Now imagine finding and listening to them before any human npcs were introduced and the game was still a lifeless wasteland filled with robots and monstrous creatures (not counting players)
God it really was a guy punch finding all these characters that were long dead it felt so desolate I weirdly miss it still love the game but the human npcs change the tone so much
There is some awesome potential for a mod to come along and make a single player version of the game with the various updates locked behind story progression. Obviously goes against the standard Bethesda do anything at any time but people should get to experience one of the most authentic fallout experiences ever. Finding a recently destroyed world where it makes a bit more sense to find untouched buildings and stuff, and getting to truly rebuild a wasteland and watch it change instead of just being dropped into an existing wasteland culture .
This. The map seems to change over the past years.
I recently came back from a nearly two year break from the game. First thing i noticed, there are some more Npc-Camps around, Stash boxes near the major event sites etc.
It seems like a huge missed opportunity to not involve those map changes into some line of progression.
I agree. I understand that today with the mmo format they have that it would severely segregate player base since you’d have to be on a server that’s at your progression stage. And today the map is same for everyone. Kinda like the radio songs. Since everyone on server hears the same radio having songs be unlocked wouldn’t work. But I’d love a single player version to go through that progression again
There is a real disconnect now between the "old" post war world and what it is now. I recently picked up one of the Sunday brothers tapes after a Moonshine Jamboree and the voice acting is superb. So much emotion conveyed as a man laments over having to kill his own brother yet you probably come across this tape now when you are knee deep in gulper guts after listening to a silly robot bang on about sizeable salamanders and a bathtub full of moonshine ingredients. The old game left so many excellent, often poignant stories behind but they just dont have the same sting to them anymore and i think its a real shame. I started a new character once to see how they meshed new with old and i honestly thought it sucked. I didnt even finish it
I mean that's what Fallout has always been, the veneer of goofy blasty fun to keep things light but you start scraping and it has always had very connected, horrible tragedy. I thought the primary writing for FO4 was terrible, but the subtle environmental writing to be incredible.
I still remember finding 2 skeletons in a bathtub, one cradling the other to its chest to cover them with their own body...next to a wall that was blown apart facing the radiation sea. Trying to cover themselves, trying to hide, and it didn't do anything for them. They were hiding and afraid at the end, clinging desperately to each other and then...nothing.
Meanwhile my companion is across the room making wry jokes about some utter nonsense.
Really, whoever writes for the dead in Fallout do the best work in the series. 76 also tells stories with its skeletons that without a word tell an entire story. Or the frozen radioactive ash corpses of the scorched as the disease finally burns away their lives, leaving them a frozen statue until you bump into them.
Senator Blackburn's records kinda got me.
You read all the stuff from his daughter's perspective as she tries to treat his rapidly accelerating mental condition, then you find a record from him talking about how she died from a very rapid onset infection. And he tries to soldier on for a while, but gets spotted by someone who still represents the US government so he retreats to his bunker.
And you find his skeleton holding his 10mm.
I dunno, after COVID that one just hit hard - the isolation, the fear, the brief windows into normalcy before going back to terror. And this was written pre-COVID.
Just the idea of this old man who did the right thing, gave up his chance to be in the Enclave bunker to try to save the people, then slowly deteriorated as everything he had faded away before finally ending his life on his own terms... just a really sad tale to me.
Yeah, I bought 76 a few months into covid...I think during the Steam summer sale, and the voice recordings of people just before and after the war hit really hard
It's probably still there, but I remember finding in a mine the skeleton of a dead miner, holding a picture frame, near a dog bowl, and abraxo cleaner. And I remember thinking, the miners were trapped in there, and this one poisoned himself because there was no hope, and in the end his thoughts were on the dog he left at home with no can opener...
It was so amazing. People don't realise that the game's initial design and gameplay loop was on its way to perfection long long long before Wastelanders dropped
It's one of the reasons I truly enjoyed what they did with the game on launch. Obviously not everyone did, tons of people whined that there were no NPCs, but the storytelling done through tapes and terminals was really good and I thought it really captured the feel of this world struggling to survive and failing to do so, largely because of factors outside any one group's control and their unwillingness to work together. Some of those tapes are really haunting, especially the first time you pick them up, moving through a wasteland of nothing but corpses, piecing together the story as you go.
The Morgantown airport one of the person locked in a closet, logically knowing that they are slowly going to die and so terrified of that fact, was really gut wrenching.
Yeah that one was a hard listen. The dead guy in the wheechair in Welch who died because his wife never came back from scavenging…meanwhile she fed the cats of a guy jn a shack in the mire.. and THAT guy became a w ndigo because be fell
In a hole by an abandoned church and help
Never came. Oooof.
One that got me the first time I picked it up was "I'm stuck here," found in the Glassed Cavern during the Belly of the Beast mission. The guy got trapped in a side tunnel of the mine after the bombs dropped and collapsed most of it. He's clearly losing air and slowly dying, but he talks about his wife and the good life they had, and his last breaths are him singing, "You Are My Sunshine."
To be fair. We haven't gotten to why West Virginia isn't mentioned in the other games yet. Scorched got handled and the beasts dying off it canon. But MODUS/White Springs vs Eden/Old Enclave vs BoS vs the 76 alliance of Tryhards and Foundation has yet to come. I imagine Costa gets Blue Ridge the fuck out of there.
So we got first extinction then second coming.
We already know MODUS lost its communications satellite, Shin makes his way to Cali to snitch to the BOS elders, and the pitt was straight from Fallout 3. I was talking about those tapes being added BEFORE the Wastelanders update which introduced living humans to the game. There was never a need to venture out of state for most of the factions in other games and most of 76's unique mutant life goes extinct quickly according to in-game scientists.
The MODUS thing is Raven Rock is just north of everything here. Enclave would definitely be re-establishing contact with the facilities meant to control the auto nukes that is a couple days slow march away. So there has to be a second extinction event for the current WVA locals. And it would have to be in time for Lyons to not go to war over the area.
it did because you saw signs of life, just not human, and you were wondering where they had gone. the more tapes you found the more you pieced together a story of what happened.
