Fallout 76

Fallout 76 was orginally released on PC, Xbox, and Playstation consoles.

Fallout 76 is an online action role-playing video game released on November 14, 2018, by the Maryland-based game publisher Bethesda Softworks. Fallout 76 is the narrative prequel to the other games in Bethesda’s Fallout series with their previous title being Fallout 4 released in November of 2015. Fallout 4 sold 12 million copies and grossed over $750 million dollars within the first 24 hours of its release and achieved both critical success and a dedicated player base. Due to Fallout 4’s notable status within the gaming community Fallout 76 proved to be a highly anticipated title with equally high expectations. However, on the game’s release date players quickly realized that Fallout 76 was plagued with a myriad of problems; from shoddy gameplay mechanics to immersion-breaking bugs to a misleading in-game store, Bethesda released an unfinished game with a AAA price tag of $59.99 USD. The reaction from players was swift and damning.

On the surface level, the controversy surrounding Fallout 76 seems simple; Bethesda released a poorly made product and suffered the consequences critically and financially. However, several underlying ethical issues, including pressure from the gaming industry and toxicity in the gaming community, complicate the situation.

Premise and Gameplay

The Fallout series is set in an alternate timeline where decades of deteriorating Sino-American diplomacy led to a thermonuclear fallout in October of 2077 called the Great War, which lasted all of two hours, resulted in billions of casualties, and irrevocably altered earth’s climate and ecosystem. Fallout 76 takes place twenty-five years after the Great War in West Virginia, where the player character has been living in Vault 76, a fallout shelter built by a company called Vault-tec. The event that begins the game is Reclamation Day, the day in which residents of Vault 76 are required to leave the shelter and begin efforts to re-colonize the Wasteland.

View from inside Vault 76 after Reclamation Day.

Fallout 76 is structured as an open-world experience with missions and activities scattered across the map for players to experience at their leisure. Due to this structure, many players may not have experienced the storyline in its entirety or even in order. However, missions generally revolve around four fallen Wasteland fractions - the Responders, Raiders, Brotherhood of Steel, and The Enclave - and the player’s attempts to finish the work of eradicating the Scorched using the resources that they left behind. The player character eventually comes to learn that the Scorched are ghouls infected with the breath of the Scorchbeast, an enemy creature awoken by the Great War, and must defeat the Scorchbeast Queen to end the plague.

Since Fallout 76 is a multiplayer online game and missions have to reset regularly for new players the Scorched are never truly eradicated. However, they don’t appear in any other Fallout games so the narrative of Fallout 76 can be assumed to be resolved by the events of Fallout 1.

Ethical Concerns

Harassment Online

Gaming is that it transcends age, race, and location. Over 214 million people in the U.S. alone play digital games regularly and in 2020 the industry generated more than $159 billion dollars in revenue, more than the global movie industry and the North American sports industry combined. The community surrounding gaming is huge and multi-faceted but for the subset of players who identify as ‘gamers’, a disproportionately small yet vocal subset of toxic and entitled individuals are responsible for giving them a bad name. No group understands this better than the people who work in video game development.

Gamers have been known to bombard developers on social media with racist and sexist rhetoric as well as generic cyberbullying and death threats. Some recent instances include harassment surrounding the release of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us 2 and CD Project Red’s Cyberpunk 2077.

Cyberpunk 2077 suffered a similar fate to Fallout 76 in that it was released incomplete with game-breaking bugs and many features promised by the marketing team having gone unfulfilled. Many players were also disappointed by the narrative, which boasted three unique story arcs and game-altering dialogue options that would ultimately make every playthrough unique but turned out to be inconsequential to a singular, pre-determined storyline. A couple of hours spent in Cyperpunk 2077 reveal that the game could have benefited at least a few more years in development. However, after multiple release date delays, the developers began receiving death threats online, which caused CD Project Red to rush development and ultimately release an unpolished product.

The Last of Us 2’s release caused a different kind of scandal than Cyberpunk 2077 and Fallout 76. The game was free from unacceptable technical, narrative, and administrative failures. In fact, it became the most rewarded game in history in 2020 after securing 261 wins. Naughty Dog instead earned the ire of gamers with its divisive storyline, where the main character of the first Last of Us game, Joel, is brutally killed in an act of revenge by the daughter of one of Joel’s casualties, Abby. Naughty Dog employees from many different departments received harassment for the writer’s decision to kill off Joel the way they did, including the writers themselves, game developers, and directors. Abby’s voice actor, Laura Bailey, also received an abysmal amount of harassment and death threats from angry gamers.

Harassment is so prevalent within the gaming industry that the culture has normalized it. In the case of Fallout 76 its release was buried in so much controversy that the reality of the consequences falling on Bethesda employees went largely unreported. However, Matt Frary, Director of PR at Bethesda, did take to Twitter to remind those who used Bethesda’s press inbox that “I don’t appreciate being told I deserve to die”.

Matt Frary addresses death threats as a point in his PR box notes on Twitter.

As described in the case of Cyberpunk 2077, Bethesda was under a lot of pressure from the gaming community to release Fallout 76 on time despite whatever challenges or setbacks they may have faced during development. Bethesda’s leadership team fully understood the negative backlash that their team would face due to too many delays, and as in the case of The Last of 2, they also recognized that even their best work was capable of earning them the vitriol of players who had been fans for years and high expectations for this title.

Death threats are used as a semi-legal method of gaining social control over other people. Subjects of repeated abuse often face the development of new psychological and physical disorders as well as the worsening of old ones. Because they are constantly suffering from the fear of their abuser’s threats being carried out, many victims become paralyzed by it, unable to complete their daily tasks, work, or sleep. With the internet ushering in the Golden Age of death threats, victims are able to receive more abuse from more sources than ever before.

The pressure that the Bethesda team was under during the development of Fallout 76 was not conducive to a healthy work environment and did not allow devs to produce their best work. This factor, along with others, concluded in the release of an incomplete product that perpetuated the cycle of abuse from gamers.