#also i know it Functioned as a scrapped quest but i just mean literally. lore wise. what the hell is it

[twinsoftriumph]

[mllemaenad]

Having played some more Fallout 76, I have to say ... yeah, the lack of NPCs is kind of a problem.

I mean, I know how people are. Every time a new game in a series is released everyone rushes out to complain that it isn’t as good as the last one; that it’s been ‘dumbed down’ to allow – heaven forbid – new players to participate; that the company sold out; that it’s just the worst. People were like this when Fallout 4 was released, and apparently 4 isn’t so bad now 76 exists. I don’t want to add to that: it’s perfectly playable, the controls are similar to Fallout 4, and there’s plenty of lore and character in the world itself to make it interesting. If it’s someone’s favourite, that’s fine, and I at least want to see how it ends.

But the emptiness of the map really is a problem, from a story perspective. It’s a problem because it makes it damn near impossible to commit to the story’s central premise: we are here to rebuild, to reclaim, the world after the bombs fell.

Previous Fallout games have dropped the player into a world where that job is at least partially done. Even empty, barren, original Fallout had Junktown and the Hub as major trading centres, and if you had any luck at all you stumbled out of Vault 13 and immediately located tiny-but-functional Shady Sands. You arrive to aid a world in crisis, but the world is, you know, there.

Fallout 76 offers the same premise. Appalachia apparently had a remarkably functional society going a mere 25 years after the Great War. The Responders, our story’s heroes, got shit done. They re-purposed the railroad as a trade route, and had outposts and safe havens established over the entire area. They had community farms, and automated factories running with light supervision. They had survival training programs, medical care, counselling services, supply drops – the fucking works. There’s evidence of towns and households both surviving through the nuclear apocalypse.

Unfortunately none of this survived the scorched plague – a disease apparently so virulent that it left literally no survivors. Now, I find that a bit hard to swallow in itself, since it’s established that ghouls demonstrate a resistance to the plague (where are my ghoul survivors, damn it!), but okay. Fine, let’s go with that then. We are left the heirs to the world they created, free to do with it as we will (provided we can, ourselves, survive the plague).

And that’s where things get ... weird. Something you run into a lot is ‘event quests’. They’re timed, repeatable missions. Not all are attached to the Responders, but many are. You’ll hear Maria or Sanjay on a recorded message: get the food processor running, defend the farms, run the patrols, protect the machinery. These quests make sense if you imagine yourself as part of an organisation with a growing community to feed and clothe. But since the people who need these things are dead, there seems little purpose in doing them – beyond the XP you get at completion.

Now, reasonably, you might say that the Vault 76 survivors are that community. That sounds plausible, except ... they aren’t. While you can build a camp of your own, there’s no way to connect that with other people’s camps to make a town. You can claim a workshop to produce resources as an individual, but there’s no way to produce resources for the Vault survivors as a whole. Every survivor is individually self sufficient, and I’ve had no problems feeding my character or maintaining her gear.

I should digress for a moment to say I’ve had no issues with other players. My encounters with other people have been brief and courteous: I have rescued others and been rescued myself, then we have waved vigorously at each other and we have moved on. I know there must be arseholes out there because I’ve seen Wanted tags pop up, but I haven’t had issues myself.

And why would there be issues? What are you going to do, murder people for their scrap? Why would you bother? We’ve all got plenty of scrap. My damn stash box is full again already. The game isn’t geared towards PvP. And that’s great. It doesn’t feel like it should be. It feels like it should be collaborative, but it isn’t.

Imagine if there were NPC survivors. Like your settlements, in Fallout 4, only the whole damn server is responsible for them. Perhaps the leadership of the heroic Responders is still gone, and 76′s much vaunted genius survivors have stepped in to take their place. Good luck, guys. When you run to protect the machinery, you now have a purpose: you are keeping the last survivors of the scorched plague alive while you hunt for the cure. Imagine being able to use your specialisations: become doctors, hunters, scientists, builders – for other players, yes, but also for the NPCs. The characters should have personalities, be people, give you something to fight for, even if they aren’t the quest givers. Imagine tangible, sensible benefits to doing all those quests: as long as you keep the power station running, your camp and the surrounding settlements are hooked up to the grid, so you don’t need a million generators to run things.

Shady Sands was built by (some of) the survivors of an experimental vault, who struck out into the wastes and made a home. Necropolis and Vault City are both the result of survivors turning their vault into a long-term home. Broken Hills and Jacobstown are both built by refugees from the Master’s army. Megaton and Underworld are groups of like-minded survivors giving the vaults the finger and living on through nuclear devastation anyway. Goodneighbour is established (recently) as a refuge for the persecuted and dispossessed – a place where these people look after each other.

Fallout success stories are always about collaboration. So why does the game have the survivors of 76 wandering around as though they don’t know each other?

I haven’t reached the endgame yet. So if it turns out that Vault-Tec set 76 up to fail at reclaiming the wasteland, I won’t be surprised. It’s fucking Vault-Tec: if someone’s still alive when they’re done with them something has gone horribly wrong.

But since when do Fallout players have to do what Vault-Tec wants?

I ... think we need some survivors, Bethesda. We need someone to save. Because otherwise it’s hard to imagine a society growing up in the game. It’s hard to imagine anything that would persist the two centuries to Fallout’s current ‘present day’.

We need NPCs.