You really can't help but admire the blinding shine on Bethesda's massive pair of brass ones, can you? Fallout 76 is not a game that has done well by any estimation. Lackluster content, a disastrous launch, heaps of missing features, and more than a few severe bugs secured its place as one of 2018's worst games.
Any other developer might attempt to work with the community to improve the game and come back stronger than ever. It worked for No Man's Sky, after all. Not Bethesda though. Instead of working to fix the game they instead... decided announce a new premium subscription service that locks most of the player-requested features behind a paywall.
The ironically-named Fallout 1st membership costs £11.99 per month, or £99.99 for a whole year. That's more than Xbox Game Pass or PlayStation Now, two services where you can play older, better Fallout games, incidentally.
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For your money, you're supposed to get access to private servers, 1,650 atoms per month, a survival tent, a scrapbox with unlimited storage, exclusive icons, emotes and a new outfit. Yeah I know, it's hilarious. I'm convinced Bethesda and Blizzard are competing to see who can screw up the most this year.
If this whole scenario wasn't scandalous enough, if Bethesda hadn't already made themselves look like the greediest clowns in the explored universe, it gets worse: This premium subscription service is - incredibly - broken.
According to a growing list of bugs and glitches that are being compiled over on Reddit, players are experiencing all manner of issues, including trouble with the private servers not working as advertised (ie, at all) and the previously promised unlimited storage actually deleting player items.
There are multiple reports of Fallout 1st players heading into these "newly created" and "private" worlds only to discover that they're actually neither of these things. Players are apparently finding dead NPCs and looted areas, suggesting that these are simply old worlds that have been recycled.
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It also looks like any player on a friend list is able to join a private world without actually asking for permission from the host player, which kind of throws the whole "private" aspect of the premium service into doubt.
Bethesda has since acknowledged these issues in a statement and has promised to start working on fixes. On the subject of players coming across looted items, the company believes this isn't an issue.
"When a Fallout 1st member starts a Private World, a dedicated World is launched on an AWS server," Bethesda explained. "Players who have seen looted containers upon login may be experiencing the expected behavior upon log out and log in. Loot is instanced for each player in containers."
"As Fallout 76 players know, if you loot a container on one server, and then log out and log back into another server, the container remains in a looted state for a period of time."
As for private servers not behaving like private servers, Bethesa admitted that this is a problem: "We understand this is not what players expected for their private worlds and we are looking to provide an option in an upcoming patch that will allow Fallout 1st members to restrict access to their servers more completely, preventing friends from joining without permission."
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Finally, the issue of the disappearing items. Bethesda's initial investigation into this problem apparently concluded that no items had actually gone missing, and that it was a display issue.
However, the company has "since found that a small number of players have in fact experienced a loss of scrap items after placing them into the Scrapbox and then loading into a world". Resolving this issue is Bethesda's "top priority."
Featured Image Credit: BethesdaTopics: Bethesda