Last month someone managed to steal a number of Fallout 76 players’ items and gear using a cheat program. Now some of those players say Bethesda has finally managed to restore their lost valuables by giving them access to cloned versions of their characters from before the incident.
Player IGN Romulox reported on Reddit last week that they’d received an email from Bethesda stating the company would be giving them access to a new character with the exact same inventory as before, as well as 8,250 of the game’s premium Atom currency, roughly the equivalent of $75.
“A clone of your character (with a modified name) will be restored on January 22, 2020,” Bethesda said in the email. “Once restored, this character will have the entire inventory of items, gear and scrap (100% of your stuff) that it possessed on December 20, 2019.” A few other players on Reddit confirmed they received the same email along with access to backup characters.
The attempt to make amends went one step further, with Bethesda offering to have one of its employees meet up in-game in order to facilitate “secure trades” so the player could combine any loot they’ve earned in the preceding month with their cloned character. It’s nice and fortunate that Bethesda had backups they could use to give affected players their inventories back, and also wild that apparently the only way to merge the old and new inventories was to literally have the clone meet face-to-face with their predecessor.
Of course, players were also surprised when someone was able to hack their gear in the first place. A number of cheat programs flooded into the PC version of the game in late November, making it possible to not just steal people’s stuff but also add NPCs to the game and duplicate rare items.
While the inventory hack and other exploits were patched out of the game by the end of December, the fact that they made it into the game at all raised questions about how exactly Fallout 76’s online multiplayer world is constructed and what its most nefarious agents might be plotting in the future.
In the meantime, IGN Romulox seems satisfied with Bethesda’s apology package and has even decided to share their good fortune with the rest of the community by raffling off some of their rarer gear that was duplicated in the character cloning process.
