Fallout 1st, Not the 1st, 2nd or 3rd Thing Wrong with this Game…

Bethesda. A name which, until recently, brought joy to many people’s ears. On the 14th November 2018, this all changed; the release of Fallout 76 was the beginning of a year of seemingly endless controversy. Why are we bringing this up again you ask? Well, after all the issues which have cropped up over the last year (which will be covered later) Bethesda still haven’t seemed to have learned their lesson. Fallout 1st, a new subscription service for Fallout 76 is coming for the price of £11.99 a month! Wait….what?! No – I am not joking.

To fully understand the absolute absurdity of this we must first understand what went wrong with Fallout 76. Although, a better question is probably what didn’t go wrong! For starters, the premise of the game already had many early sceptics when announced during E3 2018. It is an always-online Fallout game with no NPC’s and reliance on player interaction. I think most know all too well the issue with always-online games – trolls – so many trolls. To make this even worse there is a mechanic in the game which allows for the production of a nuke. These nukes can be fired on the map and destroy someone’s base they have spent HOURS on.

The in-game controversy was not even the worst part. A special edition of the game was available for pre-order called the ‘Power Armour Edition’. This edition was sold at a steep $200, advertising a canvas duffle bag as one of its selling points. The issue was that it did not come with a canvas bag and instead was a cheap tacky nylon bag. This instigated a barrage of complaints from the fanbase. At first, the Bethesda support team ignored the complaints until they faltered and said, “We aren’t planning on doing anything about it.” Clearly, this is not how to handle accusations of this nature, so eventually Bethesda relented; however, the fanbase was far from pleased. Players upset about the swapped bags were entitled to 500 atoms compensation. To put this into perspective, 500 atoms is worth around £5. That’s right!

It took until June the following year (2019) for Bethesda to start rolling out the promised merchandise, 7 months after initially intended… poor form Bethesda. But oh boy does it get worse. In December 2018 Bethesda decided to ban 3 players for supposedly cheating. The players argued that they were using mods but not using them to cheat, and as such, it became a case of the player against the developer with no concrete evidence either way. To put this to rest, Bethesda told the players they would be unbanned if they each wrote an essay on why cheating is detrimental to online games. This once beloved companies’ solution to potential cheaters was to treat them like school children; I honestly could not make this up if I tried.

You would think after that that they would learn, but no! In April 2019 Bethesda started selling Repair Kits in the Atom Shop. A shop that uses atoms as currency, which as mentioned earlier is purchased using real money. Repair kits measurably affect the game and thus it took Bethesda less than 6 months to break their promise of only cosmetic items being available from the Atom Shop.

Now this brings us to this week, and oh boy what a week it has been for Bethesda. They announced the release of Fallout 1st, a subscription service to Fallout 76 which costs £11.99 a month. What you get for this purchase is not even worth it and is the most blatant money-grabbing scheme I have seen in a long time. With it you get private servers, unlimited storage for crafting components and a placeable fast travel point; these features arguably should have been in the game from the get-go. With Fallout 1st the player also gains 1,650 atoms per month and access to the Ranger Armour Outfit. This goes to show how badly Bethesda knows its audience. The Ranger Armour Outfit is from Fallout: New Vegas, many fans favourite game in the franchise, (hilariously not even developed by Bethesda but instead the original creators of Fallout, Obsidian). Why would they hide a fan favourite item behind an obscene paywall? The only answer to all of this is that Bethesda is getting greedy and somehow has gotten away with it until now.

Luckily, players have started to push back. One man, David Chapman from Indiana, purchased the Fallout 1st domain before Bethesda could and riddled it with satirical explanations of what is on offer, such as “This sh *** y community has been begging for the ability to play alone in private worlds since before the launch of Fallout 76 (like what a Fallout game should be), and we begrudgingly announce that they are coming to the game with Fallout F**K YOU 1st.”

Further push back can be seen with players in-game putting up signs saying “Boycott Bethesda”. Not only this but both the Fallout and Fallout 76 sub-Reddit’s are riddled with ESSAYS on why Bethesda needs to take a step back and re-evaluate themselves.

In an industry increasingly surrounded by bad business practices (looking at you EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard) you cannot help but worry what the future holds when even once loved Bethesda has joined the ranks of trashy companies. Hopefully, all of the backlash will send a message, but one can only hope.