Fallout: 76 - Take Me Home, Country Roads

Bah.

No NPCS

Well, yeah, they announced that.

Most of the game is picking up stuff.

Has this man never played Fallout before?

Most of the story is audio logs dripping the story to you.

See this would be a problem for me. That's why I asked what the main quest was about. I suspect (hope) that any patches or DLC will provide more interesting quests.

This is just an empty open-world where players are expected to find their own fun

I can understand faulting Betheseda (heck, for being Betheseda if nothing else) for making a glitchy, boring game - but is it not generally expected in an MMO that you will have to make your own fun? They stated right from the beginning that the idea was to make all human characters/interaction be with actual humans. Making your own fun seems very much the point.

Storytelling, plot progression, a sense of living in a world that's alive - it's not there ... eveyr quest is walk here, collect the thing.

Collecting things is pretty typical in an online/co-op game. Yes, I don't think Fallout meshes well with it, but at the same time, I enjoyed Fallout 4 for being "go here, shoot the thing, collect the thing, walk back."

Getting booted out of the game

Yeah okay that's kind of bullsh-t. Shame on Betheseda.

Real-time menu

In an online game? Shock.

Technical issues

I fully believe that Fallout 76 will be an excellent game two years after its release once the game has been made totally free.

VATS was implemented due to Betheseda being terrible at making first-person combat

Ummm... what?

VATS is problematic and the hit rate fluctuates rapidly

Yeah, that's a problem. I don't think there was a way around this beyond removing it entirely, but that wouldn't feel like a Fallout game.

No world-building or progression ... exposes how mechanically awful Betheseda's games are ... game should be in early access until it can sort its shit out

-nod-

Its archaic, cobbled-together, devoid of fun, barely functional, generic

So what I understand is: the lack of NPC's and worldbuilding make the world feel lifeless, there are a lot of glitches, and the game is outright creatively lazy.

I do feel he's being a little too harsh. I feel bad for the playerbase considering a lot of people will probably take Sterling's words to heart and not even give this game a shot. Or at least I would had I sworn to never give Betheseda Day 1 money ever again.

But I get the impression that this game is pretty much what I expected it to be.

Hopefully they just lower the price and give it the No Mans Sky treatment instead of outright abandoning it.

Edited by Soble on Nov 15th 2018 at 2:54:05 AM

I'M MR. MEESEEKS, LOOK AT ME!

Bethesda will make any lost money with their next projects, I doubt they're too worried.

A more conversational, even-toned analysis of the controversy.

If something good comes out of this, maybe it will give Bethesda pause the next time they think about chasing the Live Service fairy.

And regarding Bethesda as a company more broadly, independent of the controversy surrounding this game in particular, they're still using the same decrepit-ass Gamebryo engine for both Starfield and TES 6. A new engine is a change that has needed to happen for a while now, and problems are only going to get worse when Bethesda tries forcing Gamebryo to do things it was never designed to support.

Much as I hate to say it, there's writing on the wall here.

yey

Yeah, at this point the writing is definitely on the wall when it comes to Gamebryo. It's been tolerably outdated for a long time, but the janky attempts to duct-tape a multiplayer component to it is really exposing its problems in ways they can't cover up any more.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Nov 15th 2018 at 4:02:24 AM

My understanding with Jim Sterling is that he's a rather negative critic in general-he's even called himself a cynical prick.

Now, with Fallout 76, the problem with the game is that I think a lot (but not all) of criticism comes from a sort of Periphery Hatedom that misses the point. A lot of people hate that the game is multiplayer. Now, it's fair to not play the game if you aren't into this type of game, but the game never marketed itself as being anything but a multiplayer spin-off so one shouldn't be upset per se.

There are some more valid criticisms. I would argue the lack of human NP Cs was a relatively poor choice. I'm pretty sure I know why they did it and I will give the idea credit for being interesting; but I think a multiplayer fallout with NP Cs would have been better.

Now with the Gamebryo engine I would say there was a case of Morton's Fork here. On one hand, I 100% agree that Gamebryo was a bad choice for an engine for this game. However, I would also argue that using Fallout 4's engine was honestly their best choice-this wasn't the time to try out a new engine. So my criticism would more be that Fallout 4 shouldn't have used the outdated engine.

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

Switching to a new engine wouldn't really be easy is the issue. We all saw what happened when Bioware attempted to use the Frostbite engine for Mass Effect: Andromeda. That game came out all fucked up because they weren't used to the engine. Plus Modders would probably want Bethesda to keep using the Gamebryo due to the ease of modding it. It would be a massive blow to the series if Bethesda switched to a less mod friendly engine.

"Love, love will tear us apart, again."

i'd like to point out you can have a gamebryo-esque experience and have a fun game. Its called Elder Scrolls Online.

76 does not seem to me to be fun, but then, i dont care for survival sandboxes.

It's not really a survival sandbox. It's Fallout 4 but with more RPG-Esq mechanics. I freaking love the perk card system compared to the perk point system. Makes you have to think which perks you want at the moment instead of being able to have them all. Plus managing hunger and thirst and weapon durability is balanced to where you get immersed but its not obnoxious. I like it since Bethesda games are full of food but theirs no real point to eat it.

"Love, love will tear us apart, again."

Did they fix the perk card? Coz the perk card in Fallout 4 was awful. It actually broke the concept of playing a sneaking character, since you couldn't max out the sneaking perk without being level 40 and having found most of the chinese army training magazine, ie: By mostly completing the game! Playing a sneaky at low level was basically broken and impossible.

Edited by Ghilz on Nov 15th 2018 at 9:19:25 AM

The thing with Bioware and Frostbite is that the latter was made by DICE for their own shooters, whereas previous engines were custom-made. So Bethesda should build their own from the ground-up.

