As soon as I entered, I was reminded of Elder Scrolls Online and other Bethesda games. It has the same compass ribbon approach and no mini-map, and the lock-picking mini-game hasn't really changed since Morrowind. Worse, it has the same dynamic difficulty-adjustment system that makes all progress pointless. Still, this didn't come as a surprise so I can't complain.
Levelling-up involves allocating points to attributes and choosing "perks", which are basically skills. Beyond level 50, you don't get the attribute points, just the perks, which you can configure in various loadouts. Weirdly, these loadouts allow changes to attribute values. It makes no sense to say that someone is stronger and less intelligent when they're questing than they are when they're crafting, but that's how these things work. Once you have a decent set of perks and have maxed them all out, you can scrap the ones you won't be using to obtain points that let you level up "legendary perks", few of which seem particularly useful.
There's no maximum level but, because level 50 is where the attributes-levelling stops, I figured I'd play until I was level 100. I actually stopped at 116, thanks to a double-XP weekend that came up immediately before some new content I wanted to try. I saw several characters with a level higher than 1,000; 1,326 was the maximum I spotted.
Because of the dynamic difficulty adjustment, if you level up in a fight then so do the mobs you're fighting. This isn't much of a problem at higher levels because the incremental change is small, but if you're level 12 and suddenly the mobs coming at you are level 13 and you haven't had a chance to increase an attribute and add a perk, you could be in trouble.
The new content is riddled with bugs. There are still bugs in older content, too. One quest asks me to find something in a locker in an area with no lockers. Another asks me to speak to a person in a four-area zone (Atlantic City) that I can't visit except when running it as an instance, in which case the person I'm to meet isn't there. I didn't bother trying the other off-map zone (the Pitt), which perhaps I should have but I came to these late. The reason I came to them late is because having been told that I needed to speak to a flying-machine pilot to fly there, I figured I should speak to the flying-machine pilot to fly there. It turned out I needed to hit ESCAPE R to go there.
To quit the game, by the way, you have to hit ESCAPE Z then scroll down to the tiny "quit" at the bottom of the menu. That wasn't obvious; I had to look it up when I'd finished my first session and wanted to log off. When you restart, you don't restart where you logged off, either, you start nearby (where "nearby" means "oh, around there somewhere").
One of the features of the Fallout universe is you get to wear powered armour. Most players do kit their characters out in this. I didn't. The reason I didn't is that it was too heavy to lug around. For the first maybe 75 levels, until I got the right perks (which are distributed randomly), I was perpetually over-encumbered and couldn't fast-travel anywhere. It transpired that the reason for this is Fallout 1st. OK, so normally when I start a new MMO that has a subscription model, I take out a subscription. Fallout 76 has one, which is calls Fallout 1st. Unfortunately, it doesn't make this at all clear. I looked to see how to subscribe, didn't see the word "subscribe" anywhere, so figured it didn't have a subscription. Fallout 1st seemed to be some kind of pay-to-win package of goodies you could buy as a one-off. By the time I realised that no, it was the subscription, I knew I wasn't going to be playing for a great deal longer so I didn't take it up. Anyway, if I did have the subscription then I could have had an infinitely-large store for all my crafting components (known in the game as "junk"), meaning that I could keep all the heavy stuff in my regular storage box. Without Fallout 1st, I was limited in what I could keep, and that didn't include power armour. I only noticed that Fallout 1st was a subscription when I tried to buy it from the game store with all the secondary currency ("atoms") I'd picked up from inadvertently completing challenges during play. I expect my experience would have been somewhat different if I'd been wearing power armour against some of the solo-instance bosses, instead of sniping them at distance, running out of range of their two-shots-kill weapons and jabbing myself with a stimpack every thirty seconds.
