First-week sales and critical reception of FALLOUT 76 disappoint

Bethesda Game Studios are facing the most difficult game launch in their history, with sales of their latest Fallout game plummeting. Early release figures from the UK suggest a massive 82% drop compared to its predecessor. In addition the game has received a critical mauling from a gaming press normally all too willing to overlook their game's huge flaws in return for advertising revenue.

Bethesda Game Studios, the in-house development studio for Bethesda Softworks (itself part of ZeniMax), have been developing large, open-world and single-player focused RPGs in their Elder Scrolls fantasy series since 1992 and in their Fallout science fiction series since acquiring the rights from Interplay in 2004. Fallout 76 is the ninth game in the Fallout franchise and the first to have a predominantly multiplayer focus (and only the second to have any kind of multiplayer component at all).

Bethesda specialises in making large, open-world games where players create a character and follow an intricate storyline and a plethora of optional side-quests and activities, such as crafting new weapons, settlement-building or becoming merchant traders. This has proven immensely popular with gamers, especially since Bethesda abandoned their early, hardcore RPG focus in favour of a more approachable, mass-appeal style of game. This arguably began with The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006) and continued through Fallout 3 (2008), The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011) and Fallout 4 (2015). Bethesda has outsourced other games, with Obsidian Entertainment developing Fallout: New Vegas (2010), a more hardcore and old-school RPG, and Zenimax Online Studios developing The Elder Scrolls Online (2014), a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game.

This approach, although unpopular with hard-core RPG fans of their earlier games (particularly cult success The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, released in 2002), has been immensely successful. Oblivion sold around 2 million copies in its first week, on sale, Fallout 3 increased this to 3 million and Fallout: New Vegas sold over 5 million copies in its first week on sale. Skyrim sold more than 7 million copies in its first week, with Fallout 4 shifting over 12 million copies in its first week.

Fallout 76, however, has sold around 2 million copies worldwide so far, meaning it is inarguably Bethesda's worst-selling game since Morrowind, a fairly niche RPG from a then-still-obscure developer released only on PC (an X-Box port did follow in the US a month later, but not until many months later worldwide). As more figures come in, the sales may go over Oblivon's, but it won't be by much. Given Bethesda's AAA status and the massive brand awareness of both Bethesda as a publisher and Fallout as a franchise, this is a disaster.

Apart from Interplay's Brotherhood of Steel (2004), a PS2-only action side-game made whilst the company was collapsing, every Fallout game going right back to the start has sold significantly more than the one before it, a streak also ended by Fallout 76.

The reasons for the game's failure seem clear. The problem isn't that it's a multiplayer spin-off of the main series - so was The Elder Scrolls Online and that's done very well - but that it's trying to play to two audiences whilst meeting the expectations of neither.

Fallout is a series of large, open-world roleplaying games with lots of locations and things to explore. Fallout 76 leans into that with a very large map, four times the size of Fallout 4's, with a lot of location and variety in the landscape, based on West Virginia. However, the game also jettisons what people expect from a Bethesda roleplaying game. Apart from a couple of robots which give out desultory quests, there are no NPCs in the game at all. The only human characters you meet are fellow actual human players. Beyond that there are only monsters.

Also, because Fallout 76 is a prequel, taking place long before the events of even the original 1997 Fallout, almost none of the traditional Fallout lore is present: there are no Super Mutants*, Brotherhood of Steel*, Enclave, New California Republic etc. There are Vaults, Deathclaws, Pip-Boys and Power Armour, but not much beyond that.

All of this would be fine if the game did its core gameplay loop - teaming up with other players to take on enemies (either environmental, monsters or other humans) in battles - well. It fails to do so, with the series' clunky shooting in place once again, worsened by the removal of VATS, an automated, RPG-style targeting system the series has used to overcome the deficiencies in combat. In Fallout 3 and New Vegas, VATS paused the game and in Fallout 4 it slowed it down, but both are clearly impossible in a multiplayer game, so instead the game tries to make it work as a real-time mechanic and, erm, fails miserably.