Here is the Ars review of the game.

No Metacritic score as of yet, but players are already review bombing it on the site. People clearly don't like it much.

Optimism is a duty.

Question? Is anyone else having a texture bug? I'm trying to play the game but a lot of the textures are replaced with black which makes it very difficult to play the game for me. I think my computer might just be too weak to run the game but has anyone found a fix for it?

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

Best thing I found yet:

A Mr Handy named Vlad and a Ms Nanny named Mia having a conversation. Except their dialogue is a reference to several youtube videos where real world chat AI's are made to have conversations with each other and the random tangents they end up going on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw55FMgUD94

Edited by CitizenH on Nov 16th 2018 at 2:12:08 AM

I'm almost starting to feel bad for the team behind this game.

Though I do enjoy videos like these.

Edited by Soble on Nov 17th 2018 at 12:07:29 PM

I'M MR. MEESEEKS, LOOK AT ME!

OMG that was hilarious.

tbf that first video is from June.

Yeah I knew from the start that this being a multiplayer-only experience would mean that the standard Bethesda bugginess would be under much higher scrutiny and that, for the first time, they'd need to up their QA game to unheard of levels to keep up with... well, basic quality standards. Which it seems they didn't. Game is the buggiest mess they've released yet, and unlike every other product they've dropped they can't rely on the community to patch everything because, y'know, it's a multiplayer game.

Looking forward to seeing if they finally man up and start doing genuine bugfixing like every other company of their caliber or just write all the major problems off as unsalvagable like they do for every other game they release (see: the game-breaking bugs from Fallout 4's release that still exist in the vanilla game and have carried over to FO76).

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Nov 17th 2018 at 1:36:25 AM

I do admit I'm starting to feel bad for the game. I'm not playing it, but that's because what I heard of the game pre-release didn't appeal to me. As far as I can tell, the game is exactly as advertised—maybe a little bit better, with veteran players doing unexpected things like helping newbies. So while "don't like don't play" can sometimes be insulting to players, in this case it's like "you knew what this was going to be going in, why did you buy it if you weren't interested in that type of game?"

and Yeah, "multiplayer game by BUGthesda" was pretty much all I needed to read in order to decide to give this thing a wide berth. And every single thing I've seen about it since has only served to reassure me that I made the right choice.

I think we should stop with the hating because this is turning into a complaint thread. And that's against the rules.

"Love, love will tear us apart, again."

Satirical thumbnail aside, Australian shooter man believes the game to be alright. He likes how the Perk system works in co-op and the world, with dislike towards the balance and technical issues.

There are some accusations of him being a contrarian/shill for not being as damning as others, but that's beside the point. Kinda interesting to see the opinion of what some would call an outsider to the whole thing.

Edited by UltraWanker on Nov 17th 2018 at 4:36:33 AM

gggman is the only reviewer I've seen who's kept a level head about this whole thing. I swear some people are going absolutly crazy about this game. I've had the biggest blast playing this game both alone and with friends. I think it's even better then Fallout 4 which was my previous favorite game in the series.

Edited by evilface on Nov 17th 2018 at 4:33:51 AM

"Love, love will tear us apart, again."

I've only played a little-I'm up against a game breaking graphical bug right now. This one probably isn't Bethesda's fault, though-my computer has an ancient graphics card. Basically, a lot of textures look black so objects in the game are very difficult to see and renders the game somewhat unplayable as a result.

I can definitely say this game is overhated. I think it mostly goes down to Genre Alien, honestly. A lot of people are hating the game largely for it being multiplayer IMO. It's definitely not a game for people who dislike multiplayer. The problem is a lot of the critics go into it and judge it by the same metric as they do the singe player games, which is a bad idea.

In other words, if you go into this game wanting to play it solo and consider other players to be immersion-breaking onlookers, then you've missed the whole point of the game.

Edited by Protagonist506 on Nov 17th 2018 at 4:47:26 AM

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

I haven't really encountered anyone PV Ping outside of the Hunted radio station.

That said, I recently unlocked the artillery installation for my CAMP.

I came upon a group of VERY young sounding little kids building a base in the forest. Just to have some fun, I set my status to Pacifist, shouted "incoming!" and tossed a blue smoke grenade right into their front door.

They all panicked and ran around crying when the shells began falling, only to realize quickly they weren't doing damage. That gave me a good laugh.

Besides that, since I hit level 50 I've spent a lot of time teaching people how Workshops function and handing out power armor frames at Flatwoods.

The review bombing and haters honestly just tired me out and made me not want to watch any Youtubers play it. Personally, I'm enjoying it so far. While having human (or ghoul, Super Mutant, or whatever) NPCs around would have been nice, I'm kind of just enjoying the solitude and wandering around, exploring and looting. The perk card system is cool as well, though the random nature of what cards you get is a bit frustrating, because I'm trying to get a higher level hacker perk.

Took me a bit to figure out how workshops worked, then gave up on them for now because I'm not high enough level to be able to fully utilize them or defend them.

Also, throwing knives are surprisingly OP once you've figured out their janky throwing arc. Can one-shot most enemies I run across right now, and they're cheap to make. Dunno if that will continue to hold true into higher levels, but for now I keep a few dozen stocked on me.

Wish there was something like buildable signs or some other form of written communication in this game. I want to RP as a trader in the late game and set up my camp as a little shop and sell stuff to people.

My one and only experience with PvP so far was when a wanted player who was level 50 had the gall to walk up to my camp, shoot my turrets, bash down my door, then break my stash, then walk away. Of course, joke was on him when he went down the hill and ate several sniper bullets. 100 caps well earned.

Edited by danime91 on Nov 17th 2018 at 7:24:36 AM