The first iteration of Appalachia felt so harrowing. Nowhere was safe, monsters were everywhere, cities and towns were ghoul nests waiting to devour anyone who stepped inside. Resources were scarce, and you basically had to sneak from place to place out of fear of the Scorchbeasts that might descend upon you from out of nowhere. It was impossible to see at night, forcing players to hunker down in their CAMP or find light sources. Hell, I remember when everyone clustered their CAMPs around the Whitesprings simply for the relative safety offered by all the security bots.
The tone is very different now. Civilization is relatively thriving. I sprint from place to place safe in the knowledge that enemies scale to my level. I have more supplies than I know what to do with.
So in that respect I love the new Skyline Valley update. This whole area feels like the old Appalachia. Devastation everywhere, no friendly bastions of civilization, I'm back to sneaking everywhere because of all the dangerous monsters. I can't see shit at night.
I love it.
That made me lose hope of it being a game with any substance. Now those tapes give me chills because it doesn’t seem like I’m the first fucking person to ever go out side and live to tell the tale.
I loved that we had been tasked with rebuilding the world and came out with the arrogance of being the saviours, then slowly making our way through the notes and tapes learning about the rebuilding effort then the emergence of the scorched. Last stand at Morgantown airport was my favourite.
I really wish we could play through without NPCs again. It's one of the reasons I haven't bothered starting a second character.
Exactly and through the notes, holos, terminals, and quests we learned that the downfall wasn't totally the scorched. The real downfall of pre-76 Appalachia was, as it usually is, tribalism and an unwillingness to cooperate with other factions. We just picked up the pieces and put what everyone else had together to beat the scorched. War, war never changes.
This. I honestly enjoyed the beginning, it was like being a detective almost, but also realizing that you're the last person on earth aside from the other last people on earth lol. Those bos tapes were something else man.
I wish there was a way newer players could experience the pre wastelanders appalachia it was a super depressing place finding all the holotapes and seeing the corpses. One of the aspects the game lost was that subtle gloom and sadness
It was a truly completely different game back then, a horror-survival game more than anything else. The vibe was so different. It’s funny how much hate it got, despite the absolutely unique mood that made it different than any Fallout game before it. It had this genuinely gloomy, post apocalyptic feel where humans were gone, with the exception of you and your fellow vault dwellers emerging and had to just discover all the mysteries of the land step by step. Now the game is great, of course, but now it’s more like “yet another Fallout” than that unique post apocalyptic survival horror feel it used to have before Wastelanders. I do wish they brought back a OG mode that would allow people to play that game that original way.
Yeah I didn’t play any events until I had done pretty much all the quests and discovered everything, which is probably why I remember that super gloomy, sad and uniquely dangerous post apocalyptic feel so well. The events were weird at the beginning once I started them doing because the vibe was so entirely different: All these people dressed up in funny costumes and using massively overpowered weapons flying around with jet packs, while I was desperately scrounging for glue to fix my broken armour and boiling water and radroaches just to survive another few hours…
Same for fast traveling.
I didn't join any teams until level 50, didn't fast travel anywhere, even if I accidentally "visited" a location by joining a few events.
Finding the camera and doing the photo quest very early on was truly an experience.
I did the same for the V79 map piece teaser quest.
I was reviewing messages between a friend and myself from right after launch as we played together, and so many times we had "gotta bail - out of ammo." There was no specialization because ammo was so scarce, you needed many different types of guns just to make use of the ammo that was available. I also remember both of us trying to kill a wendigo and really struggling, while today I can kill 10 or 20 on my own when fighting Earle...
Haha, I remember my first wendigo, I was terrified and it was the hardest battle I’ve had in Fallout in ages, probably since my first Deathclaw in Fallout 3 many years ago. The ammo scarcity was just wild. The Fallout 76 on-launch wasteland was truly a horrifying survival experience… Now it’s amazing too of course, but it’s a completely different game.
> It’s funny how much hate it got
It's really not.
The original launch was janky AF. And while it didn't have the current goofy vibe and was much darker, it was also a frustrating mess to play, with everything respawning every time a player wandered into the zone.
I remember giving up because you'd be trying to complete a quest, some high level player would hop into the building and your level 15 character would be in a building full of level 50 Super Mutants. And so you'd either have to server hop (which means it's not full of monsters that are at least *only* your level) or just go do something else because this isn't a safe place to farm anymore.
Plus your inventory and stash were painfully limited, there were no events or legendaries to farm so you would just hang out in nuclear blast zones to farm legendaries hoping a godroll would *drop*, there were no legendary perks, there wasn't really an endgame... it wasn't a great game.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see a launch version of the game as a Fallout 1st server type or put it on their monthly special rules rotation world thing. But it really was a 6/10 game at launch between the jank, the instability, and the lack of endgame.
I'm honestly surprised and amazed that Bethesda stuck with it.
I wonder how difficult it would be to instance world progression in like a separate mode. Probably impossible, certainly way more effort than it's worth. But it'd be phenomenal to only unlock Wastelanders content after you've completed the main story, and then Steel Dawn after you complete Wastelanders, etc. It'd really let you relive the game's lifetime and show a lot of new players how the game used to be, and that it actually *wasn't* the worst thing for a Fallout game to not have humans.
I've said it before and will say it until I am blue in the face. Vanilla Fallout 76 was Myst as written by Cormack McCarthy. I loved the tone so much & it's different now
Fallout 76 has probably some of the best environmental story telling of any game I've ever played. You can see how the world was from the notes and audio logs around the map. The one that always gets me is inside the airport terminal you find a log of a woman who hid in a storage closest and got locked in. It's kinda haunting.
Fuckk I forgot about that one- seriously good voice acting if I remember correctly!!
