First impressions of Fallout 76 (I skipped out on the Beta as I had no free time)
On launching the game, all my settings were automatically set to a range of Ultra and High. I put this down to my hardware as I had recently upgraded my desktop. When my brother launched and joined me, he was given the same. While his hardware is a little older, its still decent, so all seemed good.
Then our friend Peter joined us, and was set to the same Immediately we knew something was wrong as he is running on quite… See More
old stuff, and on launching he was running at about 6 FPS. A bit of configuration and we were good to go (until the fog rolled in and Peter realized his framerate was dropping heavily)
The game ran fluidly for myself, and didn't seem to experience any issues when my network connectivity dropped unexpectedly. I was in the process of trading with a random player at the time, and we completed our trade, emoted goodbye and went our separate ways.
Soon after I was met by a player in power armor named Oblivionn, level 30 or so at the time. I was level 4. He offered to trade, so I decided to see what was on offer. Turns out all he wanted was my collection of .308 and 10mm rounds, so I declined. Being under level 5, he could not attack me and initiate PvP, so he walked away.
Later, after leveling quite a bit and finding ourselves at the mercy of PvP seeking players, Myself, Lewis (my brother) and Peter sought to build an encampment. We picked a nice spot overlooking the Vault-Tec University, and began laying plans. While they worked on building defensive towers and platforms, I checked out the surrounding area and discovered a home filled with a multitude of wall mounted cat heads, and a number of cat bowls (great source of plastic)
We stopped here for a nice photo op, and were immediately set upon by a group of 3 players wielding .50 cal machine guns. So ended our first night of playing, as we were all quite tired at this point.
I was really skeptical of the idea of an online Fallout experience. While I've always toyed with the idea of a multiplayer adventure, I envisioned it as a purely Co-op campaign mode, following a story, completing quests together. However, we had so much fun playing this that I'm starting to see why Bethesda chose this route. I was surprised at the lack of players I saw during 6 hours of Gameplay (we only came across 7 or 8 collectively)
Based purely on what we accomplished last night, I have to rate the game a 10/10 and am looking forward to my next intense session when i'm not working the night shift again