Fallout 76 is finally playable on Steam since the Wastelanders update. However, after the official release of the game on the platform, there were tons of bad reviews – which are slowly being outweighed shortly thereafter.
Since the Wastelanders update for Fallout 76 was implemented today, April 14, at 2:00 PM, the game is playable on Steam for the first time. PC players had to access the Bethesda.net client since release. Those who already owned the game for PC received a free Steam version.
Shortly after the Steam release, the reviews were already “mostly negative” with only 34% positive votes. That’s almost two-thirds of players who rated Fallout 76 poorly on Steam.
A similar picture emerged during the release in November 2018 on Metacritic. Fans bombarded the game with negative reviews – among other things out of frustration. However, the situation on Steam improved within a few hours.
Harsh criticism of Fallout 76 is improving quickly
Where does the negative criticism come from? The criticism in the reviews appears similar to the release on Metacritic. This includes many unreflective reviews, some written with only 0.1 hours of playtime and one point in order to be posted.
In the more detailed reviews, players talk about technical issues. They couldn’t play, the game would crash, or it wasn’t optimized enough for PC. There are even some players who complain that Wastelanders is not a new game at all, but just a DLC – although Bethesda communicated it from the start as a free update.
Fallout 76 also had technical difficulties during the beta and at release in 2018. Over the years, Bethesda has worked hard to resolve these issues. Nevertheless, there can still be crashes. In our gaming sessions, we couldn’t find this issue.
How does it look now? By around 6:45 PM, the reviews improved from “mostly negative” to “balanced” and increased to 41%. By 7:30 PM, they were already at 45% positive, with a rising trend. The newer reviews are a bit more frequently positive than negative.
On the shop page, Steam standardly summarizes only the reviews from players who purchased Fallout 76 through Steam. With other settings, the ratings look different:
- Reviews in German and English are “mostly positive” with 72% positive reviews from 712 reviews
- Across all languages and settings, there are even 1533 reviews, of which 67% are positive with the status “balanced”
The players show a higher playtime in Wastelanders and praise the improvements it brings, such as the NPCs, into which the developers have invested a lot of work or the new story that motivates them to play again.
Those who want to see for themselves can download the update for free now if they already own the game. MeinMMO author Benedict Grothaus has also shared his impressions in his detailed play report on Wastelanders for you.
Have you played Wastelanders yourself? What are your first impressions of the new major update?