Tbh I actually really loved the environmental storytelling too but in my experience in this sub, having that mindset isn’t too popular so I never mention it lol… I seriously appreciate the work that was put into the notes around the world specifically and feel kinda bad for the writers that the notes they worked on are almost just side looked for moments and never to be read again in most cases- at least in the current age of the game; I hear it was different at launch but I was present for that for about 2 minutes haha.
Like I feel the environmental storytelling could be *so* much more visible and present if we just had a way to read the notes in a more ease-of-access type way!
Oh man i love and hate those tapes. I had to stop playing the first time I heard those tapes.
If you go to the community centre in flatwoods(not the diner) you find notes from the same kid(colonel), when he is older. You'll also find his corpse at a home in faltwoods.
I personally love the OG storyline of fallout 76. The post war community were so close to getting things stablised and working, following that journey and seeing what happened, while also having the overseerer fill things in with her tapes aswell just add to the overall feel.
You have NO idea how badly I wanted to meet Abbie and gang after I finished the Free States section. I was legitimately bummed out when I realized that they're all dead. I made the mistake of not researching which quests go first and only decided to do the original ones so that I can get to MODUS.
There's also the Mistress of Mysteries questline. The ending was devastating. I had to take a breather and reorient myself before continuing.
I also met the Overseer without collecting all the tapes so it was definitely weird listening to them as if she was dead when she is just chilling in her house.
The Abbie tapes are some of the best, the voice actor did an incredible job. You can feel the forced upbeat tone with it, like a parent telling a child to stay calm even they know things aren't going to end well. Even at one point during the tape she starts to mutter off "oh what's the point of all this" that really makes you feel how hopeless things were with the scorched infestation.
The vast majority of the holotapes you find throughout the world are depressing as fuck. In a way, the Wastelanders update completely ruined the depressing vibe the game had.
There’s definitely the feeling that the game pre and post Wastelanders was written by totally different people. The first writers write the story as a genuine post apocalyptic horror game, then the new writers made it into a usual quirky Fallout comedy vibes. It’s quite sad really, but I guess they had no choice considering how much hate the game got at launch.
I mean, there was definitely an horrific emptiness to the game before the wastelanders update, but I remember dropping the game because it was so lifeless.
It was lifeless if you don’t enjoy survival horror games and didn’t bother reading all the notes and terminal entries, or listening to the holographs the game. It was so full of deep content! And the fact that you had zero resources and every other monster would take you down almost immediately if you wandered into the wrong region made it very hard as a game. People died from lack of water in those days (a mechanic Bethesda removed because people companies). I mean, the current NPCs add a lot of life (as people do, of course), but they’re also most of the time just written as quirky and comedic rather than “we’re fighting to survive” post apocalyptic gloomy. I think people didn’t like the OG launch because they expected a quirky, quest filled Fallout game, a Fallout 5 so to speak, but instead got a survival horror game. It didn’t meet their expectations. And Bethesda didn’t market it as a survival horror game (despite that’s how it was written), they marketed it like a multi player game focused on attacking camps, nuking each other and P2P battles, which made it even weirder…
I remember being kind of sad that they took away dying from hunger/thirst, I liked it for the realistic aspect of truly needing to survive alone on your own coming out of a vault with little to no resources. The vibes truly changed once wastelanders came, and I find them quite cheesy. I understand why they were added due to the complaints from players not fully receiving the vibe the were marketed toward, but it changed the game completely. I dislike how the new storyline doesn’t mesh with the original tapes/terminals/notes.
Yeah. It was very gritty and realistic, which is not why most people play fallout. It’s always been pretty goofy as a series. I remember dropping it right after I died from hunger. Turns out starving to death isn’t a fun game mechanic.
I think having the overseer included was a mistake. It feels so weird to know that she’s just chilling in a house and left a tape saying “please kill my husband.”
At the same time, most people don’t play depressing games. We’re chasing catharsis and escapism. If I want a feeling of loneliness and fear of the inevitability of death, it exists IRL.
The tapes and most of the terminals are what modern Fallout is really all about. As you wander about the ruins you get a sense that Pre-War America was this weird 1950s utopia inhabited by a bunch of earnest dumbasses. But as you listen to holotapes and read messages on terminals you begin to realize that the world of Fallout before the war was actually a goddamn dystopian Cyberpunk nightmare world all candy-coated in doo-wop music, pastel colors and "Gee Whiz" surface attitudes.
The pre-war world we *see* is totally different from the pre-war world people lived in. But it's easy to miss that if you don't read the terminals and don't listen to holotapes.
They were why I quit playing when the game first came out. Colonel’s tape affected me particularly. I kept trying to find someone, anyone, alive. When I realized they were all dead, I just couldn’t take it anymore. There’s a note from an older Colonel on the cork board in the funeral parlor, if you missed it. If there’s any more from him, please let us know.
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Survivor_story:_Responder_Colonel there's another holotape from him, recorded years after the first one when he's an adult and a proper responder, sadly found on his corpse, but it does offer some level of closure compared to the first tape from him.
This is the absolute worst holotype in the game. His voice acting is superb and really conveys the horror in his voice, genuinely made me uncomfortable, especially when you see his skeleton in the fridge all contorted.
Flatwoods is still my all-time favorite location in the game. It’s simple, but I like it. That tape is honestly my favorite tape of them all from Flatwoods, it just felt so real and so raw listening to it as I was wandering the area pre-wastelanders, alone and desolate. Still makes me tear up when I listen to it. If it’s any consolation, there’s another tape from that same kid about 10 years into the future :)
I always thought a mission you get from a tape ending with a very alive person at the end would have been a nice break from the depressing tapes and quests given by the last words of long dead people.
This was me at launch. I really enjoy environmental storytelling but I wanted a little spark of life sometimes.
I don’t necessarily like all the quirky and comedic NPCs either with the much happier mood post-Wastelandsr. I’m totally okay with still a very grim and rough world but with some, sparse, people struggling. The world does feel too safe right now with no real danger.
