Fallout 76 is an entertaining compromise
In John Hersey's novelistic account of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the nuclear blast at once divides and unifies. It's the synchronising point for six parallel lives - six total strangers joined forever at 8.15am, 6th August, 1945. The idea of the nuclear blast as a kind of photographer's flash, framing and composing its victims in a single, baleful instant of universal transformation, has since become a staple of post-nuclear fiction. 73 years later, the Bomb again performs a synchronising function in Bethesda's Fallout 76, but to rather different effect. It exists here as a weekly public "endgame" event, triggered by gathering widely dispersed launch codes and assailing a control room, its arrival time and explosive radius marked on the map screen for all to see.
It's with this that Bethesda concludes our three hour demo, inviting journalists to witness the calamity from the hillside around Vault 76, the game's starting area and character creation hub. The countdown ends just as I fast-travel in, breaking off my solo investigation of a museum rumoured to contain traces of the Mothman, an old West Virginian legend. I don't even see the missile land. The air turns white, then crimson as the frame rate plummets. We shuffle in the glow, a gaggle of level 6 scavengers in mismatched leathers and party hats, watching the fireball rise out of the valley below. Then, like the fools of history we are, we tumble down the ravaged slope together, yelling and firing our guns as purple clouds hiss upward to meet us. Our bodies buckle and deform, like the flesh of cartoon characters: switching to my Pipboy menu, I find that my skin has become bioelectrical, with a chance of shocking anybody who touches me.
Soon, however, the rads overwhelm my health bar and I collapse between newly irradiated trunks. The holocaust will linger for a few hours, twisting the location's fauna and flora into extra-hazardous shapes. It will somehow spawn rare items and crafting recipes, a fierce temptation for any player with the armour, meds and determination to weather the horrors within. Then it will fade away, leaving the area much as before - until next week, at least, when another set of launch codes are spawned. Fallout has always taken great relish in such devastation, from its elegiac announcement trailers to Fallout 3's infamous Nuketown quest, but this is the first time a Fallout game has turned the apocalypse into a question of routine, a thing to gather around and re-enact, again and again.
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