PART 1

Oh this is gonna be a long one... feel free to jump to the last 2 paragraphs if you want a tl;dr and my own personal option, otherwise I'm going to be completely unbiased and just give you a general account of what I've observed since the game was announced.

As it has already been mentioned there are 5 major / main Fallout titles before this one. All of these were full-fledged RPGs with a branching story where your actions and choices affected the outcome and you could end up with different or varying endings at the very least.

Now, back to Fallout 76... The game was announced at E3 2018, but everyone already knew about it because Kotaku's Jason Schreier had leaked info about it (as he had done with Fallout 4, and that got Kotaku blacklisted by Bethesda). The leaked info claimed it was a fully online multiplayer game, using the Creation Engine, etc... fans didn't want to believe it and a lot of them resorted to petty insults and trying to discredit the guy.

Given that he hadn't failed at leaking info about Fallout 4, there wasn't really any reason to doubt him now... and it turned out that he was right. Come E3 2018, we are given a trailer that didn't straight up say it, but kind of implied that it wasn't a singleplayer game. Then, Todd Howard, director of the game as well as the go-to figure (along with Pete Hines) for anything involving announcements from Bethesda Game Studios, announced that the game would be coming this year (as it did), that it ran on a multiplayer version of the Creation Engine (a badly aging in-house engine that they insist on using), etc... Meanwhile people were expecting a big reveal about their upcoming singleplayer RPG title: Starfield. And while we got a small teaser, there was no indication of how long it will be until it releases, we also got a teaser for The Elder Scrolls VI, which is only in pre-production and still a good 6+ years away from seeing a release. Both of these teasers were pretty much just a cop out to what was a pretty underwhelming conference in general.

So we were left with the upcoming RPG title being multiplayer, we can live with that right? I mean, even if I have to deal with other people I'll still be fine as long as there are individual instances (like most MMOs with branching paths do nowadays), and I can still play the story and make my own choices. But as it turns out, the information regarding that shortly after E3 wasn't the best. We learned that:

• There are no human NPCs because while designing the game, they decided that every human you saw should be another player.
• There are no dialogues trees / choices. There are no individual instances either. You can listen to robot NPCs, you can listen to holotapes (tape recordings, basically), but you can't actually have a conversation with said robots, or make any non-linear choices. The game story is completely linear (with the exception of being able to do multiple quests at the same time) and talking to robots / listening to holotapes is how you get your quests. As it turns out, this is a really bad idea because most of the time while doing this (listening to recordings without gameplay being halted on purpose) you'll be shooting stuff / talking to your friends and not paying attention to the story.
• You can't (at launch) run the game on your own server / local host, you can't mod it either which is something BGS games rely heavily on (though they said they're working on it, and considering allowing third party servers).

This wasn't the Fallout that people are used to, so a lot of people were already apprehensive... and that's when games media comes in. I saw a lot of headlines about the game with titles that were out of context phrases, or using the journalist's personal interpretation of what they had read/heard. Things such as:

• It's a RUST clone (a survival game). It's actually quite a bit different from RUST, RUST is actually a better survival game in that regard, but I don't think Fallout 76 is trying to be a survival game.
• It's a Battle Royale. I actually saw this headline from PC Gamer, and I still see people parroting it today. The game has a very specific Battle Royale-like mode that you need to opt-in to play it by tuning into a certain radio station. It's basically 6 players, each player gets a different target among the other 5 (with non-repeating targets, so no multiple players get the same target), last man standing wins, and there's a shrinking zone apparently. This is what I've read about it, and while it sounds like a very basic Battle Royale, it's far from making the actual game a Battle Royale, it's a mini-game inside the game...
• It's a PVP griefer party. BGS actually went to great lengths to discourage / make PVP be mostly meaningless. To get meaningful PVP both the attacker and the attacked need to "slap" each other (deal damage), otherwise the attacker deals reduced damage and becomes wanted, the more they attack the higher their bounty, and that bounty is posted to everyone on the server with their location, someone who kills them can claim the bounty, which comes directly out of the criminal's pockets. When a player dies, all they drop is their "junk" which are crafting components that you can turn most items you find into. Don't like/want an item? scrap it -> turns into junk. This junk can be deposited on a safe stash and most players do it so regularly that even if you get killed during PVP you won't lose too much junk, if any at all... PVP has no benefits, so nobody is doing it, which begs the question why BGS allows it in the first place. I've played for 30 hours so far and haven't been attacked once, most people actively avoid hitting each other during events where too many people are gathered in the same place.