For all of the time I put into the launch of the original Destiny, it was beyond barren in terms of content. It was a damn good time, but most of that was in the excitement of something new from Bungie other than Halo. Playing with friends also tends to polish mediocre experiences.
I went through the same cycle with Destiny 2, and watched as Anthem crashed and burned a couple years later. That era during the launch of the original Destiny feels like the real start of the live service boom, and since then new types of experiences that demand all of your attention have been popping up every month it seems. But it’s really the normalizing of that type of release strategy that stings the most these days – rushing a game to market only to fix things up after the fact.
Half baked and thoroughly puzzling – I like many others was confused by the initial release of Fallout 76. From the outside looking in it seemed to run the gamut of all issues associated with a GaaS title released a tad too soon. Unsurprisingly, it received a mountain of backlash.
Over time, my curiosity in what Bethesda Games Studios had developed started to overtake Fallout 76’s initial blunder. Recently, nearly 3 years after its release, I decided to take the plunge. Part of me wanted to see if things had remained truly horrendous and the other part of me wondered if a steady stream of updates had brought Fallout 76 to the surface.
What I’ve found after 20 some odd hours of playtime is that while it certainly lacks qualities found in traditional Fallout games, its level of atmosphere is far and away above anything I would have expected. Fallout 76’s rendition of West Virginia might even be one of my favorite examples of open world atmosphere.
