Welcome to the Fallout universe. It’s a nasty place out here, with nuclear destruction and all. There’s monsters to hunt (or run away from) and settlements that desperately need your help.
While Fallout 4 was a definitive game in the series, Bethesda’s online excursion into the Fallout world, Fallout 76 was... less than well-received (even though it’s still getting updates).
The player base was pretty united against Bethesda: they were upset about a game with loads of bugs, downgraded graphics, annoying players, and a boatload of Bethesda’s infamous glitches.
But hey, there are memes aplenty. Here are some of the best memes about Fallout 4 — and how it stacks up to the infamous Fallout 76.
9 Open World Stories Be Like
As most open-world games do, Fallout 4 gives players hundreds of choices. Want to build your own village? Go ahead. The game starts with the player’s son, Shaun, kidnapped. Oh No! After a completely wacky revelation that (spoiler!) 210 years have passed since you saw the light of day, and.. well, the world’s ruined, your son is missing. But the son can wait. There are cans to collect and monsters to shoot.
8 Um, Where Are The Rest?
When looking at the series chronologically, well, it doesn’t make much sense.
Not too much time has passed in between games and Bethesda’s tech doesn’t improve the graphics so notably (more on that later). All in all, 76, players agree, seems like a big jump that reached too high — and what happened to all the other Fallouts in between?
7 Multiplayer Woes
The Fallout games have never been intensive story-driven experiences like other open-world games (looking at you, Red Dead Redemption), but the first few were entirely reliant on NPCs, who players fetched stuff for, killed stuff for, fought with, talked to and more.
Fallout 76 changed that. Bethesda promised a dreamy online world where players would be roving the hills of West Virginia with a cohort of friendly online players. In reality, it’s turned out like many online worlds, where people are people and those people are often kind of annoying.
In the game’s early days, proximity chat meant you’d be roving the hills of West Virginia to the soundtrack of the dreaded heavy breathers or gamers as foul-mouthed as you’d expect in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
6 You Had One Job
And that brand new, dreamy world, online and next-gen as it promised to be, didn’t quite seem.. right. A lot of fans and reviewers felt it was just a rehash of the graphics of Fallout 4 with none of the meat that made it feel like a typical Bethesda game.
All puff, no detail.
5 Glitches Galore
Which also meant glitches. And no, Fallout 4 wasn’t immune. Bethesda’s glitches are pretty infamous. Characters walking through walls? Check. Headless NPCs? Oh yeah. But glitches combined with a broken online experience sure made for good memes in the Fallout department.
In fact, it might not even be a Bethesda game without a few funny glitches adding some zest to the gameplay — and in a wacky world like Fallout, who knows what to expect anyways.
4 Hoping For Change
Players had high expectations for Fallout 76’s world. And who could blame them? It seemed like an exciting, innovative, new experiment in totally player-controlled online experiences.
But after a seriously underwhelming beta (which crashed for most players) the main game was so broken even a 50 gb patch didn’t fix it up, and even still, the player base was incensed against high DLC costs and more.
There’s plenty of players still deeply invested in Fallout 76’s world though: there’s countless clubs and gangs and competitions that harness that multiplayer aspects of the game.
3 Out With The Old
Even SpongeBob is not immune to Fallout memes. And comparing Fallout 4 to the beloved Crusty Krab means, naturally, Fallout 76 is the much less beloved Chum Bucket.
Metacritic agrees: the game has a 49% rating. That being said, the game still has a committed player base, and the world’s derision has moved on to games like Anthem — similarly troubled at launch.
2 Great Expectations
Fans were prepared to love Fallout 76 — and they DID love it. But yet another complaint was the Bethesda graphics engine, which had powered their games all the way back to Elder Scrolls 4. Oblivion, in 2006, was just not powerful enough to compete with next-generation games.
The graphics in Fallout games were beginning to look tired, compared to other open-world games like Far Cry New Dawn and more. That being said, with Bethesda’s Creation Club, you’re free to download mods that make the game far more pretty.
1 Maybe Try Again?
And that brings us back to SpongeBob—er— Fallout 4. Because the root of many fans Fallout 76 criticism (and memes) wasn’t anger at Fallout 76 per se — they were mad that the company they loved delivered a half-baked game.
From the game’s E3 presentation, it looked great: who wouldn’t be enticed by a entirely online world that promises endless adventures?
In reality, it looked different, and Fallout 76 will always be remembered with a chuckle (or grimace).
At least Fallout 76 provided great memes.