With the release of the TV show, the daily player logins are around 400k with 30k-50k concurrent across all platforms. I suspect a decent number of those are logging in for a half hour or less just to do daily or weekly challenges.
I have put about 2,700 hours into FO76, a decent amount was AFK to farm events. I have all the best gear and all of the items available in the game that you don’t buy from the shop with an abstraction of real money. I have fully beaten the game until the brahmin was pulp and has become one with the wasteland again, and then I began to dig a deep hole.
Last paragraph is the TL;DR.
It is now a Fallout game with a weak story and other people that may or may not be annoying, and the optional PvP is basically first attacker wins unless you are specifically built for PvP. You don’t need to interact with other players and can still put a few hundred hours into the game just playing story stuff. On release, it was a glitchy shit show filled with griefers and no NPCs.
It has bugs and glitches that aren’t a problem most of the time unless you really want to grind one activity. Sometimes random glitches, crashes, etc. happen more frequently than is understandable, especially after a content release. I swear they don’t actually play test updates and depend on the players to report things.
The building is kneecapped by a budget constraint that keeps you from taking advantage of the build area. In personal cells called “vaults”, the budget may be exceeded without the budget bar being filled. Most of the build items are in the store shop or are only obtainable during limited time events that you need to RNG grind to get or buy from another player that likely doesn’t know the fair market value. Items available in the store shop cycle randomly, so you may not see an item you want for a year or more. Holiday themed items often show up in the store after the holiday has passed.
More on the subject of arbitrary budgets, you only have storage for 1200 units of weight off your character. That is, unless you have a FO76 subscription which gives you 2 unlimited storage boxes for scrap materials and ammo, soon another one will be added for chems and healing stuff. That isn’t a problem if you don’t collect weapons, plans, and armor. It is a problem if you do because you won’t be able to keep tons of ammo or stims in storage. I traded uncommon and rare plans for caps because that is the fastest and easiest way to get caps, I had around 700 weight units of plans between two characters(each plan has a weight of 0.25). If you want to keep legendary weapon effects just to have or for selling, they each weight 1 unit. The player joke is that FO76 is an inventory management game with an open world action RPG mini-game, which is true for experienced players.
Some of it is a tedious grind to get some of the best armor, like hundreds of runs of a 5 minute activity to get enough of a specific currency or dozens to hundreds of runs of a Raid that requires you have a team of 4 and good gear+build that takes about a half hour but can take over an hour(or be impossible to complete) with inexperienced players at lower levels.
There are 8 different in-game currencies that you can’t buy, not including the game store currency. There is no way to exchange currencies except for 3 that are one-way and one of those currencies can only be used to buy another currency. Treasury Notes > Gold Bullion, Caps > Gold Bullion.
One of the currencies is only for seasonal content(4 seasons a year) that requires you to do daily and weekly challenges, that currency does not roll over into the next season and some seasonal rewards require a FO76 subscription. The seasonal currency you can technically buy through buying season ranks, a full season cost about $120 if you don’t want to bother with challenges. The daily challenges take a experienced player 10-15 mins to complete, the weeklies take 30-45 mins. The FO76 subscription is really nice for QOL, but I put around 500 hours into the game without one.
The events are mostly under 5 minutes long and aren’t fun after like the 6th time.
The big content updates are once a year with smaller content additions between. For instance, they just added fishing and before that they added the ability to become a ghoul. The last big update was in December when they added a 5 stage Raid and the next big one is at the end of the year which is going to be a big map expansion.
If you are a Fallout fan, Fallout 76 is a Fallout game that is fun enough to play for the quests(60% of Fallout humor compared to FO4) and free content, but it is not a Fallout live service game that will be enjoyable for most Fallout fans for as many hours that you can put into the singleplayer games and you will “miss out” on a lot of items if you aren’t down for the grind or have cash to burn.
Realistically, you could experience all the game content in like 200 hours. Even faster if you know higher level players that can help you, which a lot of higher level players will help you. That is a lot of content without the limitations that purposefully slow progression down like you see in MMOs. Keep in mind that you don’t need the game subscription to play the game and don’t need to spend any money in the game to play and get the endgame content.
It isn’t until you are trying to grind out getting certain things that your playtime skyrockets, but that is true with a real MMO.
On the subject of the community and players helping players, the community is pretty great. I have dragged lower level players through the hardest part of the game and taken them from level 20(you can start the game at level 1 or 20) to over level 100(there is no max level) in an afternoon with no detriment to my enjoyment. I have given newer players thousands of scrap, hundreds of legendary mods, and hundreds of thousands of caps worth of item plans that you can on get with RNG grinds.
I am not exceptional, I am pretty typical for the high level players. Since we have “nothing left” to do in the game and understand the meta, pretty much everything has lost value. We will buy overpriced stuff for sale in player vendors just because we want to get rid of caps and it takes us minutes to go from 1k caps to the 40k cap limit due to the value of the “crap” we have in our stash. Some players can’t hit the cap limit in hundreds of hours of play. It could take you hours to get enough material to make 2k of ammo(that you can burn through in an hour) and we will give you 10k of that ammo or enough materials to make 10k and not even notice the loss because we know how to net gain ammo.
Compared to gacha games and actual MMOs, FO76 is far better in terms of cost in terms of time and money, also the community is very helpful to new players.
