If you are a Fallout 76 fan or currently enjoying the game, there is a bit of bad news from Bethesda for you. Bethesda Support on X announced that the game will be going offline on Tuesday, September 3, 2024, by 10 AM ET /9 AM CT to apply the Milepost Zero update, but that is not all.
Once the update is applied, players will need to redownload the entire game. According to Bethesda, they are repackaging the entire game to make it smaller. While this sounds promising, that is where the real problem lies for several reasons.
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“This update will require a full redownload of the entire game due to a repackaging effort which will make the overall game size smaller,” the company announced on X.
For the sake of clarity, PC and Xbox gamer @ClaireusG asked if that meant uninstalling and reinstalling the game. The answer from Bethesda Support was a simple and emphatic “Yes”.
Speaking from the perspective of a gamer from Africa (Nigeria specifically) where Internet access is still a luxury, redownloading an entire game will be costly for players who already own the game. The price of purchasing data to redownload the game will likely be akin to the price of purchasing some indie games. So, where’s the incentive to redownload the game?
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Also, since the new update will involve uninstalling the old game, players immediately became worried that doing so may erase their saves. If you have spent hours in a game just to progress through a level, you will easily realize how heartbreaking it is to lose your saves which will mean starting the game all over. For some, that is enough to abandon the game.
Also, some dedicated players have built admirable photo galleries over the years. Bethesda is not giving out any guarantee about saves yet—which also puts such photo galleries at risk of being erased.
Responding to the announcement, an X user with the handle @hopalongtom wrote, “Will this repackage fix it so future reinstalls won’t delete our save loading screen screenshots? On PC they can be easily reimported, but on console, it stops recognizing them entirely!”
Responding to that comment, Bethesda Support wrote, “Stay tuned as information becomes available”. Several players also asked if the repackaging would make the game more stable and fix the crashing issues often experienced by players. In response, Bethesda Support recommended trying one of the fixes listed here, depending on your platform.
Bethesda’s Milepost Zero is the next biggest Fallout 76 update
While Fallout 76 has received several updates in the past, Milepost Zero is one of the super-sized Fallout 76 updates that don’t happen often. It promises to bring new repeatable events, make changes to the C.A.M.P. mechanics, as well as various other tweaks to the existing weapons, quests, and events.
However, for someone just entering the game, this is a welcome development. The series of updates over the years has led to the bloating of the Fallout 76 game to over 110 GB, nearly four times the size of the base game on PC (and that’s a lot of storage space taken up). People with 512 GB of storage would be worried.
It will be interesting to see how Bethesda accomplishes its game compression goal without causing emotional pain to dedicated players. By the way, are you looking forward to Milepost Zero’s release? Share your expectations in the comment box below.