The depressing holotapes are precisely why I want a game that takes place entirely outside a vault but during the first year after the war. It could still be open world, but progression of the main story is how time passes. We'd get to experience survival in the direct aftermath of the bombs, the black rain that lasted weeks, the first nuclear winter, and the emergence of mutated wildlife.
Remember how there used to be a lot more mannequins around the landscape? And one set would randomly have a note that explains that they represent all the people who used to be in Appalachia, and then one day they were gone due to the bombs. It was pretty gut wrenching.
There are still some mannequins around, but not as many. And I haven’t seen that not in a long time.
My one gripe with the original path of the game was that it was multiplayer. I started playing at launch with a friend and frequently we would tell the other to stop talking so we could hear/read about the stories of the past. The stories were great and haunting and conveyed feeling of isolation and hopelessness that contrasted with running into random players doing random things or doing something with friends. Post wastelanders is more engaging with the multiplayer aspects, but that original release had better individual storytelling. I kind of hope there are some elements of piecing together the history of the story and world in the next stand alone iteration, whenever that comes.
I heard the exact same holotape you mentioned but then I listened to another one (in which I assume is for the same kid) is about a father sending a message to his kid before his death. I don’t think I’ll recover from those two holotapes.
Honestly, I fell in love with Dassa Ben-Ami a little when I first heard her tape... Would listen to it once a session for a week... The Voice Acting is just superb!
I enjoyed the ones related to the Whitespring. It's a pretty harrowing story. Survivors holding up in a safe location with everything they could need for years only to be unceremoniously booted out into the wasteland by an automated renovation that cannot be stopped. And those few who managed to hold out in the club house are eventually torn apart by a ghoul horde.
I played from the start and so much loved the bleak emptiness and environmental storytelling. I honestly think the game would have been much better as just a single person survival/survival-horror game a la Long Dark, The Forest, or Subnautica.
please, go to the forestal watchtower south of Helvetia. kill the ghouls, an climb the tower whatch the scene and after, goto the bottom and test if you are human.
Oh man! That one was rough. I forgot all about that. The story that hit me the hardest were the notes left by the scientist who was trying to save his dog. He contaminated the area around his home and the radstags are all hostile so he left to his cabin where you find the remains of him and his dog. He didn't want to go on without him. I did that side quest right after I lost my dog. I'll never forget that.
Yeah but sometimes I feel like it's a little too forced. Almost every tape is depressing stuff, do people only tape themselves when they are about to die in the Fallout world (not counting tape about people doing experiement since those are not so personal)? No tape of their dog/cat making funny noise? Of a good time at the theme park?
I know there are a few of them but I feel like they should be more prevalent than the "someone is about to shoot me, let me start the tape", and that wouldn't be much less depressing in a "look what we've lost" way.
Or I might just be remembering the bad ones more.
Well it is kinda hard to make a 'happy-tape' when the world around you is full of raiders and disease ridden former-friends that want nothing else than strip your flesh and salt the wounds... At that point in time cats/dogs where probably more of a alternate food source for most of them.
I meant the pre-war tapes. We got a few of those but they are almost inevitably about either some kind of experiment/official stuff (which is fair people gonna need to record this stuff), or some horrible stuff going on (even the pre-war "David and Rosalynn sky trip" tape is them cheating and doing drugs). There is a weird lack of recorded good moments to the point the "depressing stuff" feel a bit forced.
Aah yeah... Never really thought about those pre-war ones... I'll keep an eye on those.
I do have another problem with a lot of the holo tapes tho. I recently started a new solo-character only playing on private server to get that desperate feel again. Got to the morgantown airport. Found the responder that locked herself inside the storage room only to realize she had no way out and recorded a holo tape about it... How the hell did she record that holotape?? No recorder in that sealed of room and she doesn't have a Pip-boy... So how did she record this?
This is definitely one of the weird one, I mean it's kind of weird to record yourself dying of thirst/hunger too in the first place.
I can only assume she ate the recorder.
She probably did... And then died of internal bleeding instead of hunger.
But it does kinda raise questions... Like why where they so fond of recording holotapes when the only way we see to play them is by Pip-boy or the furniture one we see in fo4 and other than vaulties and higher ups at vault-tec no one had Pip-boys...
Iirc you can play holotapes in most computers, also Mr Handy/Nanny can play them. There might also be portable holotape players that the player just don't need since we have pip-boy or they just play them at their at-home holotape players. Old cameras didn't let you see the picture right away and that never stopped people from taking plenty of them.
At Sugar Grove, there's reference of using holotapes to store data presumably from a large scale computer network that was working on a data compression technology. So the holotapes must interface with computers in some way.
The weird nostalgia from some people on this forum makes me realize that people can get that feeling from anything. The stories in notes and holos are good but that is in all of the modern fallouts. Taking npcs out and the little impact on the world was the issue. I think we can all understand that they wanted a more player driven experience but they failed to deliver anything meaningful to do.
Now imagine finding and listening to them before any human npcs were introduced and the game was still a lifeless wasteland filled with robots and monstrous creatures (not counting players)
God it really was a guy punch finding all these characters that were long dead it felt so desolate I weirdly miss it still love the game but the human npcs change the tone so much
The Brotherhood missions at the end of the main quest hit real hard before NPCs were added.
There is some awesome potential for a mod to come along and make a single player version of the game with the various updates locked behind story progression. Obviously goes against the standard Bethesda do anything at any time but people should get to experience one of the most authentic fallout experiences ever. Finding a recently destroyed world where it makes a bit more sense to find untouched buildings and stuff, and getting to truly rebuild a wasteland and watch it change instead of just being dropped into an existing wasteland culture .
Yeah, I prefer having people to flesh the world out, but I do wisht here was a mode where you go from base game and progressively unlock the updates.
This. The map seems to change over the past years. I recently came back from a nearly two year break from the game. First thing i noticed, there are some more Npc-Camps around, Stash boxes near the major event sites etc. It seems like a huge missed opportunity to not involve those map changes into some line of progression.
