Fallout 76 has been around for five years, and in that time it’s worked hard to establish itself as one of the more poorly received games in the franchise’s history. From the moment it was released, it became a troubled title, with many fans debating Bethesda’s decision to move from a single-player model to an MMORPG, a live service.
Despite lengthy attempts to correct Fallout 76’s course, which included the release of expansions, countless updates, and bringing in third-party studios to add resources, the game is still far from realizing its full potential. Now Fallout 76’s Season 12 update has dropped, and with it, Bethesda revealed a roadmap that will last until June 2023.
There is one key problem: the road map is practically empty.
The few that remain
It’s been a while, but IGN posted a unique and entertaining report who talked about the “weird players” who still maintain Fallout 76’s foundations. At the heart of the game is the community, but the densest part of that core is made up of role players and creators who basically have to drum up. own entertainment in the game.
Recently, Bethesda Game Studios revealed its plans have been supporting Fallout 76 for many years coming, stating that Fallout 5, which will likely be the next game in the series, is nothing more than a one-pager – little more than a concept.
Based on the latest roadmap (released just a few days ago) that support is waning though. There’s nothing new in the books until June 2023 – honestly, nothing is even teased for the future. In fact, the run for the next six months is a series of events that fans have been replaying over and over for quite some time now.
Fans expect quality-of-life updates and improvements, but with each update, they seem to be further and further away from reality. Last year, Bethesda revealed a massive roadmap that included many impressive updates, including the Nuka-World expansion and the game’s first off-map adventure, The Pitt.
Although these were also quite disappointing, at least they existed.
Not set for change
There are currently no plans for Fallout 76 – at least not that we know of. There’s been a huge amount of wasted potential, and with it twelve season delivery and the roadmap for the first half of 2023 is so disappointing that many players are abandoning the game.
Here are some of the comments we collected on Twitter that highlight some of the sentiment coming from the community right now:
- “I need to stop auto-liking your tweets. I don’t like these. We want content!’ – SakuraiChune
- “The new twist is not new content. You’re lazy as always. – DeadCarnival
- They need to make Seasons more user friendly to get me back to playing the game. I am sorry. But being forced to play 2+ hours every night for months on end just to finish the season is absolutely ridiculous. I lost all interest in Fallout 76. – DaWhiteBrotha
- “Actually, I’m looking forward to either a new quest, a new main story arc, a massive side adventure… that kind of content. Something that makes us forget that you decided to give it all to ESO instead. – Zech
If we use SteamCharts.com as a representative example, it seems that even the new season was not enough to attract a significant number of players. In February, the peak player count reached 12,954 players (on Steam), which was the lowest monthly peak for the game since August 2022. September and October saw The Pitt relaunch, but the ecosystem has steadily declined since then. then.
Even the game featured on Game Pass and PS Now didn’t do much to grow the community.
Fallout is an iconic, post-apocalyptic franchise with roots dating back to the 1990s. It’s Bethesda’s flagship series, but since the release of Fallout 76, it’s failed to gain traction. Fallout 4 was the last main title in the series, released in 2015, and Fallout 5 is currently not expected until the late 2020s.
Will Fallout 76 cause the series to collapse?
For more Insider Gaming coverage, See our report on the subject The series of Assassin’s Creed games Developed behind the scenes at Ubisoft.
