Fallout: 76 - Take Me Home, Country Roads

You get free credits in every free to play game and its always used as an excuse for why the game is totally fair.

Its rarely true.

As for whether I;'ve played it or not, of course I havent, but mostly because it combines two elements I have zero interest in, base building and free to play mechanics.

However, i did know all of that already, and the fallout first thing is exactly what im referring to. features that were promised from day one sectioned off only to paying customers.

Oooh, pardon me that I used small hyperbole to make for a simpler description! You're right, it isn't literally every predatory forms of monetization in the world, it's just a collection of the more common, tested and confirmed to be effective ones! And everybody knows that if you only use some forms of predatory monetization it's still ok! It's only bad if you use literally all of them! Yeah, no. Sorry. Pull the other one.

And for the record, it's not catastrophization. It's a real issue, on which you can find several studies and the accounts of several people, be it stories about what happened to them or to people around them. Go watch some of Jim Sterling's videos on the matter, he's compiled quite a few.

And in regards to the game, I speak from experience. I played it when it first launched, I played a little bit more now since Wastelanders came out. The monetization is predatory. It's the same sort of stuff that games like World of Warcraft and SWTOR (which, by the way, also does the "you gets special currency for completing achievments" thing, and it's just as much bullshit there) use to keep their players hooked and spending money, just with a slightly different strategy from those, just like every other game with a form of monetization does. It gives you a hook, tries to make you feel like it's worth continuing, then starts hobbling you so you'll spend money. ''It's how these games are designed".

And that's not an indication of the game's quality. WOW is a good game. SWTOR is, if nothing else, acceptable. And Wastelanders is an improvement on the base game of Fallout 76. I wouldn't personally say it makes the game good, but it makes it decent enough. That doesn't stop their monetization strategies from being both desperate and predatory. Which they are.

And that's without entering into the topic of how much more their monetization strategies were made clear during the initial months of the game during all of those different issues that appeared, like the canvas bag debacle or the Nuka Rum thing.

it is catastrophizing and hyperbole still, because you act like the Atom Store is some insidious Compelling Voice that looms over you as you play

Where in actuality it's a barely noticeable, again completely optional feature that has NO effect on gameplay. You aren't "hobbled" in any way. There is no pressure to purchase anything from the store, because nothing from the store makes gameplay any easier or confers any bonus or competitive advantage.

Sorry, exactly one item from the store offers any benefit at all: the repair kit. Which can also be looted as prizes during regular gameplay. And is next to useless, when repair costs you a steel scrap and a piece of ballistic fiber at any armor workbench you trip over.

Do you understand what Free To Play mechanics are? Free to Play mechanics are paying with a premium currency to skip a five hour wait that is completely unnecessary. Free to Play mechanics are using premium currency to access unique game-changing items that cannot be obtained any other way. Free to Play mechanics are things like Star Wars: Commander, Farmville, Clash of Clans, etc. Free to Play offers tiny quantities of Premium currency during gameplay, but charges several thousand in store, so that the tiny quantity you get during gameplay means nothing.

None of those are true for F76. The last one you could make an argument for, but the prices in store are in the hundreds, while prizes are doled out in the dozens. get ten objectives (again, for things like swatting the hostile enemies that you will already be shooting at) and you can already afford most of the items for sale.

Also to the other troper, Fallout 76 is not a "base building game". You have the capability of creating a small camp. It's also not oriented around the so-called "free to play mechanics". The mechanics of the game are that of all the previous fallout games, a large open world, a lot of guns and ammo to explore it with.

Edited by blkwhtrbbt on May 6th 2020 at 8:46:29 AM

Weasel is great. The raiders always have fantastic personalities. The settlers are more relatable but tend to be so vanilla

Then you are severely underestimating the power these kinds of systems have over people who play those games, as well as the way they are designed to work. Sure, you might not be personally affected, but there are people who are, and these kinds of things are engineered to prey on people like those.

Cosmetics, especially, suffer from this kind of thing. Yeah, they don't directly affect gameplay, but they matter a great deal. In Overwatch or Fortnite, for example, there are entire cultures built around cosmetics. You can find stories all over about people being ridiculed or even outright bullied for using standard skins in those games. And then there are things like SWTOR, which has an entire site built around customizing your player character and showing it to other people, something that can only be properly done with money, or for free with infinite amounts of patience, which not everybody has. WOW has a similar thing with their cosmetic culture, where you constantly see their marketing teams promoting little contests to celebrate people who have the better looking ones.

