80 PCWorld JUNE 2020REVIEWS FALLOUT 76: WASTELANDERS
Bethesda even figured out instancing.
One of my major complaints from the Fallout
76 launch involved a quest that ended with
killing a specific ghoul. Trouble was, if
someone else had already killed the ghoul
you had to either wait for it to respawn or
bounce to another server and hope it was
alive. No more! Now there are certain
interiors that are specific to your quest and
your character, and allow you to make choices
that actually affect the story.
Would I still prefer a proper offline Fallout
sequel? Absolutely. That said, Wastelanders is
so much closer to what Fallout 76 should’ve
been at launch. There are still problems, some
of them fundamental design choices made to
accommodate multiple players, but
Wastelanders feels like a proper online Fallout
and not an empty imitation.
And the parts of Fallout 76 that were
already strong have been made stronger.
Post-apocalyptic West Virginia is a lot moreinteresting with people roaming around,
peppered with vignettes—raider camps up in
the mountains, hopeful settlers trying to
revitalize crumbling towns, roadside bars and
a new Vault everyone wants to break into. It’s
the sort of small-scale storytelling Fallout’s
always been good at, and which was so
noticeably lacking in Fallout 76 at release.
Not that it’s seamless. I think Wastelanders
is probably better (to some extent) for new
players than it is for returning players.
Bethesda’s completely rewritten the early
hours of the game, introducing a bar called
The Wayward almost directly on top of the
Overseer’s Camp players originally traveled to
after leaving Vault 76.
But if you played Fallout 76 at release, this
leads to some weird cognitive dissonance. I
left off playing in the middle of a quest to hunt
down the old Vault 76 Overseer, following her
audio logs across West Virginia. Starting up
Wastelanders, I was surprised to find out she
now lives right down
the road from Vault
76—and when asked
about her audio logs,
she simply says she
left them to “help”
me. I guess I could
chase them down still
if I wanted? To what
end?
Wastelanders
also remixes certain