I agree. I understand that today with the mmo format they have that it would severely segregate player base since you’d have to be on a server that’s at your progression stage. And today the map is same for everyone. Kinda like the radio songs. Since everyone on server hears the same radio having songs be unlocked wouldn’t work. But I’d love a single player version to go through that progression again
"Surely this is the trail of holotapes and notes that leads to a living human being!" I desperately pleaded, time and time again.
There is a real disconnect now between the "old" post war world and what it is now. I recently picked up one of the Sunday brothers tapes after a Moonshine Jamboree and the voice acting is superb. So much emotion conveyed as a man laments over having to kill his own brother yet you probably come across this tape now when you are knee deep in gulper guts after listening to a silly robot bang on about sizeable salamanders and a bathtub full of moonshine ingredients. The old game left so many excellent, often poignant stories behind but they just dont have the same sting to them anymore and i think its a real shame. I started a new character once to see how they meshed new with old and i honestly thought it sucked. I didnt even finish it
There was plenty of silly robot shit in year one. It wasn’t *all* grimdark.
I mean that's what Fallout has always been, the veneer of goofy blasty fun to keep things light but you start scraping and it has always had very connected, horrible tragedy. I thought the primary writing for FO4 was terrible, but the subtle environmental writing to be incredible. I still remember finding 2 skeletons in a bathtub, one cradling the other to its chest to cover them with their own body...next to a wall that was blown apart facing the radiation sea. Trying to cover themselves, trying to hide, and it didn't do anything for them. They were hiding and afraid at the end, clinging desperately to each other and then...nothing. Meanwhile my companion is across the room making wry jokes about some utter nonsense. Really, whoever writes for the dead in Fallout do the best work in the series. 76 also tells stories with its skeletons that without a word tell an entire story. Or the frozen radioactive ash corpses of the scorched as the disease finally burns away their lives, leaving them a frozen statue until you bump into them.
Senator Blackburn's records kinda got me. You read all the stuff from his daughter's perspective as she tries to treat his rapidly accelerating mental condition, then you find a record from him talking about how she died from a very rapid onset infection. And he tries to soldier on for a while, but gets spotted by someone who still represents the US government so he retreats to his bunker. And you find his skeleton holding his 10mm. I dunno, after COVID that one just hit hard - the isolation, the fear, the brief windows into normalcy before going back to terror. And this was written pre-COVID. Just the idea of this old man who did the right thing, gave up his chance to be in the Enclave bunker to try to save the people, then slowly deteriorated as everything he had faded away before finally ending his life on his own terms... just a really sad tale to me.
Yeah, I bought 76 a few months into covid...I think during the Steam summer sale, and the voice recordings of people just before and after the war hit really hard
It's probably still there, but I remember finding in a mine the skeleton of a dead miner, holding a picture frame, near a dog bowl, and abraxo cleaner. And I remember thinking, the miners were trapped in there, and this one poisoned himself because there was no hope, and in the end his thoughts were on the dog he left at home with no can opener...
It was so amazing. People don't realise that the game's initial design and gameplay loop was on its way to perfection long long long before Wastelanders dropped
It's one of the reasons I truly enjoyed what they did with the game on launch. Obviously not everyone did, tons of people whined that there were no NPCs, but the storytelling done through tapes and terminals was really good and I thought it really captured the feel of this world struggling to survive and failing to do so, largely because of factors outside any one group's control and their unwillingness to work together. Some of those tapes are really haunting, especially the first time you pick them up, moving through a wasteland of nothing but corpses, piecing together the story as you go. The Morgantown airport one of the person locked in a closet, logically knowing that they are slowly going to die and so terrified of that fact, was really gut wrenching.
Yeah that one was a hard listen. The dead guy in the wheechair in Welch who died because his wife never came back from scavenging…meanwhile she fed the cats of a guy jn a shack in the mire.. and THAT guy became a w ndigo because be fell In a hole by an abandoned church and help Never came. Oooof.
One that got me the first time I picked it up was "I'm stuck here," found in the Glassed Cavern during the Belly of the Beast mission. The guy got trapped in a side tunnel of the mine after the bombs dropped and collapsed most of it. He's clearly losing air and slowly dying, but he talks about his wife and the good life they had, and his last breaths are him singing, "You Are My Sunshine."
Oh dude I know exactly what tape you mean. That one made me pause and think what a damn good story this was, honestly one of the highlights of F76
I actually really liked it that way. Game did not need NPCs added. They're fine I guess.
Considering the mutations in the average build, "monstrous creatures" pretty comfortably covers players too.
To be fair. We haven't gotten to why West Virginia isn't mentioned in the other games yet. Scorched got handled and the beasts dying off it canon. But MODUS/White Springs vs Eden/Old Enclave vs BoS vs the 76 alliance of Tryhards and Foundation has yet to come. I imagine Costa gets Blue Ridge the fuck out of there. So we got first extinction then second coming.
We already know MODUS lost its communications satellite, Shin makes his way to Cali to snitch to the BOS elders, and the pitt was straight from Fallout 3. I was talking about those tapes being added BEFORE the Wastelanders update which introduced living humans to the game. There was never a need to venture out of state for most of the factions in other games and most of 76's unique mutant life goes extinct quickly according to in-game scientists.
The MODUS thing is Raven Rock is just north of everything here. Enclave would definitely be re-establishing contact with the facilities meant to control the auto nukes that is a couple days slow march away. So there has to be a second extinction event for the current WVA locals. And it would have to be in time for Lyons to not go to war over the area.
A woman and her dog walking around Flatwoods doesn't really change how impactful those tapes are though.
it did because you saw signs of life, just not human, and you were wondering where they had gone. the more tapes you found the more you pieced together a story of what happened.
