Fallout 76 Is a Video Game for People Who Like Podcasts Way Too Much
For the past decade or so, big-budget video games have fallen in love with audio storytelling. You can find "audio logs" or something like them in all sorts of games, from violent first-person shooters like Doom to more contemplative puzzle games like The Witness. Their appeal is akin to that of podcasts'—they let a game flesh out its world while leaving you free to do other stuff, like murder aliens or solve puzzles. They're a trope, and one that doesn't seem to be going away anywhere soon. They're also maybe the only interesting thing about Fallout 76.
Even from the outset, Fallout 76 was going to be a weird game. A multiplayer, always-online entry in a series that built its name on famously solitary experiences, the game isn't kind to people who like Fallout games, and it's even less pleasant for people who are completely new to Fallout. It's a recipe for disaster, and that made me extremely eager to play it—video games are often at their most interesting when they're on the brink of disaster, barely ready for the messy, drama-loving humans about to inhabit them. And one week after its release, Fallout 76 seems spectacularly unready.
To wrap your head around the game's premise and what it's like to play it, you have to know a little bit about Fallout—not much, but enough. The Fallout games take place across various periods between the 21st and 23rd centuries, but in a timeline that diverges from ours immediately after World War II. In the Fallout universe, nuclear power gave way to an idyllic retro-future dystopia where the aesthetics and politics of the 1950s persisted well into the future, and series of wars of resources redrew the map, ultimately leading to global thermonuclear war that wipes out nearly everything.
In a Fallout game, you generally play a character who's leaving a Vault—a bomb shelter designed to preserve human life for generations—to survive in a bizarre nuclear wasteland. Fallout 76 is a prequel of sorts, taking place the earliest in the Fallout timeline as West Virginia's Vault 76 is the first vault to open after the bombs fall. As such, you—and everyone who plays Fallout 76—take the role of the first humans to emerge after the nuclear apocalypse, tasked with settling the American wasteland.
Fallout 76 commits to this setup in a manner that's both fascinating and frustrating: You and your fellow players are the only humans in this game. You aren't really interacting with other characters; you're just getting by alongside them, or in spite of them. It's bizarre, because Fallout 76 isn't purely interested in survival—you build out camps and have to worry about hunger and thirst and disease, but the game seems most interested in delivering story. This is confounding, because in removing characters, Fallout 76 rids itself of the most effective way of delivering story.
Hence the podcasts. The Appalachian wilds of Fallout 76 is littered with audio recordings and still-functional computer terminals with diary entries in them, all means for you to piece together the lay of the land, and the people who lived here before the irradiated wasteland caught up with them. I like these audio recordings. They are by no means great—I'm not sure I've played a game with truly great audio recordings. There's an artifice to them that makes them inherently ridiculous. Literally anyone with a smartphone can start an "audio diary" today, and how many people do you see doing it? Let alone an entire town? Come on.
But when you break it down, a lot of big-budget video games are just inertia machines. They tip you forward with a strong hook, and construct what's called a "gameplay loop" to provide a set of circuitous activities that'll keep you both playing for hours, and also coming back for days. Audio diaries do that for me. They're a great place to hide short stories of all types, and I'm curious to see which ones are hidden in Fallout 76, at least for a little while. The thing is, Fallout 76 isn't just about exploring and finding cool little stories tucked away on holo-tapes or computer terminals. It's a game with other people in it, and a rough story arc that involves... seizing control of the last remaining nuclear warheads and living the doomsday prepper fantasy? It's unclear what Fallout 76 wants me to enjoy, other than how nice it is to have all this wide-open space now that everyone who ever lived on it has been killed.
But odds are you might not every get to any of this. You'll probably be frustrated by the shooting, which the game is really bad at, even for a series that was never good at shooting. Or the general jankiness that comes from being an always-online game, with connection dropping at undue times, or being at the mercy of fickle broadband providers. Or just the general hollow feeling at the heart of the game's world, full of robots and mutants and irradiated wildlife and the remnants of varying factions and corporations, all gesturing to a bunch of iconography that maybe meant something, once. Fallout 76 feels like the final product of a long game of telephone, where places and things that perhaps made a point once upon a time are replicated faithfully, and toothlessly. And with a whole bunch of other humans who are running around doing other stuff, and might try to kill you, but are most likely too far away to really care about. There's some stuff that's better to take on with them, but I doubt you'll ever really want to. So all you kind of have in Fallout 76 are these audio recordings I've been jokingly calling podcasts. There's a reason for that.
In a recent New Yorker article about the medium, Rebecca Mead writes, "Podcasts are designed to take up time, rather than to be checked, scanned, and rushed through: they are for those moments when you can’t be scrolling on your phone. For a digital medium, podcasts are unusual in their commitment to a slow build, and to a sensual atmosphere." In other words, podcasts are best enjoyed when you must give a task your time, but not your attention. They're a companion for traveling a wasteland. They're what you do when you'd rather be doing something else.
