Published , by TJ Denzer
Published , by TJ Denzer
Sometimes bugs or glitches can be a thing of beauty. Sometimes they might not even be bugs or glitches, but rather a situation that was simply there in the system and never fixed. Such could be the case with the recently released Fallout 76 Wastelanders update, where some upset players have found out that if you die in front of NPCs, they will raid your corpse and keep your precious gear for themselves permanently, effectively making them the most frightening raiders to ever exist in Fallout.
The so-called game-breaking bug was discovered on April 23, 2020, as users on the Fallout 76 Subreddit started posting experiences of being killed on a mission or in the wild near NPCs. When coming back to life, they would find that a gun or some ammo were missing. They’d also find that those nearby NPCs were conveniently wielding a weapon they didn’t have before - a weapon quite familiar to the one the player had before they died. Yes, the NPC stole not only their precious gun, but also the ammo for it when they died, and they won’t give it back, as demonstrated in the video below.
Since the bug has been reported by several threads on the Fallout 76 subreddit, Bethesda has since responded to say it is looking into the matter. That said, it also sounds like the behavior of NPCs from previous Fallout games when they recognized a better weapon in play and would go to retrieve and use it if the user had died. It wasn’t out of the ordinary for Fallout New Vegas NPCs to pull weapons off their dead buddies to use against you or others.
The major difference here is in the finality of Fallout 76 being an “always-online game” and the rules that come with that. Players can’t steal from players, but apparently NPCs sure can, and there’s no going back to a save you just put together in Fallout 76. In that way, Fallout 76 Wastelanders has introduced the scariest raiders to have ever been put in a Fallout game - the kind you can’t do anything about with all of your usual trickery. It seems Bethesda is going to fix this at some point, but we’ll always remember the Fallout NPCs that turned the tables, looted your privileged corpse for once, and got away with it.