Ultimately, though, the truth is comestics affect people's enjoyment of a game. Sure, it's not a direct mechanic of playing, but it is a factor of the game, and it's sectioned off behind a paywall. It doesn't matter if the thing they're sectioning off is a direct benefit to gameplay, or an advantage in PVP. If it's a part of the game, and they're sectioning it off for real money only to then advertise it and push it onto others, then it's a predatory for of monetization in a game. Those things are put there for a reason; it's certainly not so it can just sit there in the store without doing anything.

Yet again, I'm going to suggest you look up Jim Sterling's videos on the subject of monetization. He explains these things better than I do.

Your argument there is, first, fallacious, and second, shows that you don't understand what Free to Play means yourself.

Free To Play means that the game is free and you can play through it's entire story. Go look at, say, Path Of Exile for a decent example. Those games still have microtransactions, but their stories have nothing to stop you from playing, unlike other games that section off parts of the story behind a paywall, or restrict your experience gain if you're not a subscriber, or have the systems you described.

What you described are what the term "Free To Play, Pay To Win" phrase was made to mock: the practice by game developers who make Free To Play games of taking their description to the letter so they can use the loophole of "you can play for free, but it's better if you pay". And sure, none of those things are in Fallout 76, but then, nobody is accusing Fallout 76 of being one: it has a cost. Wastelanders itself may not have one, but anybody who's going to get Wastelanders did already pay for the game itself. Which is an entirely different problem from the discussion of "are the microtransactions and in-game stores in Fallout 76 predatory or not", so I won't delve into it now.

... i mean besides the post right before yours, right?

Which is shortened to "free to play". Nobody bothers calling fully free games free to play, even if they do have optional purchasables.

And you've made a fallacious argument yourself. I can even tell you WHICH one it is.

Yeah, they're there to make extra money. They're entirely optional and barely noticeable. There's nothing there that you couldn't get a variant of in-actual game. There's Halloween costumes in game. There's gas masks and helmets in game. There's decorative armor in game. There's even the currency to purchase the cosmetics available in-game in fairly large quantity, so unless you're trying to collect every item in store it's quite rare to need to spend anything.

I don't see how this is different from bookstores selling bookmarks, or plastic miniatures, or dolls from the popular franchises.

Or collectors editions of books or games. Or heck, SEQUELS. Or artbooks. Or writer diaries/series bibles. Pay more for a section of content you otherwise get denied!

If there really are a subset of humanity with a unique psychological vulnerability to purchase cosmetic extras, compelled to spend money on something they don't need, if it really is the devs predating on these psychological vulnerabilities, then who's shoulders does it fall on to prevent them from ruining them financially?

Edited by blkwhtrbbt on May 6th 2020 at 4:26:25 AM

Fair enough, I hadn't read the other posts. Allow me to correct: I am not saying Fallout 76 is Free To Play.

To be honest, I've always seen it shortened to Pay To Win instead of Free To Play. I only see the latter being used in this context by the developers because they don't want the Pay To Win association.

That is a contradicting statement. No shop is meant to be barely noticeable, unless you're deliberately trying to fail at making a shop. Those items are there to be sold, and thus the game employs strategies to make them sold.

The specific case is more "gambling and/or shopping associated addictions", and other associated disorders, but yeah, there are, and they're the primary target of the entire microtransaction deal with the industry, which is filled with trends that this game follows as well. And yeah, it's shitty.

And quite effective: I don't suffer from any of those disorders, but during the time I spent playing SWTOR and WOW those microtransactions were pretty damn seductive. I won't accuse every game under the sun of doing so, but most of them use psychological tricks that aren't forcing people to play, but will get into your head and make you feel like you would enjoy the game a whole lot more if you did get them. I'd praise how well-designed those things are if they weren't primarily designed to take advantage of people.

Yikes. I guess I'm speaking from a position of privilege here.

I dont feel any compulsion to purchase anything in the optional stores usually because I like best the outfits that I win or obtain through memorable events in game. The few times I made purchases in store were with currency I'd basically accidentally accrued through just playing and were for old nostalgic things from older games. Like the Silver Shroud costume.

I just found f76 super tame compared to, say, fortnite, where you have NO control over how you look without buying at least one cosmetic item. Your avatar is randomly generated.

Oh, don't get me wrong, Fallout 76 isn't in the deeper end of the pool when it comes to predatory monetization. If that's what it seemed like I was saying, then I communicated myself badly. Their practices are still shady as shit, but there's definitely much worse out there.

