Fallout 76 is the latest main entry in the Fallout franchise, boasting never-before-seen multiplayer mechanics that fans both love and hate. It was released in 2018, and since then, it has grown exponentially in terms of the overall player count and what it offers said, players. However, it had an extremely rocky launch that left fans disappointed and wanting more.
In the years that have followed the release of Fallout 76, countless updates have been applied by Bethesda Game Studios and the platform has stabilized somewhat, but there is still plenty of room for improvement. With a roadmap that never hits milestones on time and a thriving world boasting hundreds of thousands of players, it's about time Fallout 76 started ticking every box possible.
8 Don't Wander The Wasteland Alone
In Fallout 76, players have the ability to build C.A.M.P.s - bases that are limited only by the imagination of the explorer. There are vast constructs that can be applied, underground shelters to be built, and hundreds of smaller items to customize the location as the player sees fit. In a C.A.M.P., the player can also put in place an 'Ally', an AI character that offers some kind of boost to the player's character.
However, outside the C.A.M.P., players can feel woefully lonely, as Allies are unable to leave the confines of that build area. It would be a fantastic Fallout 76 improvement if players could wander the wasteland with an AI companion, or even a pet.
7 Battling The Bugs
While Fallout 76 has come on in leaps and bounds where the overall stability of the game is concerned, there are still many persistent bugs. At the deepest end of the spectrum, some of these bugs have existed for years, with players constantly experiencing them and reporting them to no real avail.
For instance, there's a bug that stretches players' bodies if they leave a suit of power armor. There's a bug that applies an awful depth-of-field layer if a player triggers VATS incorrectly. There's also a rather hilarious bug that sometimes causes enemies to freeze in place when they're killed. If there's one thing Fallout 76 needs to improve, it's ironing out these bugs.
6 Improving The Endgame
When a player 'finishes' Fallout 76, they're sadly left with very little to do. It's the plague of the MMORPG - eventually, a player will have simply sampled everything on offer. In Fallout 76, there are several questlines to follow, a vast assortment of side content, and the biggest map in franchise history, but ultimately, it's finite.
If a player reaches the lofty heights of completion and boasts a build that is several hundred levels into the game, they'll typically have very little left on offer. It becomes a game of repetition, with players re-doing the same daily quests over and over, working up the in-game scoreboard and completing repetitive tasks. If BGS could improve Fallout 76's endgame, it'd become a much better platform.
5 Open Up The Environment
There are far too many closed buildings in and around Appalachia in Fallout 76. It's a diverse game with lots to see and do, but ultimately, it feels very confined, with the vast majority of the buildings on display being totally boarded up. There was a similar vibe in Fallout 4, with many of the buildings in the dense city environments being shut down and made inaccessible to the player.
While there are technical limitations to opening up every building in the game, it would be a huge improvement if there were just more locations to enter. Fallout 76 boasts an enormous map, and there are more than a few areas of that map that feel too wide open and empty to be of any value to the player.
4 Deliver The Content
While Bethesda Game Studios has compiled roadmap after roadmap, almost nothing gets delivered on time, and when it does arrive, it can often feel like a disappointing delivery. For some players, the updates aren't meaningful, and the content they bring is over and done within a couple of hours.
Fallout 76 has a lot of potential where expansions and updates are concerned, but aside from a few storylines and some extra events, nothing substantial has been added for years. Most recently, Bethesda Game Studios, along with other development studios like Double Eleven, added a string of new events to the game. However, these events felt a little rinse-and-repeat, boasting the same mechanics in three different areas of the map.
3 Creating More Customization
It perplexes most players, but since day one, Bethesda Game Studios hasn't really added much in the way of character customization. There's a menu that can be opened up at any point during play, but it ultimately delivers very little in the way of value when it comes to truly customizing your player.
While the depth of customization comes from the many, many outfits that can be worn, the base character models can end up looking like clones of one another. For instance, since the game launched in 2018, Bethesda Game Studios has added just two or three new hairstyles to the create-a-character menu. As a base game, there are fewer customization options than in Fallout 4, which was released in 2015.
2 Ramp Up The Respawns
When players are exploring the world of Appalachia, they'll come across a wide variety of enemies. From hulking Super Mutants to the much less threatening Radroaches, there's a diverse spectrum of opponents to do battle with. However, one flaw in the Fallout 76 formula is that, once killed, these enemies take an age to respawn.
It's an MMORPG trope, and players typically will run off to complete some other tasks while they await a respawn. This creates an obvious issue, as almost every day, there's a challenge to kill a particular type of enemy. On a public server, the spawn points of these enemies deplete far too quickly, and it takes way too long for them to re-appear, leaving players frustrated and otherwise unable to complete their tasks.
1 Nothing To Nuke
As a part of Fallout 76's endgame, players are given the ability to launch nukes wherever they so desire on the map. It's a feature that creates a dynamic environment, changing the area inside the 'nuke zone' for a period of time, creating a treacherous area for all the players to explore. If a nuke is launched at a particular location, it can also trigger an endgame-level boss battle, which is the most common use of these nukes.
However, aside from two key locations, there really is nowhere else to fire a nuke at in Fallout 76. While players can fire them wherever they want, the vast majority of the map yields nothing when nuked - no wondrous creatures to fight, no missions that trigger, and very little in the way of an environmental change. For Fallout 76, a huge improvement would come from making nukes more valuable and introducing more nuke-related missions to the endgame.
Fallout 76 is available on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series.