When is easy not fun?

In my perpetual love of the Fallout franchise, a not so distand while back I re-activated my Ps Plus subscription, fired up Fallout76, and awaited for the unnecessarily massive patch/download before I could partake in the experience proper.

Updates, yadda yadda...hu, there is no longer a penalty for being thirsty/starving. Wait, really?

Perhaps let me inject some context into the above: Fallout 76 came out nearly four years ago as a survival-ish mmo-ish Fallout experience. It was (one could say still is) mired in bugs and universally panned, but beyond reason it still persists nowadays, much to my delight.

Let me zoom into the survival-ish experience: you've just left your cozy vault and set out to explore the surprisingly verdant yet rather dangerous post-apocalyptia alternative future of West Virginia. To survive, you will have to eat and drink regularly least thou suffer massive radiation damage (although never fatally so, bizarrely), contend with limited inventory and resources, plus the aforementioned dangerousity.

It was far from rogue-like, but at the same time it was fairly challenging, especially at lower, ill-equipped levels. I recall fondly my initial forays: with but a crudely put together weapon at my side and my flimsy vault jumpsuit to protect my fleshy parts, they were tense and exciting, while bobby pins and stimpaks (commodities as common as candy in a candy-fuelled nightmare at later levels) were more precious than the One Ring. It all made West Virginia feel more alive, more worthwhile for it.

Before I continue my enthusing recollection, I should underline that I never really suffered from any catastrophic system bugs, which were a common ailment for those wearing any power armour: to top it off, my pace was always very sedate, and I've never really bothered with the frankly disappointing higher level grind, which requires immense resources and ammunition to sustain at a consistent level.

That, my fellow humanians, is the requirement for those whose grinding prowess is a very serious business: the need for speed. The need to pulverise the grains of fun under a constantly grinding wheel, producing the sweet flour of satisfaction -and since you need a lot of flour to make good bread, you need to have it all now, quick, dirty and easy.

However, how can a survival-ish game supply that, when it was never meant to? After all, defeating the originally last boss takes an age of grinding in itself, is meant to be a map-wide event unifying everyone towards a singular purpose, and afterwards requites another age of grinding before one can re-attempt it.

Why, by making everything easier! Scrap those survival penalties, I say! Inventory limitations? Remove them! Enemies too tough? Make it so, that they be less tough, or endow thine weapons with more boom!

This has lead to an average map of Fallout 76 now having a rather large population of mega-levellers -people with levels in the high hundreds, if not thousands- constantly churning out the final bosses, or hardest challenges, or whatever final content, in the circle of grind.

So, I ask thee: is that fun? Does easy equate into fun? For some, it surely must do, to one degree or another. For the developers, or at least the game company, it surely must be, as it's helped keep the game alive.

Let me re-adjust the lense of the question, then: is easy right? Are we de-skilling ourselves of valuable abilities, in favour of easier to achieve results? Is dumming down the answer to our problems, or is it exacerbating them?

Would Fallout 76 be a better game if it had refined and evolved what made it unique, rather than trying to squeeze itself into the mmo standard template? If so, would it still be surviving?

Lots of food for thought, but one thing is for sure: that easy bread sure is addictive.

Your starving yet trying to epitomise the old man of the mountain,

Stefano Ronchi