Fallout 76 - First Impressions #3 - Questing & Progression
2Let's start with progression. It all start with you waking up from Vault76 and going into the big open world of Appalachia. There, you'll discover the main storyline of this game. Also check out my first video in the series for more info. Basically though, you're chasing the Overseer who's trying to stop more nukes from being fired, from certain nuclear missile silo's which can be found in the area.
The main story incorporates storytelling and tutorial in an awesome fashion. You're learning more and more about the history of West-Virginia and its citizens through holotapes and terminals, while you're learning the game. You'll collect food, cook it, build camps, houses, do some crafting etc. All of this is explained in a steady pace, while you're adventuring and making your way through the quests.
Character progression is once again done via the SPECIAL system. Each level up, you get to pick an attribute to increase. Contrary to previous games, you start out with every stat at 1, and by leveling up, you can develop a certain style of play, by for example putting a lot of points in strength and endurance, allowing you to hit hard with melee weapons and carry a lot of stuff. Or take perception and Agility, and take the sneaky route, gunning your enemies down from afar.
A new addition to the game is the perk System, which is done by equipping perk cards. In previous games, perk choices were final when chosen after leveling up, but here, you're choosing perk cards which you can then equip. Every time you level up, you get to choose a perk card, for any attribute you desire. However, you can only equip as many perk cards as you have points in the corresponding atrtibute. So if I have 3 strength, I can equip 3 level 1 Strength perk cards. You can level up perk cards, by combining them. This does increase also their cost, which means that if I ahve 3 strength, I can only equip a single level 3 strength perk card, or 1 level 2 and 1 level 1 strength perk card, because that adds up to 3 strength again. I hope that makes sense.
The progression system allows for a lot of versatility this way, especially if you collect more perk cards, because you can swap them around during your playthrough. Only your attributes are definitive after picking them. You can always change perks on the fly, which is super useful and allows adaptation to certain missions or environments. You can equip perk cards that reduce super mutant damage for example, just after you spot all the meat piles on the ground.
Questing itself is very similar to previous games. There's a few ways that you'll get quests. You can walk into certain area's and then new quests just pop up. Terminals and holotapes and documents also reveal new quests and locations. sometimes talking to a robot NPC starts a quest. Furthermore, tuning in to radio stations and distress signals might get you to new places as well.
Completing quests earns you quite some experience and crafting materials, weapons and armor. Especially the main quest does a good job of steadily giving you rewards, which makes it very entertaining, even though the quests themselves are sometimes a little boring. Through the quests, I found lveling to be just at the right pace, not too slow, not too fast.
Quests are generally well written, as we've come to expect from BEthesda. Also the numerous holotapes can really immerse you into the new game, with some voicdeactors doing an amazing job of making you part of what their world used to be. I found myself listening to various holotapes and could imagine what they went through.
The main and major issue that for me just doens't work, is the lack of human NPC's. Questing feels extremely lonely. This whole game feels extremely lonely, given that its supposed to be a multiplayer sandbox game. You're wandering through the world, listening to these holotapes, but never do you see an actual person. Yes other players, but that ain't really working for me. I'll get to that in another video.
It's just a shame that the flow of quests and missions is never interrupted by a funny NPC, or shopping in a settlement, or joining a faction with humans, or talking to your followers, or something like that. I've found myself walking around for hours, not encountering anyone but some Scorched and Ghouls.
Fallout76 won't suffer from a shortage of things to do though. The map is absolutely huge, and everywhere I went, there were quests, events, sidemissions, enemies. The world is packed with things to explore, and you'l be able to easily sink hunderds of hours into this game, even if you're playing this as a solo experience. And that's one of the main reasons I've personally bought this game, because I want a game like that again, where I can explore for hours and hours on end. I'm really looking forward to that part. If someone wants to tag along though, once the game is out, just send me a message. Maybe we can hunt for goodies together.
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