With this, Fallout 76 begins its long, slow march towards being a different game, dare we say a better game. The launch hasn’t exactly been smooth from really any perspective: technical problems abound, and early impressions all revolve around the nagging feeling that this is basically a Fallout game devoid of much of what makes Fallout games great, without a whole lot taking its place. It’s better to play single-player, but if that’s the case it doesn’t have the NPCs or zany world that make a single-player Fallout so fun. While those later problems will take a whole lot longer to fix if they can be fixed at all, Bethesda can at least get to work on the technical side of things. That seems to be the focus of today’s patch.
This first major post-release patch is a big one: a whopping 47 gb on PlayStation 4, though a more manageable 15 gb on PC. The patch notes are, for the most part, workmanlike. This is a meat and potatoes stability patch, not the sort of content patch we assume the game will be getting somewhere down the line. You can read them all here, but these are really the only relevant lines:
- Performance: Several issues have been addressed to resolve hitches during gameplay and other performance issues.
- Stability: The Fallout 76 game client and servers have received additional stability improvements.
Fallouy 76 has some gameplay hitches, and this patch is intended to address them. Easy to say, though I have to imagine not quite so easy to implement.
Here’s one thing the patch does not address: stash size. Plenty of players have been running right up against the current 400 unit limit, which is pretty low considering that so much of Fallout 76′s C.A.M.P. system revolves around collecting huge amounts of crap, and that MMO design, in general, tends to put a pretty heavy premium on collecting weapons, armor and other high-value trinkets. Bethesda is definitely working on that one, but it seems to be tied to the ways in which the game conceives of counting all of the objects in the game world, and so it’s going to take a little longer.
Other upcoming fixes include push-to-talk and an FOV slider on PC. Both of which the game could really use.
We’ll see how things keep going. Fallout 76 launched as a complete game, just a complete game with a ton of problems. It feels like a classic wait and see, so personally I’d give this thing six months to a year to see how it shakes out.
