10 Most BROKEN Video Game Launches Of The Generation
3. Fallout 76
Launching any massively multiplayer game can't be easy, doubly so when you're a developer universally renowned for launching buggy games too.
That's the uphill battle Bethesda was facing before Fallout 76 was released, and sure enough, it became self-fulfilling prophecy when it came out. That is to say: it was a mess.
Now, sometimes bugs are funny, in a laughable "Oh Bethesda" kind of way. Things like spinning NPC heads, that kind of thing. What isn't funny, however, is launching a massive "game as a service", online-only title that doesn't work.
Okay, "doesn't work" is a bit hyperbolic, but it's not far from the truth. It was a bug-riddled mess, something Bethesda thought they could gloss over with the myriad of purchasable items. The banning of players trying to improve the game with mods didn't help their cause either, as did removing the single player element.
Players were, in essence, trapped in a world with others all suffering the same problems and crashes. That fans had willing paid for.
Thankfully Bethesda have gone on to listen and sort out '76, making it a somewhat functional game now. But for a time, you couldn't even give this away.