Fallout 76, Who is this game for?

Finally there has been meatier gameplay videos for Bethesda's next game, Fallout 76. However I'm not any less puzzled about who this game is for, it doesn't seem built to attract regular Fallout fans, certainly not the old school ones. Suppose one might as well take a closer look at Bethesda's first dabble with multiplayer. 

Fallout 76 is the name of the game

So what type of game even is Fallout 76? Well, according to their own statement; "Bethesda Game Studios, the award-winning creators of Skyrim and Fallout 4, welcome you to Fallout 76, the online prequel where every surviving human is a real person. Work together, or not, to survive. Under the threat of nuclear annihilation, you’ll experience the largest, most dynamic world ever created in the legendary Fallout universe." So judging from that it's a survival game, where you work with other players, or not, to rebuild, or not. I don't know.

Anyway, as I mentioned there has been longer gameplay videos out now and it does seem pretty straightforward if they're accurately depicting the game. You create a character who can only communicate with emojis since there are no real NPC's to interact with, only other players, and you seem to follow in the steps of the Vault 76 overseer who has left tapes for you to listen to. Riveting main quest I know. You also seem to get objectives like killing a certain amount of ghouls in a location. You know like those procedurally generated quests in Fallout 4 that you hated. Apart from the sorry excuse for quests you also build stuff, crafting seems like a central part. You craft your camp, weapons and armor. Overall it seems like you'll be looting a lot to craft better gear so you can loot more dangerous locations.

I think I'm starting to understand what sort of game it is, problem is, if I understand it correctly it's not really doing a lot to stand out in the genre. You know, the one Minecraft dominates. That really seems to be the foundational gameplay loop they're going for, which to be frank I don't think is going to be enough. Not only is the building and crafting mechanics much more restricted than other games in the genre the gameplay is just not good enough for combat and looting to be the only real mechanics. Like we've for a long time been having arguments about how Bethesda needs to update their engine (preferably make an entirely new one) because their animations, graphics and combat are painfully outdated. Thing is, in the past with games like Skyrim and Fallout... Lets say Fallout 3, yes the gameplay was nothing to write home about but they had deep worlds filled with interesting quests, characters, decisions that had consequences in the world and not to mention actual RPG mechanics. That's why Bethesda has always been excused for lagging behind in the gameplay, graphics and animation department. Now they've stripped it all away, and I do wonder if co-op is going to be enough to make fans happy. Not that I know what fans want this, as mentioned earlier, it doesn't seem like it's for Fallout fans since it lacks everything that was good about Fallout. Fallout isn't just about a huge world with lots of potential for crafting. When people ask for co-op in Bethesda games is this really what they want?

To get a bit petty about the lore involved I have a few things to day with the disclaimer that I'm not a huge Fallout scholar so I might be a bit off but... How does the concept make sense? Like no people around? At all? In every other game we meet ghouls who survived the initial blasts, not to mention entire communities who didn't turn into ghouls but instead just survived generation after generation. So why is this world so empty? Would make sense if it was in the middle of a blast crater but the world is green, buildings barely scorched, yet the only humanoid creatures around are the scorched ghouls. I just don't understand why this was done, would it really have been that hard to add human NPC's in the game? Just Raiders? Like I've read that they want human players to make up raider factions you usually see in Fallout games, problem is that there aren't enough players to make up those kinds of raider factions and with them taking steps to avoid griefing it's not even a viable role to play in the first place. Though fine, it's a spin-off, non-canon, I can dig the lore being off (if that's truly the case, I'm not so sure that it is).

In conclusion, it seems like this game is trying to do things that have already been done and better, not pleasing fans of their old games and not being able to compete with fans of similar games. I'm curious to see how this game will end up doing, might be a huge success (which would surprise me) or it might end up being a huge flop. Either way it's going to be interesting to see the consequences from how this game ends up performing. Bethesda at least seems confident considering they've gone on record saying they intend to support this game "forever".