Each instantiation of the virtual world only holds 24 players, which is quite cosy and reminded me of the early days of MUDs. I could have made some friends there, were it not for the fact that there's no communication whatsoever except through emotes. Worlds that small don't need guilds, but they do need communication. Also, although I was asked to join a group many times (which increases XP gain even if you're doing separate things), I never found out how to accept the offer. Clicking on it opened up some kind of clunky friends interface. I guess I could have looked it up, but that isn't really the point. If you want people to group together and for communities to form, you make it blindingly obvious, not "whoah, what the hell is this?".
The stories associated with quests are pretty good. They would be better if they didn't take so long to complete that it's hard to remember what the point was. Some of them were of the tiresome "prove your worth" or "earn our trust" variety, but on the whole they were well thought-out. The main story quest ends just after you launch a nuke, or at least it's supposed to. I launched the nuke, but hadn't previously visited a location that I needed to have visited so as to open up the final scene. Trying to discover where this was could have been easier (there were 18 locations to visit and I'd only visited 17, but I didn't know which one I was missing); it rather took the edge off the feeling of success. Quest markers in instances are often missing, except for one on the exit indicating where to go for the next quest that you're not doing.
Oh, and having a cut-scene conversation as part of a quest and being attacked by mobs while having that conversation really ought not to happen.
The world-building is good. It reminded me of The Secret World (although TSW's is better). Mountains are largely comprised of stone slabs just slightly too high to jump onto unless you have some kind of rocket boost on your power armour. I did like being able to jump down safely from tall cliffs by landing on slightly-sticking-out slabs, though. Parts of the world have noxious gases, so player characters have to wear a face covering to visit them. As a result, you never see another character's face, it's always hidden under a visor or a gas mask or something. This is not a good idea if you want players to identify with their characters.
There aren't many different kinds of mobs. Some, such as supermutants all look the same except for their weapons and armour. In solo instances, there are never-ending swarms of mobs at the start that you can kill indefinitely, they're continually replaced; it's easy XP, if you want easy XP.
Fallout 76 does have housing which it calls C.A.M.P.s (a forced acronym for "Construction and Assembly Mobile Platform"), and because it's a small world they're out in the open: anyone can visit them. I quite liked this idea. You can fast-travel to them for free (if not over-encumbered) so they're very handy for that if nothing else. You can set up crafting stations there and grow food, and set up an ally who'll give you an easy quest every two days. There were three issues I had with them, though:
1) Some C.A.M.P.s were flagged as having goods to sell, but actually finding what object counted as the vendor was often something of a trial.
2) C.A.M.P.s don't persist when you log off, so if someone else builds one where yours goes then you have to set it up somewhere else instead. This happened to me when the game decided to place an award-winning show home from some other shard right where my camp was; I got around it by spending my free atoms on a second C.A.M.P. that I put close to my main one.
3) The owner of the C.A.M.P. is shown by account name, not character name. My account name was RichardBartle. This was bad for immersion reasons, but fortunately no-one knows who I am any more and communication was impossible anyway, so I didn't get any hassle from it.
There are some unique boosts in the game, namely magazines and bobble-head figures. As usual with unique boosts, I kept them for when they were really, really needed but never decided that one was indeed really, really needed. Maybe they're replenishable after you've used them, but I didn't ever try one to find out. I did try out some of the freebie group-gift boxes I received (you get a free something every day you log in), which had some effect on me and those around me. Sometimes, several people opened theirs at once, which used to happen in The Secret World. Unfortunately, unlike with TSW, it was never quite clear what the effects were. Little cartoon animations appeared from time to time that seemed to be telling me something, but gawd knows what it was.
Despite the impression I may have given in writing all the above, I did quite enjoy Fallout 76. The world itself was well-conceived and the players were friendly if uncommunicative. I could have kept playing if I hadn't long run out of things to do. Dynamic difficulty-adjustment is its worst feature, but can be lived with if you accept it as a fact of life from the outset (which I did).
To round off, here's an obligatory screen shot of my character falling through the game's architecture.
