4 Hours Into Fallout 76: Some Observations & Commentary
I’m a huge Fallout fan, and ever since Fallout 76 was announced, I’ve been awaiting it with great anticipation. I have a husband and kids, so finding time to play video games is tough.. and finding time to myself to play a single player like Fallout is nearly impossible. We all got the Fallout 76 BETA for PC, and we’re about 4 hours into it now. No spoilers ahead, just some honest opinions and observations.
First off, my suggestion to you when you log in is to immediately mute your mic, every time. Apparently, it will unmute itself if you log off and back in. The beginning areas are where everyone starts, and by default, your mic will be on for anyone in the map vicinity to hear you. My husband, kids, and I all sit in a row at our computers and talk about totally random stuff while we play, and today it made a random on the map run up and start punching my character and telling me to shut up. So mute your mic or switch to team chat.
My current dilemma in the game is what the hell all the diseases I contracted are. Ok, so I seem to be contracting mutations and disease at a rate significantly higher than the rest of the family. I think this is simply due to my playstyle. I don’t use chems to heal or buff generally. I find that they sell for so much, that my best bet is to sell them all and heal off the abundant food I can find in the wasteland. Especially with Fallout 4, when it became easy to scavenge raw materials and cook a wide variety of food with different perks. Fallout 76 is the same, with tons of raw materials and recipes. I essentially just cook and eat food to heal, use Radaway for the rads, then I can sell all my stimpacks and other chems. I think using food to heal is contributing to all my diseases and mutations, as each food carries a percentage chance of an adverse reaction. I currently am carrying blood worms and jelly fingers.. no idea what either of those are doing to my body. I also had dysentery, which caused me to dehydrate even quicker. Got rid of that, and then I got a chameleon mutation. I took some radaway to sure that. Blood worms, jelly fingers, and swamp itch do not appear to be affecting my gameplay, although they all sound terribly unpleasant. I had the materials to create more disease cure, but they disappeared from my inventory when I logged out and back in.. so I need to hunt for more to cure my poor, diseased body.
One thing that I suspect they will change is the dehydration rate. Maybe it’s because we all sprint everywhere, but we just seem to constantly be on the verge of dehydration. Wood is plentiful, as are streams, so it’s not hard to load up on both then convert them to boiled water at a cook station. Cook stations and work benches are plentiful, so despite being the type of player that picks up everything that’s not nailed down, I have rarely become over encumbered. I do suspect they’ll slow the dehydration and disease rates.
Last thing was base building. I originally headed straight for the Nuka Cola bottling plant right out of Vault 76. I wanted to see how interactions with other players would work, so I was going to throw down my camp and build massive walls around the Nuka plant. I figured everyone would head there pretty immediately, and I would block them and force them to fight me. I couldn’t though. It wouldn’t let me throw down my camp in the plant. Probably for the best.. as people like me will wall off intriguing areas. You also can’t put your camp in a road. The same nonsense building from Fallout 4 works in Fallout 76 though; you can build one wall, then build an insanely long walkway of roof with no supports under it. That was the extent of my camp building though; I wanted to get back to exploring.
Aside from “disease cure”, I haven’t come across any chems or really any food that’s not in Fallout 4. I read a lot about people complaining that all the assets are exactly the same in 76 as in 4. I’m sure as we get farther into it, we’ll discover more, and they’ll continue to add more. But for now, I was a bit surprised that there were no new chems or weapons that were immediately discoverable. I suppose I found some new beer varieties. I was also wondering if fixer would make a comeback, but I haven’t found any yet. Hope everyone is enjoying Fallout 76 so far. I really have no complaints.. not sure I’m far enough in to make a full review, but it’s definitely fun! I’m looking forward to discovering more, like what the hell is Jelly Fingers and where is the mothman and can I get abducted by aliens. What’s the weirdest disease you’ve contracted or the coolest location you’ve found so far? Please feel free to share your experiences with me!