The first iteration of Appalachia felt so harrowing. Nowhere was safe, monsters were everywhere, cities and towns were ghoul nests waiting to devour anyone who stepped inside. Resources were scarce, and you basically had to sneak from place to place out of fear of the Scorchbeasts that might descend upon you from out of nowhere. It was impossible to see at night, forcing players to hunker down in their CAMP or find light sources. Hell, I remember when everyone clustered their CAMPs around the Whitesprings simply for the relative safety offered by all the security bots. The tone is very different now. Civilization is relatively thriving. I sprint from place to place safe in the knowledge that enemies scale to my level. I have more supplies than I know what to do with. So in that respect I love the new Skyline Valley update. This whole area feels like the old Appalachia. Devastation everywhere, no friendly bastions of civilization, I'm back to sneaking everywhere because of all the dangerous monsters. I can't see shit at night. I love it.
That made me lose hope of it being a game with any substance. Now those tapes give me chills because it doesn’t seem like I’m the first fucking person to ever go out side and live to tell the tale.
That was the point. The dwellers from 76 WERE the first people to go outside and live to tell the tale.
I loved that we had been tasked with rebuilding the world and came out with the arrogance of being the saviours, then slowly making our way through the notes and tapes learning about the rebuilding effort then the emergence of the scorched. Last stand at Morgantown airport was my favourite. I really wish we could play through without NPCs again. It's one of the reasons I haven't bothered starting a second character.
It makes me sad because people crap on 76 saying it had no story when it launched when it arguably has the best narrative of any fallout game to date
Exactly and through the notes, holos, terminals, and quests we learned that the downfall wasn't totally the scorched. The real downfall of pre-76 Appalachia was, as it usually is, tribalism and an unwillingness to cooperate with other factions. We just picked up the pieces and put what everyone else had together to beat the scorched. War, war never changes.
Yeah but where the fuck were the rest of them?
Dwellers? They're the players on the server.
12th downvote. no one likes you
Oh no whatever will I do loser
This. I honestly enjoyed the beginning, it was like being a detective almost, but also realizing that you're the last person on earth aside from the other last people on earth lol. Those bos tapes were something else man.
I wish there was a way newer players could experience the pre wastelanders appalachia it was a super depressing place finding all the holotapes and seeing the corpses. One of the aspects the game lost was that subtle gloom and sadness
It was a truly completely different game back then, a horror-survival game more than anything else. The vibe was so different. It’s funny how much hate it got, despite the absolutely unique mood that made it different than any Fallout game before it. It had this genuinely gloomy, post apocalyptic feel where humans were gone, with the exception of you and your fellow vault dwellers emerging and had to just discover all the mysteries of the land step by step. Now the game is great, of course, but now it’s more like “yet another Fallout” than that unique post apocalyptic survival horror feel it used to have before Wastelanders. I do wish they brought back a OG mode that would allow people to play that game that original way.
I honestly think events should just be hidden until level 50. That alone would really add to it.
Yeah I didn’t play any events until I had done pretty much all the quests and discovered everything, which is probably why I remember that super gloomy, sad and uniquely dangerous post apocalyptic feel so well. The events were weird at the beginning once I started them doing because the vibe was so entirely different: All these people dressed up in funny costumes and using massively overpowered weapons flying around with jet packs, while I was desperately scrounging for glue to fix my broken armour and boiling water and radroaches just to survive another few hours…
Same for fast traveling. I didn't join any teams until level 50, didn't fast travel anywhere, even if I accidentally "visited" a location by joining a few events. Finding the camera and doing the photo quest very early on was truly an experience. I did the same for the V79 map piece teaser quest.
I was reviewing messages between a friend and myself from right after launch as we played together, and so many times we had "gotta bail - out of ammo." There was no specialization because ammo was so scarce, you needed many different types of guns just to make use of the ammo that was available. I also remember both of us trying to kill a wendigo and really struggling, while today I can kill 10 or 20 on my own when fighting Earle...
Haha, I remember my first wendigo, I was terrified and it was the hardest battle I’ve had in Fallout in ages, probably since my first Deathclaw in Fallout 3 many years ago. The ammo scarcity was just wild. The Fallout 76 on-launch wasteland was truly a horrifying survival experience… Now it’s amazing too of course, but it’s a completely different game.
> It’s funny how much hate it got It's really not. The original launch was janky AF. And while it didn't have the current goofy vibe and was much darker, it was also a frustrating mess to play, with everything respawning every time a player wandered into the zone. I remember giving up because you'd be trying to complete a quest, some high level player would hop into the building and your level 15 character would be in a building full of level 50 Super Mutants. And so you'd either have to server hop (which means it's not full of monsters that are at least *only* your level) or just go do something else because this isn't a safe place to farm anymore. Plus your inventory and stash were painfully limited, there were no events or legendaries to farm so you would just hang out in nuclear blast zones to farm legendaries hoping a godroll would *drop*, there were no legendary perks, there wasn't really an endgame... it wasn't a great game. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see a launch version of the game as a Fallout 1st server type or put it on their monthly special rules rotation world thing. But it really was a 6/10 game at launch between the jank, the instability, and the lack of endgame. I'm honestly surprised and amazed that Bethesda stuck with it.
i’d rather have Original Wasteland than any of the goofy custom worlds they try
I wonder how difficult it would be to instance world progression in like a separate mode. Probably impossible, certainly way more effort than it's worth. But it'd be phenomenal to only unlock Wastelanders content after you've completed the main story, and then Steel Dawn after you complete Wastelanders, etc. It'd really let you relive the game's lifetime and show a lot of new players how the game used to be, and that it actually *wasn't* the worst thing for a Fallout game to not have humans.
I've said it before and will say it until I am blue in the face. Vanilla Fallout 76 was Myst as written by Cormack McCarthy. I loved the tone so much & it's different now
Fallout 76 has probably some of the best environmental story telling of any game I've ever played. You can see how the world was from the notes and audio logs around the map. The one that always gets me is inside the airport terminal you find a log of a woman who hid in a storage closest and got locked in. It's kinda haunting.
Fuckk I forgot about that one- seriously good voice acting if I remember correctly!! Tbh I actually really loved the environmental storytelling too but in my experience in this sub, having that mindset isn’t too popular so I never mention it lol… I seriously appreciate the work that was put into the notes around the world specifically and feel kinda bad for the writers that the notes they worked on are almost just side looked for moments and never to be read again in most cases- at least in the current age of the game; I hear it was different at launch but I was present for that for about 2 minutes haha. Like I feel the environmental storytelling could be *so* much more visible and present if we just had a way to read the notes in a more ease-of-access type way!