This latter problem is also rooted in Bethesda's curious decision (which I will go into in a separate article) to continue using its GameBryo/Creation Engine (which they've used for every game since 2002's Morrowind) to make the game. When ZeniMax developed The Elder Scrolls Online, they tailor-made a brand new engine to run the game. For some reason, Bethesda didn't do that for Fallout 76, instead recycling and reusing their engine from Fallout 4 with only a few moderate changes.

On a more mechanical level, Bethesda also chose not to release Fallout 76 though traditional PC digital storefronts like Steam or GoG, which likely put off a lot of players already wary of having too many digital onlines and logins, and too many stores with their bank details. The game also launched quite soon after Red Dead Redemption 2, which shifted 17 million copies in its first week. An a massive, sprawling game it's likely many players are still making their way through that title and aren't interested in other games at the moment. Still, the fact that Fallout 76 was comprehensively outsold by a remake of a 20-year-old Spyro the Dragon game has got to hurt, and there will be recriminations going on at Bethesda HQ.

Most likely, Bethesda will say that Fallout 76 is an experimental side-game and was never meant to outsell its predecessors. This will be disingenuous in the extreme: Bethesda were clearly hoping to tap into the Fortnite/Overwatch/Call of Duty multiplayer audience and get similar levels of sales, and falling this far short can only be seen as a major failure at this point (although if the game is improved through future patches and content updates, this could theoretically change).

Whatever the root cause, Bethesda are facing their first big miss as a development studio in their history. Fortunately, given the studio's long tail on their older games, it probably won't hurt them in the long run. Their next game, Starfield, will be a standard Bethesda open-world, narratively-driven, single-player RPG. Bethesda's owners may be hoping it comes out in 2019 though, to try to make up for the issues with Fallout 76 as soon as possible.

* ETA: I am informed that Super Mutants and the Brotherhood are in Fallout 76, because when you're Bethesda who gives a toss about the established canon timeline?

Bethesda confirm that FALLOUT 76 is an online-only game, for release in November 2018

In a major showcase event at the E3 video games conference in Los Angeles last night, Bethesda Game Studios confirmed that their new Fallout game, Fallout 76 will be an online-only game set in West Virginia. The news surprised many commentators, as previous comments had suggested that Fallout 76 might still be a single-player-focused RPG with some kind of optional co-op or multiplayer component.

Fallout 76 is set in 2102, just 25 years after the nuclear war that wiped out civilisation in the Fallout universe, and long before any of the other games in the series (Fallout 4, by comparison, is set in 2287). The game casts the players as residents of Vault 76, a nuclear fallout shelter in West Virginia. The game opens on Reclamation Day, with players setting out to re-colonise the surface by building new settlements, defeating monsters and coming into conflict with one another.

A more in-depth and fleshed-out versions of the settlement-building mechanics from Fallout 4 is present, with a strong focus on players working together to build up impressive outposts, forts and possibly entire towns in the wasteland.

Something that has elected a lot of praise is the map and environmental graphics. Although still using the positively decrepit Creation Engine (originally the GameBryo Engine and first used by Bethesda for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, released in 2002), the engine has been revamped to allow for larger forests. The game map is huge, a full four times the size of the Fallout 4 map, and covering the entire state of West Virginia. Players will be able to visit the ruins of the State Capitol in Charleston in the south-west of the state, the Greenbrier Resort (which in real life has a nuclear fallout shelter in the basement) in the far east of the state and West Virginia University in Morgantown, on the far northern border of the state. Point Pleasant, the site of the mysterious Mothman sightings of 1966-67 (a creature in the game appears to have been inspired by the fictional entity), and the New River Gorge Bridge are also present.

