It Was Lonely In The Wasteland

[NEW SAVE]: Charles

Survivor’s log dated 14 December, 2102:

I’m recording this from my camp just outside of Whitesprings. It’s dusk, and I can hear some feral ghouls roaming around, but I’ve placed enough traps to fry a pack of yao guai. I’m torn up pretty bad from a fight with some mutants — my weapons hardly scratched them, and I burned through my supply of stimpaks trying to brute force my way past them. After a half hour or so, I gave up — those stimpaks had made me so damn thirsty that I could hardly walk straight. I wandered around for a while trying to find some water. I would have taken anything at that point, rads be damned, but I was lucky enough to stumble across someone’s water purifier. There was a big shack nearby that was covered in all sorts of blinking lights and fancy decorations. Whoever owned the place was clearly pretty well traveled. I called out to see if anyone was there, asked if I could have a bit of their water. Normally I’d stay away from people like this… but I was desperate.

Another human emerged from the shack, dressed in preacher robes and one of those novelty helmets that let you drink beer through a straw. They seemed nice enough. I shouted hello again, and even waved in case they couldn’t hear me for some reason. Still no response.

At this point, I was ready to just help myself. I moved toward the purifiers to grab a few bottles. I hadn’t taken more than two steps before he pulled out a laser pistol, and a pretty flashy one at that. I stopped and asked them again if I could have some water. Still nothing. I decided to take my chances and swipe some, but before I could get any water he blasted me in the back, instantly knocking me down. He ran over to me, took my sack of junk, and started performing these… rude gestures over my body. Three hours worth of exploring, all lost in an instant.

At first, I thought things like this were my punishment for oversleeping on Reclamation Day — the day all of us vault denizens have been looking forward to for a quarter of a century, when we would leave the vault and rebuild civilization on the war-torn surface. But since I left, it's become increasingly clear that there isn't much in this place that’s worth reclaiming. I’ve been following in the footsteps of a group called the Responders who tried to save a small part of West Virginia and failed, succumbing to some sort of plague. All that remains of them are corpses to rummage through, computer logs to pour over and recordings to listen to as I wander through this hellhole that was once Appalachia.

The wasteland is a lonely place. And it’s only getting lonelier.

I was excited to play Fallout 76.

Yes, I know plenty of other people were also excited for it, and I’m not cool for liking something that was hated by so many others (The Last Jedi taught me that). But Bethesda’s announcement of a new Fallout game came at a perfect time for me — I had just finished Fallout 4 and started a playthrough of New Vegas. My friend group constantly talked about the series’ lore, so the prospect of being able to share a new Fallout experience with them seemed like a dream come true. I preordered the game instantly and began counting down the days until it was released.

By now, the disastrous saga surrounding the launch (and much of the first year or so) of Fallout 76 has been documented to death. Every gamer and their grandmother knows about the deluge of bugs, scummy microtransactions, and promises that Bethesda shirked in favor of starting their live service experiment as soon as possible (including the outrageous price tag they placed on private servers). But this isn’t another Bethesda hate-rant, nor is it blind praise for a company trying to squeeze every last penny out of a franchise. Despite its glaring flaws, Fallout 76 has accompanied me through my own nuclear apocalypse and societal collapse, ingraining itself as a part of my identity — for better or worse.

At launch, Fallout 76 was a pretty lonely experience for me. The beta hadn’t convinced any of my friends to spend their measly high school savings on the game (a smart move considering that it was pretty easy to find copies for 20 bucks within a few months). So, on launch day, I stepped out of Vault 76 on my own and was instantly thrown into the buggy, remote West Virginia wilderness.

My first few hours weren’t completely devoid of company. New players are directed toward a few vaguely disguised tutorial areas, meaning that I learned to craft armor and cook a meal alongside groups of my pre-ordering brethren. These early hours felt both frantic and hopeful. We all knew that there was an entire Fallout game waiting for us just out of our view, but for now we were all brought together, given a chance to feel the sense of camaraderie that was possible in this game. Players would drop crafting materials for one another, exchange emotes, and even say a word or two over the proximity voice chat. But these shared experiences didn't last long. Some players sped through the main quests and others took to wandering off on their own; seeing another human became rare. Finding their CAMPs — home bases that allow you to rebuild your own little corner of Appalachia — was even harder, as most players kept them hidden or heavily defended, lest they be destroyed by mean-spirited passerby. And while Bethesda had been clear that playing solo was totally viable, it seemed that a general distrust of other players kept people from cooperating in the wild. The population density of each server didn’t help much either, with a maximum 24 players spread across a massive map. 

I hesitate to completely dismiss the fun that can be had during random encounters. There have been swaths of articles written about players who have used the world of Fallout 76 for fun and wacky roleplaying opportunities, from creating a theater troupe to setting up shop as a doctor. There have always been kind and creative people playing this game, but, in my experience, they are few and far between. Most players seem to prefer to play isolated from anyone else on the server, and it’s hard to get behind the idea of reclaiming Appalachia when the people you’re supposed to be working with could screw you over at any moment.