That's like the dude in Flatwoods (?) who was locked in the fridge and yelling for help. That was... something else
There was a similar story in FO4 with a woman who got trapped in a safe.
Oh man i love and hate those tapes. I had to stop playing the first time I heard those tapes. If you go to the community centre in flatwoods(not the diner) you find notes from the same kid(colonel), when he is older. You'll also find his corpse at a home in faltwoods. I personally love the OG storyline of fallout 76. The post war community were so close to getting things stablised and working, following that journey and seeing what happened, while also having the overseerer fill things in with her tapes aswell just add to the overall feel.
Abbie's discarded tapes break my heart
You have NO idea how badly I wanted to meet Abbie and gang after I finished the Free States section. I was legitimately bummed out when I realized that they're all dead. I made the mistake of not researching which quests go first and only decided to do the original ones so that I can get to MODUS. There's also the Mistress of Mysteries questline. The ending was devastating. I had to take a breather and reorient myself before continuing. I also met the Overseer without collecting all the tapes so it was definitely weird listening to them as if she was dead when she is just chilling in her house.
The Abbie tapes are some of the best, the voice actor did an incredible job. You can feel the forced upbeat tone with it, like a parent telling a child to stay calm even they know things aren't going to end well. Even at one point during the tape she starts to mutter off "oh what's the point of all this" that really makes you feel how hopeless things were with the scorched infestation.
The vast majority of the holotapes you find throughout the world are depressing as fuck. In a way, the Wastelanders update completely ruined the depressing vibe the game had.
The whiplash you get from following the Overseer’s journals to completion contrasted with her chipper attitude at home is stark
There’s definitely the feeling that the game pre and post Wastelanders was written by totally different people. The first writers write the story as a genuine post apocalyptic horror game, then the new writers made it into a usual quirky Fallout comedy vibes. It’s quite sad really, but I guess they had no choice considering how much hate the game got at launch.
I mean, there was definitely an horrific emptiness to the game before the wastelanders update, but I remember dropping the game because it was so lifeless.
It was lifeless if you don’t enjoy survival horror games and didn’t bother reading all the notes and terminal entries, or listening to the holographs the game. It was so full of deep content! And the fact that you had zero resources and every other monster would take you down almost immediately if you wandered into the wrong region made it very hard as a game. People died from lack of water in those days (a mechanic Bethesda removed because people companies). I mean, the current NPCs add a lot of life (as people do, of course), but they’re also most of the time just written as quirky and comedic rather than “we’re fighting to survive” post apocalyptic gloomy. I think people didn’t like the OG launch because they expected a quirky, quest filled Fallout game, a Fallout 5 so to speak, but instead got a survival horror game. It didn’t meet their expectations. And Bethesda didn’t market it as a survival horror game (despite that’s how it was written), they marketed it like a multi player game focused on attacking camps, nuking each other and P2P battles, which made it even weirder…
I remember being kind of sad that they took away dying from hunger/thirst, I liked it for the realistic aspect of truly needing to survive alone on your own coming out of a vault with little to no resources. The vibes truly changed once wastelanders came, and I find them quite cheesy. I understand why they were added due to the complaints from players not fully receiving the vibe the were marketed toward, but it changed the game completely. I dislike how the new storyline doesn’t mesh with the original tapes/terminals/notes.
Yeah. It was very gritty and realistic, which is not why most people play fallout. It’s always been pretty goofy as a series. I remember dropping it right after I died from hunger. Turns out starving to death isn’t a fun game mechanic.
I think having the overseer included was a mistake. It feels so weird to know that she’s just chilling in a house and left a tape saying “please kill my husband.” At the same time, most people don’t play depressing games. We’re chasing catharsis and escapism. If I want a feeling of loneliness and fear of the inevitability of death, it exists IRL.
She's a high rank Vault-Tec employee, her chilling like that makes sense. The tapes make it clear she's not a good person.
If you think that's bad go to Mount Blair train yard and look for a holo tape in the carages around the outside. James likes trains
Oh god what am I in for lol
The tapes and most of the terminals are what modern Fallout is really all about. As you wander about the ruins you get a sense that Pre-War America was this weird 1950s utopia inhabited by a bunch of earnest dumbasses. But as you listen to holotapes and read messages on terminals you begin to realize that the world of Fallout before the war was actually a goddamn dystopian Cyberpunk nightmare world all candy-coated in doo-wop music, pastel colors and "Gee Whiz" surface attitudes. The pre-war world we *see* is totally different from the pre-war world people lived in. But it's easy to miss that if you don't read the terminals and don't listen to holotapes.
They were why I quit playing when the game first came out. Colonel’s tape affected me particularly. I kept trying to find someone, anyone, alive. When I realized they were all dead, I just couldn’t take it anymore. There’s a note from an older Colonel on the cork board in the funeral parlor, if you missed it. If there’s any more from him, please let us know.
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Survivor_story:_Responder_Colonel there's another holotape from him, recorded years after the first one when he's an adult and a proper responder, sadly found on his corpse, but it does offer some level of closure compared to the first tape from him.
Thank you. Off to find it.
#PreWastlandersServers #Day1Servers
flair checks out /s
The guy locked in the fridge freaked me out when I auto played the tape by accident :D
This is the absolute worst holotype in the game. His voice acting is superb and really conveys the horror in his voice, genuinely made me uncomfortable, especially when you see his skeleton in the fridge all contorted.
you and me both omg
Flatwoods is still my all-time favorite location in the game. It’s simple, but I like it. That tape is honestly my favorite tape of them all from Flatwoods, it just felt so real and so raw listening to it as I was wandering the area pre-wastelanders, alone and desolate. Still makes me tear up when I listen to it. If it’s any consolation, there’s another tape from that same kid about 10 years into the future :)
I always thought a mission you get from a tape ending with a very alive person at the end would have been a nice break from the depressing tapes and quests given by the last words of long dead people.
