Fallout 76 is a recently released game that has been viewed poorly by critics and gamer’s alike. The game definitely has many negative points, but is it truly deserving of these poor ratings?

Game play is the core function of every single game, and Fallout 76 creates a game play experience based on what Bethesda promised. It works like any Fallout game normally does, with weapons and items that should be familiar to anybody who has played a Fallout game previously. Such items include radroach meat, stimpaks, and the Cryolator.

The map size is much larger in this game than in the previous release, Fallout 4. The game has you following an open story line in an open-world setting with very little direction as to what you should do after the opening quests. This leads to a broader direction that you can take, but has led some players into fighting monsters of a much higher level than themselves.

NPCs, non-player characters, are barely in the game, though.

“Fallout 76 does not feature any human non-player characters, as all surviving humans are controlled by active players,” one article by Chris Pereira and Matt Espineli on Gamespot said. 

Many players have expressed problems with glitches in Fallout 76. This has been a main complaint, and is especially justified with enough monsters spawning to crash a server. Monsters being so powerful that they can kill top players, and people becoming invincible without any immediate fixes by Bethesda is a problematic feature of this game. Even after a patch, Kotaku writer Ethan Gach said, “I booted up the game, and it froze and subsequently crashed before I even made it past the main menu.”

Bethesda has mentioned that they are going to fix many bugs in a big update in the coming weeks, so it may take a lot longer than expected to be able to fix all of the problems the game has.

Among other things, there have been a lot of complaints about the amount of players a server holds and how it affects game play. Many have shown that they do not see others often if at all in the vast map because there are only 24-32 participants per server. Some fixes have made server game play better for many reviewers, however.

Despite all this, the graphics in the game are phenomenal. When compared to Fallout 4, the graphics are very similar, but with small tweaks to performance. Although the game looks graphically pleasing, players are still upset about the lack of customization in graphics settings.

“Framerate [cap], VSync, and anti-aliasing are conspicuously absent from the in-game settings, and there’s no FOV slider, either,” said one PCGamer article by Wes Fenlon and Jarred Walton. 

Overall, Fallout 76 is not entirely bad, but it definitely has a lot to fix to be a worthwhile game. There are too many problems with it to have an exciting experience in play. I’d say that it is not horrible due to the fact that it has a great concept executed with only some problems that could be fixed by the developers.