With the release of the TV show, the daily player logins are around 400k with 30k-50k concurrent across all platforms. I suspect a decent number of those are logging in for a half hour or less just to do daily or weekly challenges.
I have put about 2,700 hours into FO76, a decent amount was AFK to farm events. I have all the best gear and all of the items available in the game that you don’t buy from the shop with an abstraction of real money. I have fully beaten the game until the brahmin was pulp and has become one with the wasteland again, and then I began to dig a deep hole.
Last paragraph is the TL;DR.
It is now a Fallout game with a weak story and other people that may or may not be annoying, and the optional PvP is basically first attacker wins unless you are specifically built for PvP. You don’t need to interact with other players and can still put a few hundred hours into the game just playing story stuff. On release, it was a glitchy shit show filled with griefers and no NPCs.
It has bugs and glitches that aren’t a problem most of the time unless you really want to grind one activity. Sometimes random glitches, crashes, etc. happen more frequently than is understandable, especially after a content release. I swear they don’t actually play test updates and depend on the players to report things.
The building is kneecapped by a budget constraint that keeps you from taking advantage of the build area. In personal cells called “vaults”, the budget may be exceeded without the budget bar being filled. Most of the build items are in the store shop or are only obtainable during limited time events that you need to RNG grind to get or buy from another player that likely doesn’t know the fair market value. Items available in the store shop cycle randomly, so you may not see an item you want for a year or more. Holiday themed items often show up in the store after the holiday has passed.
More on the subject of arbitrary budgets, you only have storage for 1200 units of weight off your character. That is, unless you have a FO76 subscription which gives you 2 unlimited storage boxes for scrap materials and ammo, soon another one will be added for chems and healing stuff. That isn’t a problem if you don’t collect weapons, plans, and armor. It is a problem if you do because you won’t be able to keep tons of ammo or stims in storage. I traded uncommon and rare plans for caps because that is the fastest and easiest way to get caps, I had around 700 weight units of plans between two characters(each plan has a weight of 0.25). If you want to keep legendary weapon effects just to have or for selling, they each weight 1 unit. The player joke is that FO76 is an inventory management game with an open world action RPG mini-game, which is true for experienced players.
Some of it is a tedious grind to get some of the best armor, like hundreds of runs of a 5 minute activity to get enough of a specific currency or dozens to hundreds of runs of a Raid that requires you have a team of 4 and good gear+build that takes about a half hour but can take over an hour(or be impossible to complete) with inexperienced players at lower levels.
There are 8 different in-game currencies that you can’t buy, not including the game store currency. There is no way to exchange currencies except for 3 that are one-way and one of those currencies can only be used to buy another currency. Treasury Notes > Gold Bullion, Caps > Gold Bullion.
One of the currencies is only for seasonal content(4 seasons a year) that requires you to do daily and weekly challenges, that currency does not roll over into the next season and some seasonal rewards require a FO76 subscription. The seasonal currency you can technically buy through buying season ranks, a full season cost about $120 if you don’t want to bother with challenges. The daily challenges take a experienced player 10-15 mins to complete, the weeklies take 30-45 mins. The FO76 subscription is really nice for QOL, but I put around 500 hours into the game without one.
The events are mostly under 5 minutes long and aren’t fun after like the 6th time.
The big content updates are once a year with smaller content additions between. For instance, they just added fishing and before that they added the ability to become a ghoul. The last big update was in December when they added a 5 stage Raid and the next big one is at the end of the year which is going to be a big map expansion.
If you are a Fallout fan, Fallout 76 is a Fallout game that is fun enough to play for the quests(60% of Fallout humor compared to FO4) and free content, but it is not a Fallout live service game that will be enjoyable for most Fallout fans for as many hours that you can put into the singleplayer games and you will “miss out” on a lot of items if you aren’t down for the grind or have cash to burn.
Good lord that’s more horrific than I thought. That’s full blown MMORPG time sink levels without nearly the content of a real MMO.
Realistically, you could experience all the game content in like 200 hours. Even faster if you know higher level players that can help you, which a lot of higher level players will help you. That is a lot of content without the limitations that purposefully slow progression down like you see in MMOs. Keep in mind that you don’t need the game subscription to play the game and don’t need to spend any money in the game to play and get the endgame content.
It isn’t until you are trying to grind out getting certain things that your playtime skyrockets, but that is true with a real MMO.
On the subject of the community and players helping players, the community is pretty great. I have dragged lower level players through the hardest part of the game and taken them from level 20(you can start the game at level 1 or 20) to over level 100(there is no max level) in an afternoon with no detriment to my enjoyment. I have given newer players thousands of scrap, hundreds of legendary mods, and hundreds of thousands of caps worth of item plans that you can on get with RNG grinds.
I am not exceptional, I am pretty typical for the high level players. Since we have “nothing left” to do in the game and understand the meta, pretty much everything has lost value. We will buy overpriced stuff for sale in player vendors just because we want to get rid of caps and it takes us minutes to go from 1k caps to the 40k cap limit due to the value of the “crap” we have in our stash. Some players can’t hit the cap limit in hundreds of hours of play. It could take you hours to get enough material to make 2k of ammo(that you can burn through in an hour) and we will give you 10k of that ammo or enough materials to make 10k and not even notice the loss because we know how to net gain ammo.
Compared to gacha games and actual MMOs, FO76 is far better in terms of cost in terms of time and money, also the community is very helpful to new players.