Fallout 76

Fallout 76 is an action role-playing game that can be played from either a first-person or third-person perspective. Set in the Appalachian region of West Virginia, the player controls a character who leaves a fallout shelter 25 years after a nuclear war left much of the United States decimated. The game is entirely online, and utilizes dedicated servers. While players are able to play the game solo, they are encouraged to complete quests with other players on the server.

Additionally, players can trade with each other, and engage in combat. Private servers are only available through the use of the monthly membership Fallout 1st.

Fallout 76 is a narrative prequel to previous Fallout games. It is set in an alternate history, and takes place in 2102, twenty-five years after a nuclear war that devastated the Earth. The player character is a resident of Vault 76, a fallout shelter that was built in West Virginia to house America's best and brightest minds. The player character exits the Vault on "Reclamation Day" as part of a plan to re-colonize the Wasteland.

Twenty-five years after the Great War, Vault 76 is opened up and its residents given the task of repopulating the Wasteland. Shortly after they emerge from the Vault, the player character is contacted by the Vault Overseer. She reveals that Vault 76 was given a secret mandate to secure an arsenal of nuclear weapons deployed throughout Appalachia in three still-functioning nuclear missile silos: Site Alpha, Site Bravo, and Site Charlie. The player character is directed to contact the Responders, a faction of emergency services personnel who tried to aid the residents of Appalachia during the war; however, they discover that the Responders evacuated after they came under attack from the Scorched.

The origins of Fallout 76 date back to 2013. During the development of Fallout 4, Bethesda Game Studios began conceptualizing what a potential multiplayer game mode would look like. The ideas presented were considered too large in scope, and were set aside in favor of the single-player campaign. During this period, Jason Hasenbuhler of the then-recently formed BattleCry Studios in Austin, Texas, met with Bethesda executive producer Todd Howard.

Hasenbuhler noted that several developers at BattleCry had experience with large multiplayer games like Star Wars Galaxies, and asked Howard to let the studio work on a Fallout multiplayer game using the ideas proposed. Bethesda greenlit the project after the release of Fallout 4 in November 2015. They had already begun work on downloadable content for Fallout 4 as well as preliminary work on Starfield, and felt a Fallout multiplayer game would help fill in the downtime between their games. BattleCry had recently placed their upcoming free-to-play game BattleCry on indefinite hiatus, and agreed to Bethesda's request.

According to review aggregator Metacritic, the PC and PlayStation 4 versions received "mixed or average" reviews, while the Xbox One version received "generally unfavorable" reviews.

The Guardian called the game "a pointless walk in the post-apocalypse" featuring "half-baked conflict and witless quests to unearth the dead". Eurogamer described the game as a "bizarre, boring, broken mess", adding that, shortly after its launch, it should be considered as a "failed experiment". Business Insider described Fallout 76 as "a jumble of disparate video game elements set loose in an online world, held together by a string of pointless fetch quests and experience points". Newsweek said that moments of the enjoyment during their review were "outweighed by the near-constant performance issues and poorly executed game systems", adding that they were disappointed in the game despite being fans of the series.