things we learned from "The Making of Fallout 76 Documentary"

Watching the very good NoClip documentary on The Making of Fallout 76 has gotten me from being cautiously optimistic about the title, to believing that at least their intentions and direction for the game are solid.

Here’s the video if you haven’t seen it yet.

There are quite a few interesting bits of information scattered throughout the video but the ones that stuck with me as being the most important are the following.

Nuclear silos

The presence of nuclear silos is actually linked to the story of the game, or the main quest as it were. You’ll have to use them to seal the caves where the giant flying bat-like creatures come from or you can use them to destroy other human players.

The thing is that nuking an area will also work as a means of upgrading that area to an end-game/high-level zone. This now heavily irradiated area will offer better drops as well as the possibility to gather some yet-to-be-disclosed rare resources.

Obviously in order to venture into said areas, you’ll need some seriously radiation shielded Power Armor and a serious amount of chems.

They are designing with griefing in mind

Initially the existence of these nuclear silos made me think that unless they are very specifically designed, this could lead to some people - there’s always a few - who will spam them.

But after watching the video it has become clear that they are taking this sort of behavior into consideration and they have some tools already in place to deal with it.

Great stuff.

Character specialization

It appears that you’ll be able to focus your character on playing different roles - either within a larger party, or in terms of the wider world.

You’ll get perk cards which you’ll be able to use as perks. You can only have a limited number of perk cards active at any one time so you’ll have to choose what they do in order to fit with your particular playstyle.

They mention in the documentary that players can focus their characters to be something else other than explorers, they can become medics, builders, craftsmen or cooks.

The various perk cards can also be traded between friends so in case your friend has one that you need in order to improve your build, they can trade it to you. This will make parties or groups of friends playing much more capable.

All of these sound great, but we’ll have to wait and see exactly how the various human players choose to interact on any given instance.

Events

As expected the game will have a bunch of randomly generated events that will happen depending on a variety of circumstances.

Some events will definitely be easier to approach with a team, that much is clear from the gameplay footage that we’ve seen.

Mutations

It appears that at least one part of the survival aspect of the game will be that your characters will be subject to mutations, the more Rads they eat up.

Which makes a lot of sense considering that a mere 25 years after the bombs drop, there’s bound to be way more radiation hanging around - this is also the reason behind the presence of a larger number of weirder-looking monsters - and this will affect you if you don’t keep in check.

Mutations will work like traits in Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, namely they’ll have both a positive and a negative impact upon your character’s stats and skills.

This is a really cool and realistic touch, not to mention the fact that it harkens back to the original Interplay titles.

They also mentioned that in the end-game you’ll have the option of making these mutations permanent, if you find their advantages outweigh their disadvantages.

Conclusion

So, like I said in the beginning, I was cautiously optimistic about Fallout 76 after the initial E3 presentation. Now, after seeing the documentary I am more confident in the direction that Bethesda is taking the idea and what they want it to look like and play like going forward.

Will it be great from the start?

I don’t think so, I’m not deluded. No online multiplayer game is great from the onset. They’ll need a couple of months, at the very least, to iron out bugs and glitches and also to observe how exactly players are behaving in their game.

But at least at this point in time, it seems that they’re quite committed to supplying years-worth of free content going forward and to make the game enjoyable for an ever-widening number of players. They even mentioned that, while this won’t be available at launch, at a certain point people will be able to play in private games, so that will be the closest version to a single-player or a purely co-op experience as possible.

What do you guys and gals think about all of these?

Let me know in the comments!

I'm off, back into the wasteland ;)

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