For those of you who were playing Fallout 76, but took a break, or those who haven’t had the chance to enjoy it yet (it’s great fun with friends!), here’s a bit of what’s recently come to the game through the ongoing Wild Appalachia updates that you might have missed.
First, we discovered a few university miscreants were more focused on creating inventive new brews than their studies. It’s college, it happens. As we investigate, we meet Biv, probably the most entertaining video game robot since Claptrap (yes, I know it’s spelled CL4P-TP), who is here as part of a brief quest-line that gives you the opportunity to become a purveyor of the finest alcohols this side of…well, they’re probably all awful, but they introduce a ton of new benefits, especially to non-melee players. And it’s an easy daily quest that gives solid rewards, so there’s that.
The Fasnacht Parade was a fun little event that repeated throughout the day on every server for about 
a week, giving you a bit of a taste of Helvetia, a real small town in West Virginia. Players were rewarded with fun decorations for their camps, new recipes, and the surreal experience of bringing entire servers of total strangers together to help make the parade awesome. The only real downside was that there wasn’t a rewarding gear-drop (you could get lower level legendaries, but that doesn’t satisfy many).
A survival mode, with almost no PVP restrictions, was added to the game for people who want a little bit more danger and murder in their survival games, and simultaneously the regular mode (now dubbed Adventure Mode), received a few tweaks to reduce the potential for griefing. If you feel like tackling Survival Mode, you’ll get a 20% boost to XP earned while leveling, as well as the opportunity to complete weekly challenges for unique legendary weapons that can’t be obtained elsewhere.
The Burrows is a new dungeon added to the game, that was not announced in the roadmaps, and came somewhat unexpectedly. The map is excellent, and there’s a minor quest associated with it as well, giving a little more detail about a couple of the factions, but I won’t spoil that for anyone here. The big problem with The Burrows, though, is that when people think of dungeons in games, they associate them with raids, bosses, and excellent loot. There is a unique loot drop which is kind of cool, but it’s more of a novelty than something people would use. And while the dungeon was described as being challenging and difficult, it really wasn’t. My hope is that someday they’ll take advantage of the great physical space they’ve created to also have compelling gameplay as well. But, I suppose, it was a bonus surprise none of us were expecting, so maybe we shouldn’t be too disappointed.
On the much more enjoyable end, we discover some cryptid hunters in the area were looking for a ferocious sheepsquatch, which turned out to be a wild goose chase. Or so they thought, as you investigate various clues, some of which lead you closer to discovering the truth, while others were just unfortunate circumstances that hadn’t been solved yet. Over time, a new event was added with arguably the hardest boss yet, and almost certainly the hardest hitting. More clues were revealed over time, and then we discovered Shear Terror.
While there has always been a fairly robust photo mode on the game, apparently Bethesda wanted the experience to be a bit more immersive, so they added an in-game camera, and a bevy of associated challenges to help you earn free Atoms (the meta currency used to buy cosmetic/convenience items). Finding the quest starter can be a bit challenging, but the community generally is very helpful, and calls out when and where you can find the broken camera you need to repair. Film is cheap, and you can get new plans to craft other lenses. Given how good the photo mode already was, this seems a bit unnecessary, but it’s something to do, and we’ll see how it develops over time.
And, that leads us to the next patch, outlined in much greater detail here, which will add player vending, legendary scrapping for a unique currency, the Ever Upwards! quest-line that, among other things, will introduce backpacks. Get you some!
