After four years, a Fallout 76 update is finally removing the most notoriously broken weapons in the Bethesda RPG game. While having overpowered weapons and abilities can be extremely fun in a single-player game such as Skyrim or Fallout 4, the nature of Fallout 76 as a multiplayer game means that other players have to deal with the ramifications of anyone who chooses to use one of the most broken Fallout 76 guns.
If you’ve ever seen a Scorchbeast Queen melt in seconds, you’ve probably run into one of these such legacy weapons. In particular, we’re mostly talking about explosive laser weapons here – that is to say, laser guns that have the ‘Bullets explode for area damage’ legendary mod effect applied. While you haven’t been able to get the explosive mod on laser weapons for years now, they were obtainable early in the life of Fallout 76.
Many of these weapons aren’t actually a big problem, but some of them can absolutely devastate the game’s hardest challenges in seconds. Perhaps most notorious among them is the Explosive Gatling Laser, especially when paired with the Two Shot legendary mod causing it to shoot additional projectiles. Bethesda has long seemed reluctant to take these weapons away from players who obtained them legitimately, but they have finally taken action.
The latest Fallout 76 PTS update removes the explosive mod from all legendary modules – the fix is expected to roll out on live servers with the next major update, Nuka-World on Tour, which is set to release in December. In a post detailing the update, Bethesda explains that “Although we are playing in a post-apocalyptic world, we still want to keep that world fair, fun, and inviting to all.” They say that the team is “implementing a system that will remove illegal mods attached to weapons that cannot be obtained in-game.”
The community has certainly reacted to this change positively on the whole – a megathread on the game’s subreddit is already at over 1,700 comments. “This should have been addressed two weeks after being discovered,” remarks the top comment, “but four years will do.” Another says that they’re pleased to see that “Bethesda is taking off the gloves to deal with one of the oldest, ugliest, most divisive problems.”
Meanwhile, Fallout 76 YouTubers and Twitch streamers have also chimed in on the issue, including some who have been away from the game but have taken the opportunity to return to discuss the patch. “I genuinely never thought this day would come,” says YouTuber LoneVaultWanderer, “I seriously thought that this was going to be swept under the rug and never talked about ever again officially.” Another YouTuber, AngryTurtle, is “excited” about the change, saying “I don’t enjoy using them – they are just too powerful.”
Personally, I got into Fallout 76 much later down the line, so I missed my chance to get one of these guns – and I certainly wasn’t looking to veer into the dark underworld of black market trading and potential duplicated or hacked variants that has bubbled up around the weapons over the years. It was fun to see one pop up once in a while, but perhaps less fun the third time in a session that one of the most climactic fights was reduced to ash in seconds. As one Reddit user says: “War. War sometimes changes.”
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