It’s also hard to believe in the goal of restarting civilization when there’s nobody to restart it for. Fallout 76 has no human NPCs, a creative choice for which Bethesda has given multiple reasons, from wanting the other players to fill that role to it being a thematic choice. The chunk of West Virginia where the game takes place wasn’t targeted by the bombs that were launched during the Great War, and in the 25 years that your character stayed safely underground, an entire generation of humans fought for survival on the surface. Some former first responders united to form the Responders, who protected the local people and taught them survival skills. Throughout the main quest, you learn that the Responders made a lot of progress in restoring civilization to the area; however, they were ultimately wiped out in their fight against the Scorched, a horde of people infected by a mysterious virus and turned into ghoul-like monsters. Much of your time early on is spent tracing their missteps through a tiring string of expositional devices. What makes this challenging is that there are no human NPCS — even iconic groups that are standard for the series, such as raiders or members of the Brotherhood of Steel, are absent. The entire story is told through audio logs, memos and a handful of robots.   

This decision never sat well with me. Interacting with other humans helped flesh out one of my favorite elements of the Fallout series: exploring what parts of humanity we would cling to when the structures of modern civilization were stripped away from us. This theme can be explored with non-humans: in Fallout 4, Nick Valentine was a synth grappling with his own artificial existence, and in New Vegas, the super mutant Lily Bowen slowly lost the ability to remember her grandchildren as the virus she was forcefully exposed to took over her mind. But I would argue that the Fallout games, like most post-apocalyptic media, are a chance for us to question what defines humanity, and that works best when dealing with actual humans. Fallout 76 hides the player’s chances to do that under a mountain of collectibles left by former residents of the region. Nearly 400 holotapes can be found in the base game, almost three times as many as in Fallout 4. Between these, the hundreds of handwritten notes, and the many terminal logs  packed into nearly every location, you can spend a decent chunk of your time just soaking in the stories of people who have long since abandoned the area. Some of these stories are just as deep as those found in other titles in the series, but there’s a palpable barrier between you and whoever is telling them to you. You just read and listen, following in the footsteps of ghosts.

[NEW SAVE]: Benny

Survivor’s log dated 20 April, 2104:

Got myself into a bind today. Bit off more than I could chew, found myself between a rock and a hard place — you know the deal. On my way to Clarksburg, I stumbled onto a mirelurk nest, and as my luck would have it there was a damn queen watching over the whole thing. My sorry ass was toting a few too many weapons at the time, meaning I couldn’t turn tail and run for it when she popped up out of the water. Once she started wailing on me, I could tell I was well and truly screwed. No amount of firepower or chems would get me out of that on my own.

Well, thank Atomic Jesus that my buddies were nearby. The two of them were up north at Wavy Willard’s doing who knows what. They must’ve heard me hollering from there, because they really hauled ass and jumped in on that queen just before she did me in. Even with three of us wailing on her it was still one hell of a fight. Being locked in the heat of battle, swapping out damaged pieces of armor and dropping ammunition for one another — I knew then that that’s how brotherhoods are formed. 

After a good five minutes of gunfight, the queen went down with a roar. We rushed over to her corpse to grab our rewards — a nice legendary weapon and a stockpile of meat for each of us. After posing for a picture, my friends rushed back to their task, leaving me still encumbered by the weight of a copious amount of firearms. I started toward Clarksburg once more with the residual fear from my encounter fading, replaced by a new feeling of friendship.  

I had played Fallout 76 on and off for two years, dipping in whenever there was a new bit of content that wasn’t just bug fixes and balances. Even so, I was never able to finish the main quest since it’s all but required that you have a team to tackle the final mission. I had pretty much given up and moved on from the game when, in 2019, Bethesda announced something that would bring me and thousands of other players back: humans were returning to Appalachia. Not only that, but you could interact with them using actual dialogue trees, much like in classic Bethesda games. Several locations were overhauled to house new factions, and NPCs were added into key locations along the main questline, places that had felt far too hollow before. Instead of just reading through terminals and looting corpses, someone is there to greet you along every step of your journey and share the process of uncovering history.

The “Wastelanders” update was released in mid April 2020, just as lockdown orders started to seem more serious than a two-week stint. When my high school first announced that they would be suspending classes, I moved a spare television (a $15 garage sale find, complete with blown out speakers) and my Xbox One up to my room. The days of screen time limits were gone in my household, especially since I had nothing else to do after the state of Michigan announced that all high school seniors in good standing wouldn’t be required to attempt any of the early online learning experiments. The small music shop where I worked was deemed a non-essential business, so I spent the next two months developing a routine of eating breakfast, exercising, and then playing Fallout. It was life in a capsule: time stood still even as I kept living. My parents had begun the process of separating just before lockdown, and my father had moved out of the house in March. Tensions between him and my mother, combined with differing levels of social distancing, meant that we rarely saw him. Without the ability to escape and hang out with my friends, I holed up in my room for upward of eight hours to play Fallout 76, escaping instead to a digital wasteland. 

