My Yordie character reached Level 166 last week, and Zahava character reached 162.

Up close and personal with a Deathclaw

Nonetheless, I’ve taken the first step in leaving Fallout 76; I cancelled Fallout 1st. I’ve been selling off much of my weapons and armor inventory and moved all my valuable scrap to my inventory. It has been a saddening experience because there are many things I still like about Fallout 76, but there are several recent changes that have convinced me that the things I dislike reached a point that has killed the enjoyment I’ve found in this game. I’m not saying this is a bad game, there are some amazing aspects of the game, the world, and the gameplay, that I love. And I’m thrilled that Bethesda is focusing on eliminated some egregious defects and cheats (like “magic weapons”), but there three recent changes that have left me out and I’m moving back to Fallout 4.

One Wasteland

I understand the objective of One Wasteland but it is poorly implemented it has made exploring the wasteland a constant battle with high ranking lesser beings. This is relatively minor but as I discovered in Meat Week, those lesser beings can help overwhelm you when there are real monsters on the field. This is just too much “too much” for me personally.

The ‘Seasons’ Grind

I don’t dislike the idea of the Seasons feature, but I really dislike the way it drives you into a constant daily grind to keep progressing up the path just to get a lot of useless junk. Yeah, there are some cool things but plenty of not cool things (like the Ammo machine), and there are very useful items, like Legendary Scripts. Anyway, I made my way to 94% in Season 1 and I’m currently around 30% in Season 2, so I speak from experience and overall Seasons has proven to be too much of a grind.

Daily Operations

I have attempted Daily Ops only once and I don’t need to do it again because I despise the gameplay. I didn’t give up on this lightly and I’ve watched other players make the run with relative ease, but nothing about this makes me want to do it. In fact, Daily Ops was my tipping point and I’m done with Fallout 76 for now.

What is so bad about Daily Ops? For one thing, I’d been looking forward to advancing in the Brotherhood of Steel quest line, but it has become clear that the Daily Ops gameplay is the door to the BoS line and future developments. And I’m just not willing to grind away at Ops, so I feel like I’ve been cut out. However, some players love the Ops style gameplay. Like I said, I’ve only done this once, starting with being dropped into the Harper’s Ferry sewers where I was confronted by a new class of robots (they can only be destroyed with melee weapons). Anyway, I fought my way to the first checkpoint, then the next but the third checkpoint was buggy, the diamond pointer was stuck inside a wall, not up, not down, just stuck. I died three times and the experience just irritated me. I’ve since learned that the sewers quest is the most difficult of the three daily ops, and the fact that the design team chose to start everyone on the most difficult quest as the introduction sucked, (please pardon my disdain).

There’s a chance I may try Daily Ops again after I get over my irritation, but right now I doubt it. So, based on my understanding of this new direction I am likely going to be excluded from a huge amount of stuff I’d like to have. I’ve done demanding quests many times, even quests I dislike a lot. Launching nukes is pretty dangerous, especially solo, but I’ve done it successfully a half dozen times now. And I won many Tadpole and Possum badges, even got the Possum backpack (120 weight) and other Possum stuff. Maybe I’m just in a bad mood. *smiles* Anyway, I despise the Daily Ops gameplay and I’m done with it for the foreseeable future.

Not Goodbye, Just ‘See Ya Later’

In other words, I feel like the game is walking away from me and I’m walking away from the game. I’m disappointed, but not sour grapes. I’ve had a lot of fun playing this game for a year and a half. And I’m sure I’ll continue dropping in regularly to see what’s going on, but I think I’ll get more enjoyment by returning to Fallout 4. I still have two major DLCs I haven’t completed yet. I’ve also been using several mods, but according to JuiceHead, there are a lot of new Mods coming.

My future posts will return to Fallout 4 and I plan to write some posts about my different settlements.