If I didn't have years of prior experience playing World of Warcraft, I imagine my first hour in The War Within alpha would've gone much worse. WoW immediately buries you in buckets of spells and items and quests that even had me gasping for air trying to make sense of it all. The new and returning player experience is rough, and Blizzard is willing to admit as much, according to a recent interview with Windows Central.

"We know that we have a lot of work to do on new player acquisition, but we hadn't been focusing there, we were focused on retention," vice president and executive producer Holly Longdale said.

And it shows: In a recent Activision Blizzard financial report, the company noted that Dragonflight has kept more people subscribed to WoW than recent expansions. Typically, people come flooding in and then peace out when new updates slow down before the next expansion release. Longdale said Blizzard set goals for player retention and beat them. "But user acquisition is a weakness."

Right now, WoW drops new players onto a tutorial island, called Exile's Reach, to teach them how quests, loot, and dungeons work. It's streamlined and fast, but it lacks the flavor of the classic starting zones for each playable race, like the violet forest that Night Elves start in. Each race, whether they're with the Horde or Alliance, has a distinct perspective on the world that you'd learn in their intro quests—which are admittedly much slower to work through than Exile's Reach. That context is what rooted every character to the world.

Longdale said Blizzard has work to do when it comes to the "player fantasy," the role-playing, in WoW. "There is work to do there. And that's something we want to aim for in the future."

The "future" doesn't seem to include The War Within, or at least I didn't see any evidence of that work being done in the alpha. New players are blasted through the same starting experience and dumped right into Dragonflight's storyline (currently it's Battle for Azeroth).

With features like level boosts and Warbands—which makes your progress in an expansion apply to all your characters—it feels like that individuality is at risk of being erased. For experienced endgame players, WoW characters are as close as they can be to Final Fantasy 14's one-character-can-do-it-all approach to classes and professions. The last distinction they have left is their race and class and how that positions them in Azeroth. I'd love to see Blizzard put the effort into bolstering the new player experience so that we don't lose something that, in my opinion, is an essential part of playing WoW.

Following the success of the Fallout TV adaptation, Fallout 76 has—perhaps inevitably—attracted a new audience, reaching over a million players in a single day according to the series' official X account.

Taking Steam as a sole metric (the game is also on Sony and Xbox consoles), Fallout 76 reached its all-time player peak only two days ago, with 73,368 concurrents reported on Sunday. Though originally released in 2018, Fallout 76 was exclusive to the Bethesda launcher ahead of its eventual Steam release in May 2020, when its peak concurrent hit a comparatively modest 32,982. And that remained its record until a few days ago.

Still, those figures are rendered small compared to Fallout 4's Steam numbers, which as Mollie noted, hit a 24-hour peak of 160,000 players yesterday. Its all-time peak is 472,962, which happened—like with most successful singleplayer games—during the month of its November 2015 launch. For the sake of comparison, Fallout New Vegas' 24-hour peak is sitting at 36,806, versus its 51,038 all-time peak which happened, again, at launch. It's worth mentioning that Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 3 are also on the Epic Games Store and GOG, so this doesn't paint the full picture for PC players.

The takeaway? Not very surprising: Successful TV adaptations of popular videogame series are always going to buoy the back catalogue. Interestingly, Australia's IGEA listed both Fallout 4, Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 76 in its top five best-selling games in that country between April 8 and April 14, which takes in sales across Sony and Xbox consoles too. Sure, it's not been a particularly busy few weeks new-release wise, but overall: people are (re)discovering Fallout.

But it matters especially for Fallout 76, which is a live service game that relies on a healthy returning audience and—for players—a pool of collaborators to buddy up with. If you're keen to dive in, behold our guide to how to have a good time with Fallout 76 in 2024. Meanwhile, Chris argues the best game to play today is Fallout 4. As for my opinion, I'm one of those guys that mistakes loving New Vegas the best for having a personality.