Like most apocalypse media produced in the last two decades, Fallout 76 lost an element of escapism as a result of its fantasy brushing up against reality. I’m absolutely certain that nobody at Bethesda could have guessed how pertinent the main plotline about mutated bats spreading a deadly disease would be, nor would they have considered how shallow it feels to develop a cure for that disease within just a few quick fetch quests. The Fallout games have always leaned heavily into satire with their portrayal of a nuclear war and humanity’s subsequent descent into madness, but the new pandemic themes, combined with the sense of isolation that slowly creeps over you as you play, would have made the base version of Fallout 76 a difficult game to play during the early days of COVID-19. The Wastelanders update changed the impact of this mood. With the return of other humans, your attempts to reclaim Appalachia finally meant something, and the vaccine you spent all of ten minutes developing could help people other than yourself.

I bought two of my friends copies of Fallout 76 from GameStop for a ridiculously cheap price and dropped them off at their doorsteps. These were the early days of the pandemic, back when every family had different protocols on how to handle interactions with people that were outside their “bubble.” I don’t think I saw either friend until I was back in my car, and that was the most I would see of them for the next three months. We all logged on for the first time that day. I started a new character, leaving my old one behind. This time, when I stepped out of the vault, I wasn't alone. 

My friends and I spent the following weeks powering through the main quest, uncovering the new ones, and exploring every inch of the map together. Within a week we had completed the game’s ultimate goal of launching a nuke and fighting the Scorched Beast Queen, something I had never achieved on my own. This version of the game hardly felt like the one I had played at launch; not just because of the lengthy list of updates Bethesda had released, but because I finally had people to play it with. It was a new start at a time when almost everything else was put on pause.

Not long after, we started to settle into our own playthroughs, making our own decisions about which of the human factions to ally with and what rare items we wanted to hunt down. Hours would pass without a word spoken in our Xbox Live party, but that silence was not the least bit lonely. I always had someone there I could ask to help me finish an event or clear out a building full of feral ghouls. We traded resources, set up camps next to one another, and teamed up to take on high level enemies. This is how it felt the game was meant to be played, as a hybrid between solitude and comradery. 

In those early days of the pandemic, before we had started to figure out what the hell socially distanced relationships looked like, Wastelanders was a lifesaver. I not only got my wish of having connection with human NPCs, but with human players as well. It wasn’t a complete replacement for what we all lost during that time — a traditional human connection — but it served me well, keeping me distracted and entertained. I’d like to think that Appalachia became more of a home to me than my own was during those few months, and it’s thanks in part to the people who helped me to inhabit it. 

[NEW SAVE]: Henry Rupert Cami ???

It’s been four years since I spent the summer playing Fallout 76 with my friends. In that time, I have helped my mother move out of our old house, graduated from college, and prepared to start a master’s degree this fall. One of my friends joined the Army – I think he’s in Poland right now. The other sold his Xbox and does most of his gaming on a PC. Fallout 76 has been healthy while I’ve been away, adding two full-length campaigns and reaching new heights in player count, thanks in large part to the recent Fallout TV series.

I recently moved in with my mother again in an attempt to save money before starting grad school. With the wealth of free time I have, and having just watched the new TV series, I have been toying with the idea of starting a new save. I got the game on sale on Steam last year, but I’m still hesitant to start again. With the amount of changes Bethesda made, it’s practically a new wasteland. I also feel like I’m a different person. Returning to Appalachia feels like returning to my childhood bedroom during a time when the only place I felt comfortable was in a digital sci-fi future that was bleaker than my present. Fallout 76 was there for me when I needed it, but I’m not sure if it’s something I need right now. Appalachia is healing. The humans are returning. 

The wasteland is much less lonely than I found it.

Survivor’s log dated 12 May, 2108:

I emerged from the Vault today. For some reason, I couldn’t muster up any of the excitement that had been building during all those years underground. I felt the initial breeze of fresh air, and then… nothing. The outside world looked almost exactly like it did in my time-worn memories. I wandered down into Flatwoods, hoping that I might find something new to snap me out of whatever was causing my apprehension. All I found was the pungent funk of nostalgia, as if I had already made a lifetime’s worth of memories there.

Things were different, sure — but there was a feeling of familiarity that dampened a lot of the feelings of awe and curiosity that I felt like I should have been feeling. All of these notes, holotapes, data logs, even the people wandering around. I kept asking myself if it was worth it to me to lose myself in them.  

I’m not sure that it is. Maybe someday, years from now, when the world feels like it’s ending again, I’ll get the itch to return here. 

I’m watching the sunset over the New River Gorge Bridge from my camp right now. It’s not much — just a few workbenches and a lawn chair on a wooden platform. I could have put up some walls, or a flashy sign or some lawn ornaments, but I know there will be plenty of time to rebuild another new thing someday. For now, I’m content to enjoy this place for what it is, and for what it has been.