Yesterday, Bethesda boldly announced (opens in new tab) that their much-maligned MMO spinoff Fallout 76 (opens in new tab) was getting an optional subscription service named Fallout 1st. To say that this went down poorly with the game's community is a massive understatement. One particularly salty player even snapped up FalloutFirst.com. What they did with it wasn't pretty.
It has since been taken down (perhaps devoured by a pack of hungry lawyers), but in the few hours that it was alive it was wall to wall invective, ripping into the shortcomings of the subscription. Fortunately for us, nothing on the internet truly dies, so we can still view the page via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (opens in new tab). Do be warned that there's more than a little bit of foul language here.
Folks on Twitter also caught some snaps of the site before it was metaphorically nuked off the face of the planet.
In case the site gets lawyered lol. pic.twitter.com/gtoRnnLHOjOctober 24, 2019
Even as a semi regular player of two subscription games (Final Fantasy XIV and The Elder Scrolls Online), it's easy to see why players were less than happy with the service Bethesda are advertising. It simply offers very little for a massively steep price. Private server instances are useful, but the tent, scrap box and currency for buying cosmetic outfits feel downright miserly. It's even more galling when you compare it to The Elder Scrolls Online's cheaper optional subscription, which at least gets you access to all the game's many minor DLC packs.
Unless Bethesda improve what they're offering, I doubt this'll be the last we'll have heard of the Fallout 76 Sex Tent. If nothing else, we're witnessing the birth of a wonderful, terrible meme.
