If it’s January 2023 when you’re reading this, then you’re in luck – Fallout 76 is free to keep this month for all three tiers of PS Plus subscribers! And of course still available Fallout 76 Items on Xbox Game Pass PC and Console. There aren’t a lot of games out there that come with more baggage attached than Fallout 76, and as the world’s biggest Fallout fan, even I have to admit that the launch was an embarrassing disaster. The game was not finished, lacked content, and had so many bugs I genuinely couldn’t tell what was a feature or not. After 20 hours I put it down, devastated that my favorite franchise had fallen so far. But, against my predictions, Todd Howard and Bethesda Game Studios decided to salvage the game rather than throwing it out to die.

I think the conclusion Bethesda reached is that saving the Fallout brand long-term was worth the 2 additional years of 500 developers working tirelessly to fix their broken mess. And frankly, it’s the very least they could do for both their new customers and their lifelong fans, all of whom felt scammed to some degree. Now over 4 years from launch with several huge free expansions, I can confidently say they made the right call. Fallout 76 was well worth salvaging and is absolutely worth playing for fans of Fallout and fans of survival games. Since the 2.0 Launch in April 2020, I’ve put an additional 61 hours into the open-world survival RPG and loved every one of them. If you’re dipping into the Appalachia Wasteland for the first time and don’t really know much about what Fallout 76 even is anymore, here are some tips to get you started!

As “The Fallout Guy”, as I am known to all my friends both online and IRL, people always come to me first to talk about the Fallout games. The first question I get about 76 is undoubtedly “Is this an MMO?”. That’s a complicated question, and it bears explaining because I can’t simply say “It’s like Destiny” or “it’s like Sea of Thieves” because it isn’t actually like anything else that exists. Appalachia’s map is around four times the size of Fallout 4, but each server is occupied not by thousands of people – it’s just 20. That’s right. The massive, gorgeous open world is occupied by just 20 human players.

In practice, this means that you can and likely will play Fallout 76 for three or four hours at a time without seeing a single hint that other people exist. It’s very easy to get lost in your own campaign, take down a swarm of ghouls, and then be shocked for a moment to see WaluigiButtMuncher69 and his roving compatriots jumping around on top of an abandoned shack shooting off flares and screaming obscenities.

You Can Play Alone.

You can play this game solo or with friends with equal efficiency, but if you’re not partied up don’t expect to interact with other humans much. It’s quaint, and I wish more games existed like this. Many of the hallmarks of MMO RPGs are present – daily and weekly tasks, party-based combat, dungeon raids, customizable player housing, and community events – but all on an extremely manageable little scale. You don’t need to pick a server ever – you simply hit continue from the main menu to load into a random server or join the world a friend is already in to party up. Those are all your options.

As someone who’s never played an MMO, server screens scare me and this is a welcome thing to make it more approachable. While all campaign missions from every expac can be completed solo, Community Events are going to mandate collaboration with other players. Whether you’re actually in a party or just show up at the same time, you are not going to be able to kill the giant honey beast on your own. If you’re content to stick to the handcrafted main and side quests, you need never interact with another human. If you’d like to get the most out of the game, time to party up.

3. You Should Play in a Party with Friends (or Randos)/

When loading into a game, here’s a hot tip you should follow – join a public group immediately. Public groups are made up of up to four players who are not friends and don’t know each other. When in a public group, you can simply continue doing your own campaign and side quests and never interact with your party members. Here’s the benefit, though. You get +25% to XP for events, which is especially huge at lower levels, and you can fast travel to everyone’s C.A.M.P. (player home) for free regardless of where it is on the map. Again, especially at low levels, this is huge.

Fast traveling across the map will usually cost you somewhere from 50-80 caps, and at the beginning when you are scrounging for caps one by one this is an invaluable service. If you join a public group, your party mates will not expect you to interact with them. Join the group, continue what you’re doing, and enjoy free fast travel and the XP boosts. A huge boon is that players of all levels can play together and all enemies scale to make your damage proportional. Level 5 and Level 100 players can play together and all contribute equally to a boss fight! I recommend finding friends to party up if at all possible.

4. Your Character’s Build Should be Constantly Changing.

76 tosses out the old level-up systems for cards, which are each things like “+1 to Charisma” or “+25% to laser guns” or “reduce rads from eating by 10%”. These make a huge difference in how your character plays, so changing your build per mission is the way to go, even if you’re rolling solo. However, the real key is that party members can share their perk points with each other. This is a genius mechanic that just works. One party member wants to be your hacker for the mission but another has the perk cards for it? You’re using a machine gun? I’m not, I’ll share my heavy gunner perk points. You share your rad resistance perks since we’re going into a radiation zone. There’s no better feeling in this game than specializing your character for Fallout 76 Bottle Caps a team mission, rolling out, and blasting through it.