Making Fallout 76 bearable by playing it inside Fallout 4

Tale of Two Wastelands might just be the best Fallout mod of all time, and it's pretty inarguably the most influential. On its surface, the idea is simple: Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas both use the same iteration of the same engine, so why not combine them together into a single megagame you can play for 200 hours? That, of course, doesn't even begin to touch on the technical wizardry required to make such a thing remotely feasible, but the end product really does play like magic.

Given all that, I'm honestly shocked it's taken this long for someone to try something similar. Tales From Appalachia looks to be a TTW equivalent for Fallout 4, importing the much-maligned Fallout 76 in its entirety. If you enjoyed that game's forested charm despite the nonstop griefing, terrible server lag, and odious microtransaction shop, you might just be in luck! (Seriously. I played Fallout 76 with a melee character and landed maybe one out of every five hits thanks to server lag.)

Needless to say, it looks and runs a lot better when it's not crowbarred into a pseudo-MMO.

Although Tales from Appalachia hasn't seen a public release yet, you will need legal copies of both Fallout 4 and 76 when it does, which is probably the mod author's way of ducking a cease and desist from Bethesda. The bad news: that probably won't work, since Bethesda is still actively making money off 76 and those aforementioned microtransactions. The good news: Bethesda is likely in so much disarray after the recent Xbox layoffs that you could probably get away with just about anything right now.