Let it be known that I loved Fallout 4. It was my introduction to the Fallout franchise. While I did go back and play bits of Fallout 1, 2, New Vegas, and 3, I played through Fallout 4 three separate times, eventually getting the platinum, 100% completion trophy on the PS4. Even when the story ended, I loved wandering around the Commonwealth and the DLC zones, finding all the cool little visual vignettes the designers had hidden in each broken down shack and ruined campsite. Each time I'd wander out -- alone -- I'd come back with bits of junk that would help me reinforce my settlement, personalizing my own little corner of post-apocalyptic Massachusetts. And in my survival playthrough, I'd have to think very carefully about just how much food, water, and ammo I had with me.
That's what Fallout 76 is like, but in West Virginia, and with this constant feeling that some jerk is going to step out of the woods and end you for your inventory full of junk. It's light on story (yet heavy on lore, if you like reading terminals and listening to holotapes) and all about exploration and survival. Life is about food, water, radiation, ammo, and the deterioration of your weapons and armor.
Now, I've been playing since the beta, and that hasn't happened to me, yet (knock on wood scraps). The limited number of players on each server and the humongous open world map make it really easy to not see another human-controlled character for an entire gaming session. When you combine that with the absence of any human NPCs, however, that can make Fallout 76 a very lonely experience.
There has been a lot of controversy connected to the launch of this game. It is buggy. I have been disconnected a few times. There are choices that the developers made to make this work as a multiplayer game that futz up the solo Fallout experience I enjoyed in Fallout 4 (e.g., bobbleheads are a single-use perk, almost like a super chem), and others that are just weird (e.g., you can pack your power armor up and carry it around with you).
I'm hoping Bethesda will do what Hello Games did with No Man's Sky and spend the next few months carefully addressing the issues their gamers are raising, while at the same time adding new and cool aspects to a 2.0 version of the game. If they do, I would come back and boost my review to 5 stars. If they don't, I could easily imagine this game fading to a 3- or even 2-star experience.