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Public teams improve, but don’t solve, Fallout 76’s social problemsNot a team player

Not a team player

Fallout 76recently kicked off itsnew seasonal update system. The opening season is called “The Legendary Run”, and gives the game another new arbitrary point-tracking system, this time called “S.C.O.R.E.”.

More significantly, it’s also opened up the option for players to create and join teams with unfamiliar players. I’ve been giving that a go and it’s… well, an improvement. A bit.

The more interesting part of this season is those public teams, as the game’s social system was previously a bit of a mess. I remember a notification popped up from the first player I met, saying that they’d invited me to be their friend. To this day I have no idea where I was supposed to go to actually see that invitation, or respond to it. The public teams are an effort to improve that. The idea is that any player can start a team at any time, which invites everyone on the server to join (although team sizes are limited to 4), and gives joiners a stat bonus depending on the type of team you select. Combined with the easy and cheap fast travel system, it’s refreshingly easy to join each other.

Actually communicating is another matter. There is no chat in game. I actually like that (especially the absence of voice chat). Maybe it’s to foster a sense of wilderness solitude, or maybe it’s just so that Bethesda don’t have to moderate the chat. But I like it. Because I playFallout 76mostly alone, happy to trade a bit and briefly help other players when I see them, and able to shoot back if anyone tries anything dodgy.

The downside of no chat system is that when you want to do more than that, it all falls apart. And however antisocial my playstyle, well, this is an MMO. Even I must accept that people want to chum up with strangers, and even I partake in it, now and then.

This team welcome me but I still have no idea what we were doing.

My experience with public teams so far has been a case of joining open teams, then spending between two and fifteen minutes trying to figure out what exactly we’re supposed to be doing together before getting kicked, frustrated, or told that an event attempt failed mere moments after I joined it.

I continue to have mixed feelings about the whole thing. Bethesda have promised more events and tweaks later in this season, and I do feel it is becoming a tangibly better game. But I’m not sure it’ll ever stop feeling like a game whose design is at war with itself.