But Fallout 76 was never supposed to be a MMO, it was supposed to be a “survival” game like Ark: Survival Evolved, or Rust, those kinds of games. Maybe you don’t know them? It’s not an MMO as far as there are no quests, NPCs and not that many players, but you still level up, level up mostly for crafting where you start out as a cavemen constructing primitive tools, campfires, spears and buildings made out of thatch/wood, progressing through taming some pterrodax through medieval age to smithing gunpowder and weapons, to crafting assault rifles, futuristic rail guns and taming T-Rexes.
I played the first one on my iPhone but I don’t have time for that kind of no-life’ing. It’s as demanding as Vanilla WoW if you’d lose your items upon dying with 24/7 pvp, where upon logging out your character is still in the world, just sleeping. The difficulty and commitment is brutal, even if you play carefully, build a nice base and hide, there’s no telling that at night someone won’t raid you, steal everything and enslave you (that’s what we were doing to newbs. They basically had to eat their own shit in order to die, to respawn and be free
)
Except, as retarded as that sounds, all the sense of achievement comes from basic premises of those games, that:
1) you have to grind hard and struggle with constant paranoia, to not lose your items/recover them upon dying (or kill others for their loot, but expect revenge at some point), and
2) seeing the sense of progress as you slowly level, make your way through the technological tree, expand your base to be like a city, get flying mounts etc (you still have to log in at least every 7 days to check on them, but unless players raid you, you’re fine)
3) related to 2, rewarding creativity in building, as you can build basically whatever you want with the basic “blocks” - castles, towns, slave pens, whatever. Actually that’s even what Fallout 4 achieved to some degree, with your settlement, however here you have way more things to do with the structures - paint them, set traps, build them on a raft so you can even create a mobile base/battleship/carrier if you’re creative enough. Still, even though they had this in Fallout 4, they decided to undermine it - all your base gets deleted just upon logging out (even just getting disconnected!)
Seeing as Bethesda can’t have a challenging game, which in itself is antethical to the very premise of this kind of game, and what’s more: upon dying you lose like 5 caps or junk items, there is no technological progression as 90% of Bethesda’s fallout is Power Armor and makeshift pipe firearms, pvp is broken and unrewarding, and you basically cannot leave any footprint on your server, I have no clue what they were thinking.
EDIT: There was actually a Multiplayer mod for Fallout 1/2 which did exactly what I described, except building of course, but I forgot the name. It was amazing, much better than this dud, but again I had no time for such a thing. Was super fun with friends though, you could also Steal from other people.
EDIT 2: it was FOnline and it was glorious:
