Fallout: 76 - Take Me Home, Country Roads

Not looking forward to having to install yet another launcher program either - inconvenience being one thing, but also because you'll be stuck with a smaller playerbase and less cross-connectivity between friends. That Steam Friends List does seem to subtly help sell certain multiplayer games at times, especially if one's buddies are constantly playing a particular title.

But what I'm more worried about though is how this seems to be an attempt to force the modding community to rely upon Bethseda's Creation Kit program entirely... which means we may end up paying for any sort of mod from here on out. If that turns out to be the case, then there's no way I'm buying this game, ever, because Bethesda's open world games are often in dire need of fan support and additions even months after release.

We've been here before. Remember Windows Live for PC? I have several games that refuse to install because that service has since died. Great.

So Fallout 76 Q&A had a panel with Todd Howard at Quake Con 2018 starts at 13:33

and am going to link a video by Oxhorn a fallout lore youtuber that gives a quick rundown for those who don't/can't watch a video over an hour.

Edited by Ryno_v on Aug 15th 2018 at 5:32:12 AM

That... is a fabulous anti-griefing system.

Okay, I feel a bit more comfortable about this, now.

Same.

EDIT: And of course people are already finding ways to complain about it, but for once it's not from the people who've been hating on the game the whole time - I've seen numerous people who were super-psyched before this bitching about how not being able to insta-murder people with a sniper rifle consequence-free is going to "ruin their raider roleplaying."

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Aug 11th 2018 at 10:00:42 AM

I can't watch the videos. What's the anti-griefing method?

When someone decides to attack another player, the initial attack does a pittance of damage, explicitly compared to the way that people used to slap each other with gloves to challenge them to a duel. If the attacked player reciprocates, then damage nerfs are removed and they can go ham on each other. Alternatively, the attacked player can ignore them and they'll still only get pittance damage.

If the attacker is persistent and cherry taps the victim to death, they earn nothing from it, where normally you get some amount of exp and caps for winning at PVP. Furthermore, someone who kills another player who has not returned fire gets branded as a wanted murderer. They become visible on the map to everyone no matter what, no longer see anyone else on the map, and a bounty (out of their own pocket, no less) is put on their head.

It's actually quite brilliant.

EDIT: Those people can go fuck themselves and are precisely the reason why I've been so leery about this game.

Edited by Cganale on Aug 12th 2018 at 2:28:53 PM

Sounds good, but its still not the game for me. I'd rather have a single player game with a good story than what amounts to a multiplayer base building game, which this seems to be so far.

Admittedly, yeah, "raider roleplays trolling other players" gets hamstrung by this. Which, considering this is a game about a bunch of Vault dwellers idiots coming out of a Vault and deciding to blow the crap out of each other, it would be sort of fitting for their to be bands of people trying to steal resources and generally be unpleasant.

But the price for that is an unfriendly experience that you can't control. Alliances form, griefers start factions, and sooner or later you can't enjoy the game because people hoard resources and lock others out, or spend their time picking newer players off. This is okay in a game like Rust where it's the explicit purpose. But in a game like Fallout, particularly 76 which is trying to encourage player cooperation, it doesn't really work.

How many people can be on a "server" or "world" in 76? If it's more than like 10 then I could see factions starting up and that "pittiance" of damage getting bypassed, or wanted murderer factions starting up.

I don't know exactly how much damage is reduced, but the idea that every single player has to engage one another in some drawn-out, Mad Max style gunfight is a bit discouraging. I can't tell you how much easier/thrilling Fallout becomes when you're a sniper. It seems snipers going to be relegated to being a "PVE" class, if they exist at all.

Overall I like what they've come up with here. It doesn't completely remove the idea of being a "raider/psycho" in-universe, but gives you hell for being the kind of player who wants to go around being a jackass and punishes you for behaving that way. But hey, if you're high enough level and ambitious enough to target other people then maybe you can handle becoming a blind, walking target to everybody else. Or, you know, be less of a douche and work with people so you can actually advance your Vault civilization.

