Fallout 76, Bethesda’s troubled online survival shooter, received an update today that included a number of bug fixes and the addition of push-to-talk on PC. These all looked like welcome improvements, except for one small thing: the game’s “Feed the People” public event no longer gives every player on a server cans of meat stew.
The change was noted underneath the quest section of the patch notes and was treated as a bug fix. “Fixed an issue in which completing the Feed the People Event Quest granted Canned Meat Stew to all players on the server, rather than only the quest’s participants.”
The fact that the quest’s original payout was unintentional caught a number of players, including myself, by surprise. “Didn’t realise this was a bug, thought it was a fun community thing they added,” one commenter on the game’s subreddit wrote in the official thread outlining the new changes. Their comment now has more upvotes than the thread itself. It has become a rallying cry of sorts for Bethesda to, essentially, re-break the event.
Fallout 76 has a bunch of event quests that occur every so often and are open to being completed as a team by anyone on the server. Feed the People revolves around defending a food processing plant from Scorched and robots while it creates canned goods.
While the players who participate in the event get XP and some items, previously anyone else playing on the server, no matter where they were in the world, also got cans of meat stew. Meat stew combats hunger, increases health, and, most importantly, gives the player an hour-long 5% XP bonus.
Everyone getting stew made sense within the game’s playful, post-apocalyptic fiction. Fallout 76 players were getting the food processing plant back up and running to “feed the people,” so if they were successful, the people, i.e. other players, got fed. In an online multiplayer game where communal interactions are few and far between, these server-wide gifts helped the game feel slightly less lonely.
Fallout 76 players across the game’s official forums and also on Twitter seem to be pretty much in agreement that the game needs more things like the Feed the People glitch.
“Please unfix ‘Feed the People’. Rewarding the whole server was a nice gesture,” one person tweeted at the Bethesda Support account. Meanwhile on the subreddit, thread after thread about the event continues to get posted and upvoted.
Clearly, the people are hungry. The only question now is whether Bethesda will start feeding them again.
Comments
8 responses to “Fallout 76 Event ‘Feed The People’ No Longer Feeds The People”
I’m finding it funny that after all the complaints about bugs in the game, when Bethesda actually fix a bug, the first thing people do is complain that they did…
Agreed but in fairness fix actual game play, server issues, missions problems, things that actually matter! Dont fix a bug that gives everything something for “free”
Go look at the patch notes, they’ve done a hell of a lot of other fixing…the feed the people thing was likely a 5 minute fix that got thrown in by the guy that was told to work on fixing events.
With a game still so young, you should be seeing a truckload of fixes for things like this. You take the quick hits while getting the major issues sorted. Its not a linear process. Happens every MMO.
It might also be possible that the problem means more than we realise. What if it was a core programming issue that effected other events as well, and not just specific to this one event.
Would people whine like this if this was a bug that meant the scorchbeast queens AoE hit everyone on the server, and not just those in the area?
The quest was originally like ringing the bells in dark souls, and that it was working that way unintentionally is genuinely funny.
Gaming history is littered with bugs which turned into features (see skiing in tribes),you’d think Bethesda would have more practice than most at recognising that opportunity.
People generally feel happy when they know they have helped someone. Given how rarely you meet another player on any servers, this event is one of the rare occasions where people can be altruistic with minimal efforts.
It is good to know that so many people are complaining because it shows most players aren’t a-holes.
It also shows just how popular the game is despite all the negative media coverage. I’m blown away by how active that sub is. The patch note thread was only posted 12 hours ago and it has over 5000 upvotes, the comment mentioned in this article is currently at 5575 upvotes.
It’s rare for me to see a subreddit for a single game that’s this active a few weeks after release.
Based on the long list of patch notes and other community requests that they’ve included (more detailed patch notes was one of those requests) odds are they’ll “un-fix” this in the patch next week.
TBH it was pretty odd seeing canned stew randomly turn up in my inventory and have no idea where it came from. I was something like 70 hours into playing the game before finding out it came from that event and the reward was server wide.
More worth mentioning though is just how many things they’ve fixed. It’s great to see them responding to the community so quickly and fixing a lot of key concerns. It gives me some confidence that they’re working hard to make things right. They still have a long way to go but after a shaky start it looks like they’re starting to find their footing.