SO SO SO

You know that one workshop location that looks unecessarily evil? The radioactive waste dumping site south of the Settler's settlement?

Turns out, that's a IRL design for nuclear waste dump sites, to discourage explorers and archaeologists from exploring it.

Of course, the message they say they intend to leave to future generations sounds exactly like a supernatural curse you'd employ to ward off treasure hunters.

Edited by CitizenH on Jul 9th 2020 at 5:37:17 AM

I read a story where it seems like an Indiana Jones like tale but only to turn to a horror story when the tomb they are exploring is a reactor.

It was an MLP fanfic. We even have a trope page for it.

Edited by M84 on Jul 9th 2020 at 10:01:59 PM

WAIT WHAT?

Does that mean you read a different Fic, or did you just get outed for reading MLP fanfiction?

Hey, there's no shame in that. We all lived through 2012 here.

I just LOVE this kind of detail. I'm one of those rare folks that enjoyed F76 anyway, and this is a cherry on a messily made but delicious cake

I barely know what My little pony is. But seeing the page, i'm sure most writers are dedicated to their craft.

Speaking off, i think i did read something different. It had humans in it.

Edited by RedHunter543 on Jul 9th 2020 at 8:00:27 AM

It's a cool detail that I liked, but when you think about it, it really doesn't fit with the setting.

Radiation was treated as no big deal by pre-war society. Rad X and Rad Away were available on every street corner. Plus, one of the themes of Fallout is that they DIDN'T care to consider future problems they'd be causing. The whole point is they had no breaks on their 1950's inspired Capitalism-Science-Industry train. "Future generations? If they're God-fearin' Americans they'll read the damn signs."

Fallout 76 and Fallout 4 both revealed perfectly normal, rational people living in and hating the society they lived in as much as the audience would.

Even some of the corporations involved were somewhat horrified by the deeds of their contemporaries when they came to light. Fallout may be a parody setting, but even parody has to have a "normal" to put its foundations on, so that there's a frame of reference for the satirical elements to take hold.

Also, the idea wasn't to scare off "god fearing americans". Radiation is dangerous for centuries, or in sufficient quantities, millenia because of the half-life nature of radioactive decay. We may well have to frighten off the next civilization that happens.

Edited by blkwhtrbbt on Jul 10th 2020 at 11:34:20 AM

So I'm loving this "season" thing. One of the early doors prizes you can get is a sink that dispenses purified water, and a terminal where you can sell your unwanted ammo and trade it for ammo you actually need.

Dataminers have found the next Season thing. Rather than continue with Captain Cosmos, it's going to focus on a brand-new Show Within a Show: Armor Ace and the Power Patrol, a G.I. Joe-esque series about freedom-loving badasses in power armor fighting an army of Dirty Commies.

Of note: they're continuing the trend of sly references to New Vegas by implying that Ulysses' love for America started when he discovered some Armor Ace merchandise - the symbol for the heroes is identical to the one he wears on his duster, and the male lead of the series, "Brickhouse," looks kinda like him.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Aug 14th 2020 at 5:17:14 AM

Well, this thread's been dead.

New datamines have come through. Season 3 is going to be another Bland-Name Product Falloutverse equivalent to a real media franchsie - last season we had Not!G.I. Joe, this winter we're going to have Not!Doctor Who! Behold: "The Atomic Chronicles of K.D. Inkwell, the Scribe of Avalon!"◊

Some spoilers for the Steel Dawn / Fractured Steel expansions have also been datamined in the form of scattered dialogue files, but they're still sorting through it all.

Overall plot seems to be that an expedition from Lost Hills arrives to confirm what happened to the Appalachian Chapter, but the Paladin in charge ignores direct orders in order to save some settlers who were under attack by raiders. Unfortunately, she fails and gets half the expedition killed in the process.

The Paladin, who already has a lot of misgivings with the cynical and pragmatic Elder Council (ironically Roger Maxson is usually on her side, but he's in the minority), goes rogue. She frames it to her men as abandoning the ruthless and unjust policies of the Elder Council to embrace Maxson's vision, and the surviving troops under her command wind up split 50/50 on whether she's a selfish traitor trying to avoid punishment or a hero doing the right thing no matter the cost. You pick which faction to side with.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Oct 2nd 2020 at 1:30:14 AM

I'll be honest, I thought the game was dead too.

Nah, it's still going strong and has gotten way better in the past several months. I'm actually really enjoying it again.