There's going to be holes in this system for sure, bug fixes and balance patches because somebody's going to figure out that launching a mini-nuke at an unsuspecting player probably counts as more than a "slap." Oppositely, it's going to make for one badass screenshot/GIF if someone fires a mini-nuke at you unprovoked and you just shamble out of it like Superman thanks to the damage buffer.

Edited by Soble on Aug 12th 2018 at 7:24:42 AM

Personally, I like that buffer system. I haven't seen the vids, so I don't know if it's actually true, but I'd heard those scorch beasts keep popping up and attacking bases. If that's the case, I'd rather have a fully co-op server all about surviving the PVE elements, rather than some stupid Rust rehash. I'm pretty sure the actual surviving vaults in the series didn't generally have a backstory of "Idiots from the same vault shooting each other over resources."

And if you want to be a Raider, fucking go for it. Don't complain about being hamstrung. Raiders aren't good guys, and the good guys fucking HATE them. If you're going to be an unprovoked raider, suck it up, go outlaw, and stop being a whiny bitch about it.

Devil's advocate: if people want to group up, fucking go for it. Don't complain about being griefed. Raiders aren't good guys, and they're naturally going to target settlements. It wouldn't be Fallout without psychotic, unfriendly elements roaming the wastes. You can't walk around for more than 5 minutes without getting attacked by something. If you're going to build a society in a post-apocalyptic world, suck it up, build up your walls, and stop being a whiny bitch about people being villainous.

I look at it this way - we don't have giant molerats and territorial Mirelurks dogging us, and we have ample supplies of water and law enforcement, and we still have incidents like Charlottesville and the Orlando shooting. It's far less likely people are going to be civil or neighborly when resources are minimal. The Bethesda games remind us constantly that the Capital Wastes/Mojave/Commonwealth are anything but safe. If the Deathclaws aren't trying to kill you then the raiders are. It is very much a Crapsack World before the PC shows up.

Mind, I like the buffer too, but I think the downside is the potential lack of sniping as a viable tactic, and I can sympathize with those that see voluntary PVP as clashing with the game's tone. I don't think there really was a way to win with this - either the game's mechanics would betray the setting Betheseda was working with, or they could have embraced the game's setting and allowed for problematic game mechanics.

Fallout, to me, is equal parts about how people work together and how they don't.

The problem with being evil in games versus evil in real life is lack of consequences. In real life people avoid "griefing" because it can backfire on them in numerous ways, and isn't worth the trouble. Obviously people still commit crimes, but they do it for a reason, not just "I'm bored so I'm gonna kill a bunch of people."

GIFT is a serious problem that should not be underestimated. Many, many people have been driven away from online games because of griefers, which is the exact opposite of what developers want. They want their games to be inclusive. Maybe that requires an unrealistic method of keeping the peace, but I think the end result is in fact more realistic than the free for all every other game like this becomes.

Today's CAD comic is about Fallout 76's PVP system.

"Devil's advocate: if people want to group up, fucking go for it. Don't complain about being griefed. Raiders aren't good guys, and they're naturally going to target settlements. It wouldn't be Fallout without psychotic, unfriendly elements roaming the wastes. You can't walk around for more than 5 minutes without getting attacked by something. If you're going to build a society in a post-apocalyptic world, suck it up, build up your walls, and stop being a whiny bitch about people being villainous."

And the problem with that is that it makes zero sense for there to even be raiders in this one in the first place. Everyone's coming out of a central vault with a mission. Complete cooperation makes sense. People betraying each other, period, doesn't. The PVE elements are already going to be as brutal as the other games, minus raiders. All those raiders in the other games? They came out of Hell vaults and got dumped into a Wasteland full of monsters that tore up the survivors. They weren't coming out of control vaults like we are. We HAVE resources. We have well adjusted people who lived pretty close to what lives they had before the bombs. The entire server SHOULD be a single team split into sub groups to achieve the mission. I know players won't go that route, but from a lore perspective it doesn't make sense to go raider. You're working with "People you spent your whole life around." Not strangers.

In what sense?

Not everyone. The players are. Unless they've confirmed that this setting takes place in a region with no nearby bandit tribes or wandering bands of people, which I doubt, there's always potential for random raiders.

If we're just talking about players then not every person in the Vault has to be of good intentions. That's the genius of it - any random Vault Dweller could have had malevolent traits. They've been stuck in the Vault for years and now they've expanded out, struggling for resources, struggling to rebuild. Every single Fallout demonstrates the PC becoming a lethal weapon who may or may not have a Lawful Good alignment. 20 years is a long time to be stuck around the same people.

That's steeped in the idea that human beings never have a reason to betray each other and that everyone in a crisis scenario will react rationally and cooperatively. I find that naive. Not everyone is going to turn into a Purge-style murderous scumbag, but some are. In-universe there are endless scenarios in which a Vault Dweller might have reason to attack one another. They're not gunning each other down the moment they leave - implied by PVP not starting until the player is around level 5 - but that doesn't mean everyone ends up being Heterosexual Life-Partners or Bash Brothers either.

PVE won't necessarily be as brutal because more players means more resource gathering. Cooperative survival means this won't be as brutal. The devs even mentioned they didn't want death to be a punishment and that it mainly meant the loss of junk.

You're telling me every Raider encountered in Fallout 3, 4, and New Vegas came out of a Hell Vault? Even though Fallout 4 takes place 200 years later?

This is from the Fallout Wiki:

Vault 76 housed 500 occupants and was programmed to open to the wasteland outside 20 years after a nuclear war. The occupants also were selected from every walk of life and have different races and religious beliefs

I get the impression that micro-aggressions/drama/and all kinds of sh-t could have stirred during those 20 years. We have no reason to assume that everybody in the Vault got along swimmingly and that security never had to step in ever. Mind, society was already breaking down before the Vaults were used.

You could have had 500 people with 20 racists, 50 wife beaters, 5-6 people who'd committed murder and never been trialed, and the rest all good upstanding people. You could have a Riddick or a Battlestar Galactica situation where all of these people all have to band together but the pressures of dwindling resources - fitting with Fallout 4's opening - cause them to break apart.

The only things we know about this Vault are the occupancy, and that Vault Tec wasn't actively trying to screw with them. That says nothing about what the people inside were like.

tl,dr

• The people inside the Vault might encounter other Raiders from different areas, and since Fallout 76 is an online game it's pretty easy to Hand Wave that other players could be Raiders
• The people inside the vault of are nebulous morality and background, and their experiences inside of the Vault are unaccounted for - all we know is "they survived" not "they all got along"
• I do think that PVE should be focused on and that the buffer is a good idea, but I also think it clashes with the setting somewhat

Edited by Soble on Aug 13th 2018 at 5:44:37 AM

Unfortunately, we really are left with too many questions at this point. As for my "naive" attitude, it's more like a bloodthirsty ruthless one that thinks the criminal elements you're talking about would have been tied to the ground and left to die outside the vault when the bombs dropped. Not allowed in at all. The Fallout Universe was so fucked up before the bombs that any control vault would have had rigorous screenings that blocked out anyone even beginning to approach an antisocial attitude. Not should have, WOULD have. IF our vault's not just another social experiment, then it really was intended to rebuild the nation. The Enclave would have strained out the malcontents for the sake of Purity the same way Eden wanted to do to the Capital Wasteland.

We shouldn't be doing that in real life, but the Enclave government sure as shit was doing it before the Vaults were ever necessary.

I apologize for saying naive, a better phrasing might have been "I think that's putting too much faith in [people]," or something similarly misanthropic and bitter-sounding that I nevertheless stand by.

Anyway, I suppose I can't argue with most of that. I'm behind on my Fallout lore so I don't really know why the Enclave would have screened out the malcontents - are we playing in a part of the world where they were more active now? I didn't pay too much attention in 3 and I only played a little of 1 and 2 - the Enclave were the remnants of the former USA but, how much control did they have over the Vaults?

Considering the Enclave were the bug-masked evil-doers we killed left and right in Fallout 3 who intended to wipe out parts of the Capital Wasteland with a virus, I don't know if their Vault screening process would have been the best or the most objective.

Edited by Soble on Aug 13th 2018 at 4:59:14 AM

For the curious, in how the series has presented this kind of thing before: the first settlement you're likely to meet in the Fallout series comes from Vault 15. It's not actually a control vault, but its experiment was to combine many people of different cultures and ideologies.

In the end, it led to a split of four groups when the Vault opened. Three became raiding groups: the Jackals, the Vipers, and the Khans. But the fourth became Shady Sands, which would later become the NCR; it managed to achieve mostly self-sufficiency. By the time you meet them, their various ideologies have mostly merged, mixed and given way to the worship of Dharma. The other raiders live a somewhat parasitical existence off of Shady Sands and the smaller, nearby Junktown.

There's also Vault City in Fallout 2. Actually a control vault. Didn't turn on each other and their technology was advanced enough to give them a relatively secure and self-sufficient existence, but they were incredibly insular and hostile to outsiders.

Edited by Lavaeolus on Aug 13th 2018 at 1:48:39 PM

The former US government was all over the Vault program. It was their insurance for the future. Not sure what the contract with Vault-Tec stated, but the control vaults were specifically intended to provide purely human genetic strains for creating future citizens of the United States of America. They weren't going to be including the "inferior" strains that led to domestic abuse and crime. As for racism . . . I don't recall if the original Project Purity staff were Enclave members, (Madison Lee being Asian) but if the Enclave itself were racist, it wouldn't be including non-whites in its control vaults.

I can't remember, how racist was the pre-War US government? I remember racism against the Chinese (which of course is wrong, but at least makes sense), but I don't remember much of anything about other races. And the Enclave is racist against mutants, who wouldn't have existed before the War.

, The OG Project Purity staff were descended from remnants of the US Naval Research Institute, but no obvious connections to the Enclave. James is a mystery, I've seen theories ranging from "Enclave deserter" to "Institute outcast" and everything inbetween.

As for the Enclave being racist, it's a possibility but I don't think so. IIRC Navarro's chief vertibird mechanic in Fallout 2 was a guy named Raul with a thick hispanic accent, and as much as it irks me, Bethesda's lampooning of 50's values and hypocrisy in the pre-war world (and by extension the Enclave) doesn't seem to extend to racism and homophobia - see the infamous interracial lesbian couple in the FO4 prologue.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Aug 14th 2018 at 10:54:29 AM

They were ABSOLUTELY racist, just look at all the propaganda they spread about the Chinese. Yellow Peril was in full force here.

For a good example, check out this propaganda children's story about a "red" (read: Communist, and thus, Chinese) squirrel betraying a group of brown squirrels.

Not going to apologize or defend the anti-China racism. Am going to say that it served a purpose against an enemy, and that if the Chinese had fallen or never been an enemy in the first place, it probably wouldn't have happened. As a general rule, the Enclave doesn't seem racist unless it serves their purposes. A general level of "my race is better than your race" for no good reason doesn't seem likely to be something they'd support in their control vaults. So my point about them straining out racist assholes still stands. At least against anyone but Asians. The likelihood of them even allowing Asians into a control vault is low, but 20 years isn't enough time for people to forget that they hated a particular kind of person, so that brand of racism would probably still stand.

From the backstory we have for this vault, a group working towards Vault City is more in line with canon than any pack of raiders will ever be.

Holy shit, I will openly admit that is a fantastic way to cut down griefers. Well done Bethesda for thinking that one up. I still want to know how they're going to limit the nukes, but this is already one hell of a move. Griefers will probably eventually find a way, because they're determined little assholes, but that does raise my confidence in Bethesda's handling of this game.

Still, like Soble says, it's a compromise that ends up hurting the established world of Fallout a bit, but I think that's more evidence as to why Fallout shouldn't have been made a multiplayer game at all. Even if you set up dedicated "Raider Servers" where it's made clear that everyone is fair game, you still run into the lore problem.

Going back a bit, about Fallout 76 not being released on Steam, I think it's a sound strategy. The game is naturally going to attract less people for the exact reasons we've discussed here before, so it's perfect for testing the waters with. Throw Fallout 76 on their own service, see how it performs. If it does well, consider releasing the next one there with some sort of exclusivity. If it doesn't work, then release on everything and give subtly increasing rewards for those who get it in your service as a way to encourage them. If that's what they're doing with this, it's a smart move.

Edited by TheLovecraftian on Aug 16th 2018 at 2:35:57 PM