Customers who pre-ordered Fallout 76’s premium Power Armor Edition last year have finally started receiving the canvas bags that became the center of an unlikely controversy.
To understand how this escalated to this point, you have to go back to where it all began … the announcement of Fallout 76. When the game was announced at E3 last year in June, anyone who had $200 USD could pre-order the Fallout 76 Power Armor Edition for either PC, PS4, or Xbox One — which came with 24 collectible Fallout figurines, a steel case with game (a code for PC players with, the bonus Tricentennial digital items, a glow-in-the-dark terrain map, a wearable T-51B Power Armor Helmet, and of course a West Tek duffle bag made of canvas). During that show, Bethesda’s own Todd Howard over-hyped this game and exaggerated a lot of aspects for it … “16 times the detail,” for example, is one of the things that comes to mind.
When the week of November 14th, 2018 came along, and people received their Power Armor editions … everything within the collection was okay (minus the game at launch), but not the canvas bag for it wasn’t canvas — it was nylon. It didn’t ship as advertised.
At that time, gamers filed complaints with the company and hoped to get the reply they wanted to hear. Unfortunately, Bethesda would respond to customers telling them numerous things like “Due to unavailability of materials, we had to switch to a nylon carrying case in the Fallout 76 Power Armor Edition” or “The bag shown in the media was a prototype and was too expensive to make. We aren’t planning to do anything about it or deciding to give 500 atoms” (which wasn’t even enough to get an in-game version of the same bag) in response to gamers keeping up the fight against their dismissive responses. Then to find out that the studio gave influencers and journalists a canvas bag when they showed off the game privately to them … yikes. In the end though, all of this has ended up making Bethesda violate the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, because they failed to inform buyers beforehand and put a possible lawsuit on their hands.
After all of that, Bethesda yielded and announced on Twitter on December 3rd, 2018 that they were finalizing manufacturing plans for replacement canvas bags for Fallout 76: Power Armor Edition. Any gamers who purchased the collector’s edition had to fill out a ticket by January 31st (but was extended to March 1st and then extended again to May 3rd) and they would ship them out as soon as they were ready.
It is now June 2019, six months after that initial tweet to the masses online, and canvas bags have arrived at gamers’ homes as of June 10th … we can finally rest knowing that this situation is finally over, and we survived it somehow.
Although some people have suggested that this bag is not without its flaws, they are accepting them. Let’s just hope a situation like this never happens again with any studio!
Keep it here with us at GamingLyfe.
