If you play for fallout lore then absolutely. You can breeze through everything and read every note with little difficulty.

I never bought it because I can’t self host my own server or mod it. I also don’t like games with micro transactions.

Once they shut down the servers, nobody will be able to play it. I bought the rest of the Fallout games on GoG. They can’t take those away since there is no DRM or internet connection required and I saved the offline installers.

Personally, I disliked F76. A friend of mine got it for me when it was on sale so we could play together - it’s the engine/combat of FO4 (but with mandatory lag), and a solo building system like FO4’s settlements (but without any NPCs).

GMod - now that brings me back! My nostalgia for it is so strong that I don’t know I can give a serious opinion to The Young Folks™, but I burned literal hundreds of hours (admittedly at LAN parties) playing GMod and making stupid jokes with my social circle.

It’s all fun and games until someone starts humanizing the watermelons…

I consider it worthwhile. It’s as much mainline Fallout as you’re going to get until Fallout 5, at any rate.

But it’s not Fallout 5.

Graphically, it’s not much fancier than Fallout 4.

The main questline is okay. It’s definitely less dramatic than Fallout 4, though I think that the characters are more-believeable, have more human motivations. You get to run around in a big open world and explore, but I didn’t have many “oh, wow” moments, like when the Brotherhood of Steel show up in their airships in Fallout 4 or Liberty Prime does his thing in 3 and 4.

In the Fallout series, you can generally dramatically affect the world. In 76, by virtue of it being multiplayer, you really can’t. You can just affect stuff in instanced areas. That has a real impact.

Aside from some multiplayer events, you can basically ignore essentially the entire multiplayer aspect if you want. I was really going into 76 with a bias against it because I didn’t want to interact with people, didn’t want to deal with people being jerks. In practice, I found that that was a complete non-problem. For whatever reason, despite being a community centered around a brutal, post-apocalyptic wasteland, the Fallout 76 community is really nice, and most of the limited interaction is people trying to give newbies stuff. The occasional “trap” CAMP where someone will try to build a building with a door that opens out a cliff and see if people will fall out of it.

The multiplayer aspect is mostly if you have a friend or spouse or whatever that you want to play with and run around the Fallout universe with. Can be in a group of up to 4. Not required for most of the game, though being in a group does enable some useful benefits, so a common convention is for players on a server to join a “casual” group of 4, whichever has a slot open, share one of their perk card benefits with the other players in the group, and then ignore each other from then on.

If you’re playing effectively single-player, you’ll rarely see anyone else other than in towns and multiplayer events, if you choose to do them.

For me, at least, the main drawback to the multiplayer turned out not to be having to interact with players, but that it impacted the immersion. Other characters don’t dress or name thenselves or act in character to the world. The game will throw up notifications that multiplayer events are occurring. The way the incentives system worked last time I played was that one got to the point that the multiplayer events were easy, but optimal play for most involved having as many players as possible doing a small amount of damage to each enemy, which was pretty bad for immersion. Did not feel like we were desperately trying to survive and accomplish the goal, but to try to max out the event’s return in unrealistic ways.

The game encourages you to do in-app purchases, but it’s not much pressure. I never bought anything. The major benefit is an ability to store an unlimited amount of scrap (building materials), which doesn’t really do much in the game, the ability to create private servers with your own settings, thr ability to store an unlimited amount of scrap (building material) and a survival tent (more on that below).

Some aspects of the game feel pretty vestigial to me — there’s a survival aspect that got hugely nerfed, for example, because players didn’t want to keep hunting for food and water. Most players didn’t like the PvP aspect either, and so it got minimized, wirh there being little practical point to taking and holding points on the map or fighting other characters.

My experience was that load times didn’t increase as one played the game, a problem that had plagued all prior titles in the series.

The endgame is mostly aimed around grinding repetitive multiplayer event stuff and IMHO isn’t all that intriguing. I’d play it until you’ve done the mainline quest stuff.

I really wanted more to be done with building in Fallout 4. Basically, you had the “defend The Castle against the Mirelurk Queen” quest, which let you configure defenses. Then you could configure settlements to be a little more resillient to attacks, but most of the building was just about having fun making cosmetically-appealing settlements.

Fallout 76 lets you establish a CAMP, which is like a small settlement that can go pretty much anywhere on the map. It provides some minor benefits: you can put defenses on it, put crafting stations there teleport to it for free, store stuff there, put up some items you don’t want for sale to other players there. You also get to set up an “underground” portion to the thing claled a “shelter”. You can have multiple CAMPs, though only one up at once.

You can buy stuff from other players at their CAMPs. There’s also a “survival tent” for players who have a subscription. It’s like an extra, tiny, prebuilt CAMP of various themes. Some players will help out other players on a server by placing theirs near an area where other players are doing multiplayer events, to give those players easier access to their stash to drop off loot.

There’s some minor modding, but the online aspect mostly prevents any serious modding, so if you’re into playing modded Fallout: New Vegas or Fallout 4, there’s not going to be much potential to do that.

Monsters didn’t get all that much new stuff from 4. You have Scorchbeasts, which are basically repurposed dragons from the Elder Scroll series. Enemies can get kinda bullet-spongy late game, but IME it wasn’t nearly as bad as very late-game Fallout 4.

I liked most of the biomes on the world map. Did not like the Ash Heap, which is a kind of dreary gray without much variety.

Managing weight and inventory is a more-significant part of the game than earlier titles, as you have limited storage, and you can’t just hoard everything.

Summary: As a singleplayer, mainline item in the series, I’d call it a weak entry but worth the cost of admission (even at regular price). If you have friends that you want to play multiplayer Fallout with, it’s the only way to do that, so a no-brainer. If you’re into building, decorating, and showing off your created CAMPs to other players (I am not) you might really like that aspect, as few games let you do that. It’s much better than when it was initially released, when it was a trainwreck.

From what it sounds like, I think Atomfall might line up more with your tastes if you want to buy something on Steam right now.

There’s also all the Fallout standalone fan content like Fallout London assuming the latest FO4 patch didn’t break it.

I personally enjoy Fallout 1, 2, and Tactics but those are a far jump from the modern first/third person games. I can gives tips, point you to mods, and similar non-Fallout games but if you don’t enjoy classic cRPG or Tactics games it won’t be your taste.

If you enjoyed 4 youll like 76, but as a nv fan you probably will dislike it

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I played it on a free weekend and didn’t like it at all.

The combat mostly felt like paper tigers. I just wasn’t having fun, but I can’t remember any specific details anymore. This was a couple years ago, but after they added NPC quest stuff.

If you enjoyed fallout 4s gameplay loop then its a pretty fun game to play while listening to a podcast or something but if not the game is extremely dull. G-Mod is wonderful with endless hours of gameplay and modes, so highly recommended

It’s def worth it 90% off and playing solo can be boosted with certain in-game perks.

I play it on Garuda Linux, just started without changing anything and it works without problems. Your mileage may vary ofc.

It’s a great game if you enjoy building bases and you’re willing to pay for the subscription. The game is significantly worse if you don’t pay for Fallout 1st. If you want more of the dialogue driven RPG, 76 is not the experience for you. There are a lot of great things about the game, but it’s quite different from the other Fallout games. 90% of the time, you are running around collecting junk to build up your CAMP. There are no dialogue choices that impact the story in any meaningful way. There are only a handful of groups of NPC’s and basically no characters are particularly interesting or memorable. The game is completely focused on collecting materials and building CAMPs. The subscription is almost required once you progress far enough in the game. If that is a dealbreaker for you, then I would say you should not go for it.