Almost Home
LATE ON MY FIRST DAY out of the fallout shelter, I wander into Flatwoods, West Virginia. I can hear weapons fire in the distance, and footsteps, both of which make me wary, but the message that was left for me outside the fallout shelter said to head here to get help, and I sure could use some help. I’ve already died once, and although I’ve found a gun, I am a lousy shot. I crouch low, trying to stay hidden, and crabwalk through the rubble around the main street. The last time I was here, it was to buy one-dollar seconds at the Fiestaware outlet and old-fashioned candies at the faux-Amish bulk foods store on the outskirts of town. Before they built the outlet mall, the only reason people stopped was to gas up on their way to somewhere else; it’s always been that sort of town. Now, the mall is gone, as are most of the gas stations and all of the people. This Flatwoods is populated only by other survivors, malfunctioning robots, and zombie-esque creatures we call “the Scorched.”
I’M IN Bethesda Game Studio’s Fallout 76, a survival game that marks the venerable franchise’s first move into multiplayer, online world-building. The year is 2102, and it’s twenty-five years after a devastating nuclear war. I’ve just been let out of Vault 76, a fallout shelter meant to house the best and the brightest, situated in rural West Virginia. In theory, it’s our job as players to rebuild the world, but we don’t have enough control over the narrative to do that. We can’t form governments or undertake large-scale environmental projects, and nothing we do in the game impacts the overall story arc. Instead of rebuilding, our characters kill the monsters, loot their bodies, build better weapons, then kill the monsters again.
This really isn’t my sort of game; I love computer games, but I usually play the ones called with elves and magic and simple targeting systems so that you don’t actually is fundamentally a first-person shooter game, and it requires skills and a certain bloodlust that I lack. There isn’t, at least at launch, much of a narrative. Instead, it’s what’s called a , meaning that the player can go anywhere and do anything, and there is no narrative thread that must be followed. It’s the kind of game players want to be good at instead of the kind of game they want to immerse themselves in. I will never be good at it. No matter how I try, I can’t seem to hit anything with my shotgun, though in real life I used to be a passable skeet shooter. Slashing at things with my machete seems to work all right, but it’s mostly blind flailing, and if it were possible, I’d probably hack myself to death before I killed my prey.