During the presentation, Bethesda Game Studios boss Todd Howard suggested it would be possible to play the game solo, but later confirmed that there are no human NPCs in the game. Instead, everyone you meet will be another player, with the only computer-controlled entities being monsters. Apparently the game will have some quests and missions in the game, likely assigned by the Vault 76 Overseer, but otherwise the best single-player gamers can likely expect is radiant AI quests generated at settlements, as seen in Fallout 4 (of the infamous "another settlement needs your help!" meme).

The decision to make Fallout 76 an online-only game has proven controversial, especially among those who hadn't been keeping up with the rumours and had been expecting a proper follow-up to Fallout 4 in a similar fashion to how Fallout: New Vegas was a follow-up to Fallout 3. The online-only nature of the game also elicited a negative response from the modding community, as the game will likely not allow substantive modding. Previous Bethesda games have been released in a buggy or subpar state and it's fallen to modders to fix the games and add new gameplay features whilst waiting for Bethesda to release official patches.

Fallout 76 will be released on 14 November 2018 on PS4, XB1 and PC.

Bethesda announce FALLOUT 76, an online survival RPG

After yesterday's speculation, Bethesda have confirmed that their next game will be Fallout 76, but provided no further information. However, Kotaku's sources (who previously leaked information about Fallout 4 that proved 100% accurate) have confirmed that the game will be an online survival RPG.

Fallout 76 is named for Vault 76,  speculated to be located in West Virgina. Mentioned in both Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 (which makes you wonder how long Bethesda have been planning this), Vault 76 is one of the "control vaults", the normal vaults which were designed to help people survive a nuclear war rather one of the whacky experimental vaults. Vault 76 was programmed to keep its inhabitants safe for twenty-five years and then open in the aftermath of the war.

The game opens on 27 October 2102, twenty-five years and four days after the Great War ended human civilisation. This makes Fallout 76 the earliest-set Fallout game to date, taking place fifty-nine years before the events of even the original Fallout and 185 years before the events of Fallout 4. The inhabitants of Vault 76 are preparing to celebrate "Reclamation Day", when they can go back out into the world and help re-settle it. Of course, when the doors open they find the world still a blasted nuclear ruin, ghouls and radscorpions everywhere and the other humans engaged in a desperate battle for survival. The game is set long before groups like the Brotherhood of Steel and the New California Republic form, so it'll be interesting to see how the game fares with many of the most iconic Fallout factions missing.

Gameplay will reportedly be at least superficially similar to Fallout 3, New Vegas and Fallout 4, with a central storyline and side-missions, but brand-new for the series will be a strong coop element. The base-building from Fallout 4 will be retained, with what sounds like an emphasis now on building up Vault 76 as a bastion against the chaos of the post-apocalyptic world. This is different from other Fallout games, where you tend to leave your starting vault at the start of the game and don't see it again until the end, if ever.

The game has been heavily influenced by survival horror RPGs like DayZ and Rust, with a focus on your character scavenging for survival in a hostile world, although it sounds like you can retreat to the Vault regularly to resupply. The game has a multiplayer mode, although it's unclear if it will be a full-one multiplayer game with faction vs. faction or player vs. player combat using the Vault as a hub (like, say, Destiny), or more of a single-player game with a coop element (like, say Far Cry 5). Kotaku caution that those expecting a full-on big Fallout RPG like Fallout 4 or New Vegas may be disappointed, which backs up the relatively short development period of the game (less than three years) and the fact that the game seems to have largely been developed by BattleCry Studios, who had formerly been working on a multiplayer shooter before the game was cancelled and they were absorbed into Bethesda proper.

Bethesda itself has been overseeing development of Fallout 76 at the same time they've been working on a brand-new, big RPG, code-named Starfield, which sounds like it will be released in 2019 or 2020, with an Elder Scrolls VI and a Fallout 5 to follow.

More on Fallout 76 will be revealed at the E3 Games Conference in a fortnight, and the game will - most likely - be released for X-Box One, PC and PlayStation 4 on 27 October this year, the tenth anniversary of the release of Fallout 3.