Faction PvP, improved building and more to come to Fallout 76 after launch

If you’ve read any of our Fallout 76 articles before then you’ll know that we’re not overly excited by the game; the beta was pretty poor, there are hacking concerns on the PC and, to be honest, it all felt a bit empty. However, we won’t say too much more until we’ve played more of the full release (which, if you didn’t know, is playable right now, as the servers came online early).

Something that has made us a little bit more excited about the game is a new announcement from Bethesda, where they have detailed what is on the roadmap for the game in terms of updates. Included in the roadmap are building improvements, new quests and events, new vaults, character respeccing and a faction PvP system.

If you played the beta—or if you’re about to play the game today—then you will know that the building mechanics in Fallout 76 are a complete duplication of the Fallout 4 building system, with the addition of being able to move things around the map. This system was ‘OK’ in Fallout 4, but we were hoping for it to be improved so that it wasn’t so clunky, allowing us to build bigger and more intricate buildings. It will be interesting to see exactly what improvements are made.

Another thing that was lacking in the beta was the addition of ‘good’ quests. Sure, there are plenty of quests in the game, but there were none that really stood out, none that you would look back on after playing for 100 hours and think “wow, that was a great quest”. So hopefully these ‘new quests and events’ that Bethesda speaks of are good, and not just the run-of-the-mill kill the bad guys or fetch quests.

The part of the roadmap that intrigues me the most, though, is the faction based PvP system. The PvP system that is currently in the game is poor, boring and clunky. The current PvP system works like this:

1. You shoot someone and do minimal damage
2. If they shoot you back, they do normal (scaled) damage
3. You can then shoot them with normal damage

There’s no ganking in the game, which is fine I guess, but always being on guard is part of the fun in these type of open world games, especially when the quests are a bit boring. I personally think that they should have separate servers—similar to World of Warcraft and other games—one for PvP and one for PvE, but that’s not happening. There’s also currently no real penalty for dying, you just lose a few bits of junk, and there are minimal rewards if you manage to kill anyone, so it’s all a pretty pointless affair.

This is where I hope faction based PvP comes in; maybe there will be areas of the map controlled by each faction, and if someone from an opposing faction steps into your territory you do full damage to them and vice versa. This is what I would like to see, Bethesda haven’t yet said what it will entail.

And finally, character respeccing will be coming in a post-launch update, which is welcomed news.

Fallout 76 was supposed to go live tonight at midnight. However, it appears that the game servers are already live and people are able to play right now.