I've been playing Fallout 76 after the show as well and I am genuinely surprised how much I've enjoyed it. I never intended to play the game, even after the show, but I kept reading online about how the game was really good now, and how many people were going back to it and how nice the community is, so I thought I'd give it another chance. I've put in something like 135 hours in the game since then.
I'm not a fan of the Bethesda era Fallout games. Didn't like 3 or 4 and NV was so buggy at launch that it was also not a great experience. However, that was 10 or more years ago. What I have come to realize in that time is that Bethesda no longer makes the games that they used to and that I used to want from them (RPGs like Morrowind). So you won't get games with deep, branching storylines, meaningful choices with consequences and multiple ways to solve quests from them. What you get instead are first person, open world adventure games with light RPG elements, unmatched exploration, decent ancillary storytelling, the freedom to do whatever you want in the game and, nowadays, a very robust base building component. I think it's very important to set correct expectations for games coming from this studio. Judge them for what they are and what they're trying to be rather than what you hoped they would be. And Fallout 76 excels at what it is trying to be.
The other major problem I've had with the newer Fallout games is that I just don't like the dull, dreary and depressing settings of the games. I'm not saying they're doing anything wrong... it's a post apocalyptic setting so that's exactly what it was meant to be. It's just that I didn't really enjoy spending 50-100 hours or more playing in the same dreary urban wasteland with no colours except grey and brown (and those awful monochrome filters in F3 and FNV). I understand that it's meant to look bad, it's meant to be a ruined civilization but, for me, it's just not fun to play in that kind of world for an extended period of time. Fallout 76 fixes this as well by being set in the Appalachian Forest. Large parts of the map are filled with pleasant looking trees with autumn colours. Wandering around this game world, which is the main point of game for me, is far more pleasant than any of the older games. There are still many places with the same urban decay and in fact, several different biomes on the map, but there's a large part of the map that just feels nice to play in.
If you remember, the game initially shipped without any human NPCs. All the quests were delivered by robots and recordings. They got trashed for that design choice and a couple of years later shipped a huge update which added NPCs to the game. That update also added a whole new set of main and side quests. They actually ship about one major update a year which adds a new area or expands the current map (which is massive) and each of these updates adds main and side quests. So the game has now has multiple main and side quest chains and it is entirely possible to do them out of order depending on what place you stumble upon in your adventures. This is not a bad thing because ultimately the quests are designed to send you in every direction on the map to explore anyway. It can however be jarring to go back and forth from taking quests from NPCs and taking them from voice recordings, because they never went back to modify the original quests to add NPCs there. That being said, now that I have finished a majority of the quests in the game, I can safely say that the final quests of the original main quest series are better than anything that they've shipped since. And it got me thinking about how, aside from the 'immersion' factor, there is no functional difference between taking a quest from a voice recording as opposed to a human NPC. A good quest from a voice recording is a better game experience than a bad quest from a human NPC.
Anyway the game is really fun to play if you enjoy exploring the world. The map is huge with lots of places to find. You can be wandering around in the forest and come across a set of log cabins and there's a story about the fate of the people who lived there. Or you're in the city and you go to some commercial building and learn about how the company tried to take advantage of people before the nukes went off. How an actress who was preparing for the role of a life time dealt with the great war. Like every Bethesda games, there are vignettes waiting to be discovered in any direction you walk in and if you take the time to absorb the story being presented. If you enjoy that aspect of Bethesda games, then this one does it really well.
The game isn't flawless though. Being always online means the mod scene is next to non existent. There's a live service layer with a battle pass (which I ignore) and events happening every 20 minutes. An event is a group activity with other players in the server where you teleport to a location and do basic quests (defend a point, escort a thing, kill a boss etc.). This can also be ignored but they do give items and currencies that are useful at the 'endgame' where you are trying to modify stats on your weapons and armor. If you enjoy the base building aspect of the game then it is greatly expanded since Fallout 4 but it is also one of their primary vectors for monetization because they sell an absolute ton of decorations and utilities that you can use to make your base more aesthetically appealing or just useful. And the biggest problem (which you don't actually encounter until maybe 50 hours have passed) is that inventory space is very limited. This is a problem that is easily solved with mods in their other games but here you will constantly end playing inventory tetris and it becomes tiresome after a while. But would you believe it, they have an optional monthly subscription of about $12 or so and if you buy in to that, you suddenly get nearly unlimited stash space along with several other quality of life benefits. Classic case of creating a problem and selling the solution. The debate on whether this is pay to win or not is endless in the community.
TLDR: Fallout 76 is a surprisingly fun game if you enjoy playing the kind of game Bethesda Game Studio makes. If you tried the game years ago and bounced off it, I think it's worth giving it another shot now.
