OK, it’s not “my” game; I didn’t build it. But I find myself playing it quite a bit these days.
The game is Fallout 76, and perhaps you’re at least tangentially aware of the Fallout series thanks to the successful TV series earlier this year on Prime. (It really is a great watch.)
It’s probably weird to describe any Fallout game as “cozy.” By definition, life in the Fallout universe is nasty and violent.
A brief primer for the initiated; the rest of you can jump to below the centered photo.
The world of Fallout
So. Fallout is a game series that launched in 1997 with one game studio (Interplay) but moved to Bethesda Softworks in the early 2000s. Essentially, a nuclear war breaks out in 2077 leading to what is believed to be worldwide decimation. For various reasons, giant underground vaults were built to shield paying Americans from the destruction of nuclear fallout. There’s lots of story here that I won’t spoil; if you never plan to pick up the games, I do recommend watching Fallout season 1 on Amazon Prime as it captures the feels of the world very well and tells an essentially accurate version of the origin story. [Affiliate link to the series] It’s also just a really well-made TV show with a solid story in its own right and excellent set design. Anyway….
The various games alter the timeline here and there to fit their narratives, but all gameplay takes place at least a few decades or more later as the vault-dwellers emerge into the still-irradiated American landscape to find husks of cities, huge mutated beasts, and all manner of dangers, fanatical humans. From the outset, one must scavenge, learn fast, and try to survive.
Each game usually places one such vault-dweller as the main character, walking into the light of a horrible yet not desolate landscape, and getting caught up in the various tasks and distractions of survival, exploration, and engagement with various factions of humans with distinct cultural development and governing systems and concepts of morality.
If you’ve played any of these games, you know that they are methodical, huge open-world RPG games, rich with distractions in the environment that rapidly multiple your possible story threads far beyond what you can keep up with. I personally think FO3 has the best story, though I didn’t play the original 2 (which run on a far older game engine). All of the stories offer glimpses of the megalomania that possessed the warmongers to progress toward total destruction in 2077, and very little working society remains.
Side note: The DNA of the original studio has lived on in a game called Wasteland 3 which has a lot of the Fallout vibe (but retains the extremely different isometric, grid-based gameplay of the originals) plus witty writing and a thoughtful narrative.
When Fallout 76 launched, many of us day 1 players were rapidly disappointed. We were eager to see how a “living” FO game could provide engagement that the static earlier titles couldn’t provide even with multiple DLC packs…. but the game we were delivered in 2018 gave almost nothing. The landscapes were gorgeous reproductions of the West Virginia hillsides, but almost no non-player characters even existed. It was a world void of most humans, save other players (who might kill you as soon as help you) and murderous ghouls or mutant monsters. What story existed simply was too little, so most of us put the game away and left.
A return to my Appalachian roots – in pixel form
Cue 2024. I have absolutely no idea why I decided Fallout 76 was something I should play again. I think I saw a post online that suggested it might be worth playing finally, a solid 5 years after release and multiple content updates later. I installed it (free on GamePass) and dove in. The Amazon Prime show in June reignited a lot of people’s interest in the game world, too. And I can’t deny that the summer’s rising tensions across the world stage doesn’t have “how stupid world leaders can be when they possess nukes” on my actual mind.
Since then, FO76 has turned into my cozy farming / base-building obsession. It’s … ironic? weird? possibly disturbing? … that a game about everyone and everything being either flash-murdered on the spot or living on in mutated anguish can become an escape from 2024, but here we are.
The landscapes are gorgeous and speak to my Appalachian-girl heart of the rocks and plants I grew up with. There is beauty in horror, at times, and Fallout has more and more grown into a game series which can appreciate that. Sometimes you need to stop and look across the valley of a mountain range that is likely older than almost anything on this planet and remember that you are small and your lifespan is short, and this world is going to continue on for millennia after everyone who could have remembered you has also been forgotten.
About 10 years ago, the 4th major game in the series (set in Boston) added a base-building mechanic to Fallout. It’s a bit fiddly and initially didn’t really do more than give you the option of claiming some helpful spots across the vast Massachusetts frontier to support settlers and give yourself fast-travel points across the map.
