New fallout 76 rating update#

Wastelanders is well-written, too - and at times funny. You can use your intelligence to get your own way. You can intimidate NPCs into giving you what you want, if your strength is high enough. There are different ways to complete missions. There are decisions to make, the kind of decisions that actually change how things pan out.

This is hardly a revolutionary quest setup for Fallout, but for Fallout 76 it's a breath of fresh air. The Wayward is run by a wonderfully voice-acted landlady called Duchess who asks for your help in dealing with a raider problem. Soon enough I'm at a bar that's just opened up down the road. I'm having a lot of fun! It's almost like I'm playing Fallout 3, or Fallout: New Vegas! These lines open up dialogue that's a lot of fun. Even better, there are unique speech checks you can only select if you have a low rating in one of the SPECIAL categories. Charisma all of a sudden has value in a game that since launch had been mostly about combat and crafting. And what's this? Fallout 76 lets you pick from multiple lines of dialogue - none of the response wheel rubbish from Fallout 4. Talking to them took me aback at first, even though I've spent hundreds of hours talking to NPCs in other Bethesda games. It points you in the direction of a couple of human characters - human characters! - who have arrived in Appalachia on the hunt for a mystical treasure housed in a new-found vault. Outside the door to Fallout 76 a robot like all the others has some new things to say. And to Bethesda's credit, Wastelanders is it. So I dusted off my existing character and entered the post-apocalypse expecting the most significant of refreshes - a relaunch of Fallout 76, really. I stuck with Fallout 76 for a month or so after it came out, then dropped off pretty hard. This is the thing about the Wastelanders update: it feels great because Fallout 76 was so bad. Even hearing enemy raiders chat while they're skulking about is refreshing, not because it is a remarkable thing for a Fallout game, but because it is a remarkable thing for Fallout 76. Fallout 76 is improved in pretty much every department just by having other characters in the game world who speak and who are not robots. The addition of NPCs and all they bring with them - dialogue choices, voice acting, quests and actual story - drags Fallout 76 towards the traditional single-player Fallout experience, and it's all the better for it.

New fallout 76 rating update#

Now, with the release of free update Wastelanders, it's not just got one city, it's got two - and a bucketload of NPCs to boot. When I reviewed Fallout 76 at launch, I said it was in desperate need of a hub - a town or a city filled with NPCs.