The core of my fury at this game is the sheer disrespect and arrogance with which Bethesda has treated the franchise and their dedicated player base. Fallout 76 feels like it was deliberately built to be a meme about Bethesda games, and I'm not being facetious, I think that is actually what happened. Bethesda fell in love with the hype train around Fallout 4 and Skyrim, and they built a Fallout game that is almost entirely about how great it supposedly is to be playing another Fallout game. Most emblematic of that decision was the inclusion of "Country Roads" on the in-game radio station, alongside the usual 50s hits. It's infuriatingly out of place, and if they only wanted to add an Appalachian flair, they could have used any of the reams of public domain and 100% lore-friendly Appalachian folk music. No, it was in there purely as a reference to the game's branding and marketing. "Hey guys, isn't it great that Fallout 76 is out now? Stay tuned, we'll remind you once every two or three hours."
Further evidence is the "plot", insofar as there is one. Every quest involving another human ultimately results in finding that human's corpse. It seems fine the first time, it's a bit funny the second, and the third, a bit of horror starts to creep in, as you realize all you're going to be doing in this game is shooting things and listening to dead people's holotapes. If they had thought about it for five minutes, they could have made it fit together: some huge disaster wiped out all the human survivors. But no, they all died in their small and separate ways, coincidentally just days before you left the Vault. It makes no sense whatsoever, and serves only to cheapen the experience. They also retconned some important lore without any explanation, and they included way too much humour without enough drama to counterbalance it; worse, it's cheap and self-referential humour. "Ha ha, it's a robot that thinks it's a person." "Ha ha, we sure do love those wacky Mr. Handys that we recognize from the games that were actually good."
In that context, the innumerable "bugs" are probably features in Bethesda's eyes. It's something for them to laugh about on stage at their manicured PR events. "Ha ha, we sure do have a reputation for hilarious bugs, but that's what you guys love about us, right? So we're not going to fix any of them, just for you." And to be fair, I was prepared for there to be a lot of bugs. But Bethesda fail to realize that while a lot of funny videos are made showcasing their bugs, they only get made in the first place because people fall in love with the depth and seriousness of the lore, and the human drama that unfolds within their worlds. I had a lot of laughs in Fallout 4, but they were all given poignancy by context; and there are scenes that still make me weep every time I think about them.
And the tragic thing is, there are still hints of that drama in this game, but it comes in a slow, dry trickle -- ten minute audio logs about water reclamation, Overseer's diaries, terminals with too many entries. I think I could still find the patience to enjoy it, but that patience is hard to come by when you're constantly being distracted by dumb self-aware Fallout jokes, pointless fetch quests and swarms of identical mobs. Meanwhile, there are crucial quality-of-life features that are missing entirely, like push-to-talk and FOV control, and despite a bit of lip service, Bethesda seems disinterested in adding any of them -- to say nothing of core mechanics like PVP being seriously broken by design. Bethesda's too good to fix their game; they know they'll get your money anyway, they just want to push this out and then forget about it as much as possible. But they pushed too far. I already got my refund, and I'll probably give Starfield a pass as well. Unless you can get it at an extreme (>75%) discount, I strongly recommend against buying this game.