Sometimes the vendor bots are tucked into the side of a CAMP, and sometimes the entire base is built in the pretense of a shop, but there’s no other way to put your base on the map and indicate you’re willing to interact with other players. Now, when I’m playing Fallout 76, I’m always thinking about purchasing and money and shops.įor instance, players are able to create in-game shops that mark their CAMPs on the map. The biggest changes that dramatically impacted my experience were all centered around the Atomic Shop, the in-game marketplace - but even non-Atomic Shop-related updates have rendered the game all about business. Others, like the new vault raid, were bad. Illustration: James Bareham/Polygon Shopping spreeįallout 76 has gotten some free updates. While the game depicts people in power lying and bullying their workers into silence, the Atomic Shop and in-game economy have quietly been setting up a similar feat. There’s a lot of meat on the bone here! I felt terrible reading about corporations draining as much as they could out of employees, especially because I would later read the workers’ side of the story. Instead, it focuses on concerns like unions, corporate violence, and dwindling economic security during a global war. Nuclear weapons and conspiracies aren’t really the thesis of Fallout 76 the game doesn’t retread ground covered by previous Fallout titles. Corporate executives gleefully email each other about the amount of money they’ll save on wages. Military bases are staffed solely with jingoistic, communist-hating robots that human commanders despise. Workers protest that they are unable to feed their families. You can find evidence that this ruined people’s lives. One of the biggest issues back then was automation, along with a lack of government support for workers and their families. Some of these are from after the bombs fell, but there’s a good amount of detail as to how West Virginia worked before the world ended. ![]() There are no human NPCs - or at least, not until next year’s Wastelanders update - but you can find records and diaries they left behind. Which is funny, because that’s a lot like my Fallout 76 friends list! When players emerge from Vault 76, they find the wasteland devoid of human life. Photo: Ross Miller/Polygon Appalachia and automation A nuke is obvious, but capitalism is more relevant and insidious - especially when it comes with monthly subscriptions and microtransactions for a full-priced title. The only problem is that that’s extended beyond the narrative and into the metagame itself. ![]() You know what does ring true to me? The real threat of Fallout 76 is capitalism. A mushroom cloud is an effective shorthand for conveying destruction, sure, but it means nothing to me otherwise. If the world is to end now, I suspect it’ll be through climate change. I never grew up in a world where I had to learn to duck and cover, or find my nearest emergency shelter. But in a way, maybe that’s not a bad thing. ![]() There’s no denying that nuclear weapons have completely lost their fangs in Fallout 76. The original games take place in the shadow of man’s incredible folly and greed, and the bombs reset everything that humanity had collectively worked for. Fallout 76 is the first game in the Fallout franchise to treat nuclear weapons as toys instead of looming, terrifying threats.įor some, watching a party of players hoot and holler as a mushroom cloud blooms on the horizon is antithetical to everything Fallout stands for.
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