During this past week of October 2nd to October 4th, Marooners’ Rock writer Dave Warwick and I were invited to take part in the Fallout 76 Preview event at The Greenbrier in West Virginia. We both happen to live in West Virginia, and as you can guess it was only a short drive to get there, which was a plus. During our time there, both him and I were able to obtain three hours of game-play time and some footage. You will be seeing the footage very soon once we’re done with our edits. Now you might asking yourself, wouldn’t you be biased since it’s a game about your state?
For the sake of this preview, we will be taking an analytical approach to eliminate any biases. I am delighted that Bethesda and its staff decided that West Virginia was a worthy candidate to join the Fallout franchise, giving players the opportunity to experience what many West Virginians love about the state. West Virginia has a variety of notable urban legends, such as the Mothman who is renowned for his multiple sightings in WV; just this one urban legend alone could make WV the perfect setting for a spookier or mysterious type of Fallout. We know that you are only here to find out what we think about the Fallout 76 preview. Let’s get started.
In total time, we were able to get around three hours of game-play, as I’ve already stated above. This alone really gave us an in-depth idea of what to expect in-game without spoiling anything.
The game begins on Reclamation Day, the day all the vault dwellers within Vault 76 get the chance to leave and to reclaim the surface and its history. Within the Vault you’ll be exploring the location to pick up your items such as a nice party hats, glasses, your first weapon and a handful of ammo. Beyond this, you’ll be going through a few quick doors and will be exiting Vault 76 into the Appalachian region. You could run into your friends or complete random players, but each instance will have only up to 24 players on the map. During our hands-on we explored a lot of West Virginia, which included the town of Flatwoods and Summersville, but I spent a lot of time with the New River Gorge Bridge. The land alone is very extensive, filled with new enemies, new areas and everything in-between, but my adventure didn’t turn me away from trying to meet up with the rest of my group.
One cool feature of the game is that if your friends aren’t being attacked or in battle, you may fast travel to your team members on the Fallout 76 map. I was informed depending on the reason of fast travel to get to your friends located on the map you may have to pay caps, but some locations such as Vault 76 Fast Travel would be free. One of the times I happened to fast travel to my group we were starting a battle with a Scorchbeast soon after. These creatures do not mess around when it comes to being attacked. During our play session we had bumped into a level 50 along with a higher level near the end of our session. The combat itself is easy and well thought out in regards to either have melee weapons or guns you’ve happened to find. With limited ammo being out in the wild, you’ll want to adventure and stock up on items to scrap for creation of what you need. The VAT system has been changed as well, as in past games you were able to slow down time and select what you’ll be shooting at for more damage. Within Fallout 76, you will not be able to slow down time since this is an online game, but your character will auto aim when you use your VAT system and take shots at the body parts you happen to select. It was very easy to grasp the controls. You have options such as emotes you can use to signal trading, to tell other players good job, and more. You can learn controls without being told and it felt very natural. You’ll be able to learn the controls without much effort before leaving the vault for the first time.
While roaming through areas of the game, we were greeted with challenges and quests to complete. This kept us busy exploring the land trying to level up and find better weapons and items. When we decided to visit The Greenbrier, Dave Warwick decided to shoot the friendly robot, and we laughed and watched as a nice wave of robots started shooting him and chasing him down.
You’ll also see that within Fallout 76 some of the enemies alone adapted to the settings. At The Greenbrier, you’ll see ghouls dressed up in golf outfits or some other resort outfit. This is a very nice touch to see that enemies can match any location in the game. It does make me wonder how you’ll see other enemies dressed or even act when you go to other locations. Will we see ghouls dressed as college students when you go to Vault Tech University? Who knows, but it’s something I do want to find out.
I know some of you reading, might be wondering about the Nukes, right? We didn’t get the chance to launch one, but at the end of our session we were all asked to fast travel to Vault 76. Bethesda thought it would be funny to have us look into the horizon of where we just exited and watch a Nuke go off. The sight alone was amazing, but we quickly died because we didn’t have enough protection. Maybe during the beta I’ll get the chance to see what is happening within the zone of the Nuke.
Each time you level up, you’ll be able to select a perk card. Every so often you’ll obtain a free card pack with even more perks to pick from, which was nice to help a user such as myself or even you. This was nice because of the five extra cards it granted around level 5 and level 7. As you can see in the picture above you’ll also be able to stack the cards you get. Want to upgrade your card? It’s as simple as obtaining a few cards of that item. Will it cost more for higher tier rank-ups? This isn’t something I played around with as much, since I didn’t have many cards to work with in this area.
Graphics in-game were nice, but with the game still quite a bit away from full release, there will be graphical updates most likely added to it that wasn’t featured within our build of the game. We were informed some areas of the world were still being optimized as well. In which while we played I myself happened to adventure to a few random locations and I had at least one area that I could tell was still being worked on. This didn’t turn us away, but simply had us looking forward to seeing the game fully optimized and cleaned up along with any reports that come up during the upcoming B.E.T.A.
Overall, Fallout 76 seems to have some good things going for it. While this was only a short hands-on with the game, you can expect a few of us here at Marooners’ Rock to sink hours into the beta and write more about the game. This doesn’t include when it comes time the full game along with a full review when it releases. We’d like to thank Bethesda for the chance to visit The Greenbrier and being able to obtain hands-on time with Fallout 76.