The system is still pretty damn janky, but FO76 rightly saw the potential in a game anchored in the idea that West Virginia would probably be isolated enough for people to hunker down and begin to eke out a living in this bad new world. It’s a bit rough in the early game as you emerge from the vault with nearly nothing but a few supplies and an eager can-do attitude (the sentiment behind all those “thumbs up” cartoon boys you may have seen in FO advertising). But soon you gather enough wood and learn a few plans, and you put up a little cabin with 4 walls and a crappy roof and a mattress on the floor, and suddenly you have a spot of ground you’d like to improve.
The base-builder in all of us
What is it about base-building games that absorb me for hours? I can hardly be bothered to organize the books on my end table, begging for my attention, but I’ll take 20 minutes to make sure the front steps to my virtual porch are properly aligned.
It’s not just Fallout; I’ve been known to spend a whole afternoon playing Surviving Mars where – again – base-building for survival on a harsh world demands resource management, tracking of details and to-do lists on a mental spreadsheet, and the joys and gnashing of teeth sparked by interlocking systems and cascades of consequences.
There’s a whole genre of games now that are labeled “cozy”: games which lean into the mundane parts of daily living. Animal Crossing is one you may have heard of from the pandemic days when everyone (it seemed) bought a Nintendo Switch and copies of the game to play with their kids. Stardew Valley is another huge hit in this sphere, a labor of love created by one man who decided to make the game he wanted to play.
I don’t mean to imply that Fallout 76 is anywhere as intricate as games built from the ground-up to model things like weather systems and the gravity of Mars. But have you felt the satisfaction of getting that piece of furniture (for which you just unlocked the plan) in juuuust the right spot?
It’s a type of control we wish we had over the real space we live in — and increasingly don’t.
Better together in the wasteland
What has perhaps been FO76’s shining star, though, is its community. I am on Reddit too much, and I wander into the r/fo76 community from time to time for tips and advice.
I don’t have any official data to share about the average community age, but self-reported info through the occasional Reddit thread (“Hey, how old is everyone?”) suggests the player base skews older. For example, this is a representative comment I just pulled up from a thread 3 years ago:
“I’m a fogey at 55 (and a female gamer to boot!) I’ll continue playing in the old folks home too as long as they have good internet.”
(Hear Hear!)
In an era when most game communities are known for their toxicity and the standing rule is “never read the chat” (because racism, or rape if they realize you’re a woman), FO76 players are (for the most part) friendly and helpful. I’ve had people at level 872 drop so many healing items for me to take at one time that I literally didn’t have any way to get them all back to my camp in a single trip! I generally don’t engage in any online or mic chat but folks have messaged me on Xbox to ask what ammo I am short of and dropped 1k right on the ground.
So is this an anachronism for an irradiated post-apocalyptic world? Or is it a sign that not all humans are raging assholes (perhaps once they move past their first couple decades)?
I remember N.K. Jemisin (the sci-fi author — please go read her Broken Earth trilogy!) writing a short novelette called Emergency Skin (Amazon) which won the Hugo Award for its category in 2020. She envisions a world which must also deal with its post-collapse problems, but without the assumptions that the human race is doomed to “survival of the fittest” and societal collapse in the face of big problems.
Also relevant is A Paradise Built in Hell, by Rebecca Solnit, a researched book that discusses ways in which communities in the wake of disaster band together and live communally so that all can survive (Amazon). Her surprising thesis is that intense crises — such as the devastation we recently saw in Western North Carolina thanks to Hurricane Helene — actually spawn acts of generosity and altruism, not fear. Communal living takes over; people take what is needed and share what they have. She said this holds true in nearly every situation she studied.
We humans are tribal to our core, and sometimes the “better angels of our nature” do win out.
Perhaps that’s why I need to play a game set in a destroyed post-apocalyptic America right now to cope with what appears to be impending destruction of the democratic ideas we should hold dear.
Fallout cautions us that oligarchs and businessmen and capitalists are not here “for us”; they are more likely to use humans to accomplish their means (for power, for wealth) than to take actions which help humanity overall. We should not trust strong men who want bristling military might and worldwide domination; they are not acting for us either. I think both those lessons are apropos to America in 2024, but … I generally do play games for fun, not for their political lessons.
Sometimes, it’s just nice to build a rocking chair on a virtual front porch and watch the acid rain fall for a while.
just:words 
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