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 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 Fallout 76 Items 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!

1. Fallout 76 is an MMO (Minuscule Multiplayer Online RPG)

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 Fallout 76 Bottle Caps 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.