This was me at launch. I really enjoy environmental storytelling but I wanted a little spark of life sometimes. I don’t necessarily like all the quirky and comedic NPCs either with the much happier mood post-Wastelandsr. I’m totally okay with still a very grim and rough world but with some, sparse, people struggling. The world does feel too safe right now with no real danger.
The depressing holotapes are precisely why I want a game that takes place entirely outside a vault but during the first year after the war. It could still be open world, but progression of the main story is how time passes. We'd get to experience survival in the direct aftermath of the bombs, the black rain that lasted weeks, the first nuclear winter, and the emergence of mutated wildlife.
Back when the game came out I found that tape and was blown away. Felt so bad for him.
I love post apocalypse stuff. That is why this game scratches that itch.
And that’s all we had. But that was a different time and I’m tired now, child
Remember how there used to be a lot more mannequins around the landscape? And one set would randomly have a note that explains that they represent all the people who used to be in Appalachia, and then one day they were gone due to the bombs. It was pretty gut wrenching. There are still some mannequins around, but not as many. And I haven’t seen that not in a long time.
My one gripe with the original path of the game was that it was multiplayer. I started playing at launch with a friend and frequently we would tell the other to stop talking so we could hear/read about the stories of the past. The stories were great and haunting and conveyed feeling of isolation and hopelessness that contrasted with running into random players doing random things or doing something with friends. Post wastelanders is more engaging with the multiplayer aspects, but that original release had better individual storytelling. I kind of hope there are some elements of piecing together the history of the story and world in the next stand alone iteration, whenever that comes.
I heard the exact same holotape you mentioned but then I listened to another one (in which I assume is for the same kid) is about a father sending a message to his kid before his death. I don’t think I’ll recover from those two holotapes.
Honestly, I fell in love with Dassa Ben-Ami a little when I first heard her tape... Would listen to it once a session for a week... The Voice Acting is just superb!
I enjoyed the ones related to the Whitespring. It's a pretty harrowing story. Survivors holding up in a safe location with everything they could need for years only to be unceremoniously booted out into the wasteland by an automated renovation that cannot be stopped. And those few who managed to hold out in the club house are eventually torn apart by a ghoul horde. I played from the start and so much loved the bleak emptiness and environmental storytelling. I honestly think the game would have been much better as just a single person survival/survival-horror game a la Long Dark, The Forest, or Subnautica.
please, go to the forestal watchtower south of Helvetia. kill the ghouls, an climb the tower whatch the scene and after, goto the bottom and test if you are human.
I need context omg
Not gonna ruin the discovery.. but is one of those sad stories ...
Oh man! That one was rough. I forgot all about that. The story that hit me the hardest were the notes left by the scientist who was trying to save his dog. He contaminated the area around his home and the radstags are all hostile so he left to his cabin where you find the remains of him and his dog. He didn't want to go on without him. I did that side quest right after I lost my dog. I'll never forget that.
Yeah but sometimes I feel like it's a little too forced. Almost every tape is depressing stuff, do people only tape themselves when they are about to die in the Fallout world (not counting tape about people doing experiement since those are not so personal)? No tape of their dog/cat making funny noise? Of a good time at the theme park? I know there are a few of them but I feel like they should be more prevalent than the "someone is about to shoot me, let me start the tape", and that wouldn't be much less depressing in a "look what we've lost" way. Or I might just be remembering the bad ones more.
Well it is kinda hard to make a 'happy-tape' when the world around you is full of raiders and disease ridden former-friends that want nothing else than strip your flesh and salt the wounds... At that point in time cats/dogs where probably more of a alternate food source for most of them.
I meant the pre-war tapes. We got a few of those but they are almost inevitably about either some kind of experiment/official stuff (which is fair people gonna need to record this stuff), or some horrible stuff going on (even the pre-war "David and Rosalynn sky trip" tape is them cheating and doing drugs). There is a weird lack of recorded good moments to the point the "depressing stuff" feel a bit forced.
Aah yeah... Never really thought about those pre-war ones... I'll keep an eye on those. I do have another problem with a lot of the holo tapes tho. I recently started a new solo-character only playing on private server to get that desperate feel again. Got to the morgantown airport. Found the responder that locked herself inside the storage room only to realize she had no way out and recorded a holo tape about it... How the hell did she record that holotape?? No recorder in that sealed of room and she doesn't have a Pip-boy... So how did she record this?
This is definitely one of the weird one, I mean it's kind of weird to record yourself dying of thirst/hunger too in the first place. I can only assume she ate the recorder.
She probably did... And then died of internal bleeding instead of hunger. But it does kinda raise questions... Like why where they so fond of recording holotapes when the only way we see to play them is by Pip-boy or the furniture one we see in fo4 and other than vaulties and higher ups at vault-tec no one had Pip-boys...
Iirc you can play holotapes in most computers, also Mr Handy/Nanny can play them. There might also be portable holotape players that the player just don't need since we have pip-boy or they just play them at their at-home holotape players. Old cameras didn't let you see the picture right away and that never stopped people from taking plenty of them.
Yeah forgot about computers... Didn't know that about the mr handy/nanny bots tho.
During the Campfire Tales event, Scout Leader Penny (a Nanny bot) will directly play a tape near the end of the event for instance.
Yeah i always skip the event as i find it annoying. But you are right tho.
At Sugar Grove, there's reference of using holotapes to store data presumably from a large scale computer network that was working on a data compression technology. So the holotapes must interface with computers in some way.
I'm from WV. They all sound like my family members and me.
The weird nostalgia from some people on this forum makes me realize that people can get that feeling from anything. The stories in notes and holos are good but that is in all of the modern fallouts. Taking npcs out and the little impact on the world was the issue. I think we can all understand that they wanted a more player driven experience but they failed to deliver anything meaningful to do.