Many Bethesda fans wrote Fallout 76 off entirely because it’s not a single-player RPG, and the myriad launch issues gave critics plenty of vindication. But there are players who’ve found something there, and have stuck with Bethesda’s online apocalypse through a whole bunch of updates that have broadly made it better. But even the Fallout 76 loyalists are not happy with Fallout 1st.
The $100 USD annual – or $13 monthly – subscription went live yesterday, and there were two big features at the top of the list: private servers and unlimited storage for your crafting materials. According to a big Reddit breakdown of known issues (via Forbes), neither of them are working how you’d want.
Private worlds are spawning with looted containers and dead NPCs, which has players thinking that these are existing game instances getting retooled as ‘new’ worlds. That’s a bit speculative, but this isn’t: anyone on your friends list can join your ‘private’ server at any time. That’ll be a problem if you’ve got a large friends list, especially since other premium members can theoretically stay in your created server forever.
Then there’s the new Scrapbox, which stores all your crafting components. Now there are multiple reports that scrop will disappear once it’s in the Scrapbox. That’s generally not how you want storage to work.
We’ve reached out to Bethesda for comment on these issues, but did not receive an immediate response.
I think there was a fair concern early after Fallout 1st’s announcement that all the criticism was coming from people who weren’t playing Fallout 76 – after all, optional paid subscriptions have been with online games for ages, and some players have managed to find the fun with F76. But judging by the ongoing meltdown in the subreddit, the regular players are not happy about any of this, either.