I don’t think we’ve played enough yet to have much opinion on the vendor/economy/stash/etc. There were a few instances of “hold on, I’m fat again” where we needed to find a bench or public stash. Most of our scrap use has been on repairs of found items, a few upgrades, and building our camp. We’ll see how it goes. I don’t think we’ve even hit level 10 yet.
The servers are set with a maximum of 24 players. So this game is not an MMO (24 isn’t “massive”, it’s more like the population of an old school MUD). Given that the map is estimated to be about 16 square miles (bigger than Skyrim by almost 2 square miles, and that’s not considering much of Skyrim’s map was made of mountains you couldn’t climb) you shouldn’t expect to run into a lot of people.
I bought a copy on Cyber Monday for $35 and played it a bunch this weekend. But I’m not sure I’ll play it again.
I tried to pay little attention to the reviews and such so as not to bias my opinion too much. But I had some thoughts about it when it was first announced… and almost everything I worried about is true.
It’s a Fallout game, but the multiplayer aspect makes it worse in every way. There’s all the usual stuff that comes with being online: server disconnects, slow interactions with stuff, gunshots that don’t connect, inventory glitches, and so on. And then there’s the fact that there’s no pause: can’t stop to take a leak, or switch weapons, or use a stimpak, or have a proper VATS, etc. Oh, and of course there’s no save and restore, or modding, or a console to work around bugs.
The lack of NPCs doesn’t bother me too much, but they haven’t replaced it with anything. There’s no permanence at all. It’s all either quests that have no effect, or infinitely repeating events. You can only do so much when you already know the outcome: everyone’s dead.
At first I thought griefing wasn’t a problem, and for the most part it wasn’t, but just now I came across a small group that just wanted me dead. They were all level 50+, I was 18. Even with the reduced damage they made short work of me. I went back to my CAMP, and a couple of minutes later they showed up again. I logged out before they did anything else. I ain’t got time for that.
Even aside from intentional griefing, high level players can spawn high level baddies with me in the middle. Annoying.
Maybe the fun in playing with a friend would make up for some of this… but I doubt it. I think it would make a lot of the exploration aspects more tedious. Without some common goal that multiple people can contribute toward, it seems pointless.
I think I would like it much more with private server instances and much larger base limits. I could invite some friends and we could all build some cool stuff and not worry about griefing. It would still have all the problems with being online, but being able to do something with permanence might make up for part of that.
That description reminds me of Daggerfall except with other real players. Every dungeon or quest outside the main story in DF was randomly generated. This sounds similar to me.
Well, there are “real” quests, with voice acting and the like, they just don’t change anything. It doesn’t open up new areas of the world, or make a town friendly to you, or anything like that.
The events aren’t quite random either, but they repeat often enough to be annoying. I actually like some aspects of the idea, and the first time I encountered them they had the effect of making it feel like a “living world”. But after the fifth time the power plant goes down and needs repairs, it just feels fake and tiresome. Plus there just aren’t enough people on a server to ever attract more than one player to an event, so it also doesn’t work as a social gathering mechanism.
A persistent world where you fix the plant and it powers up a town or something would be cool. But currently, you’re just randomly assigned to a server and so they can’t really make anything permanent.
Sure, that would be cool as long as it was you who got to fix the power plant. The reality would be that Johnny McBadass gets to fix the power plant and everyone else is left holding their nuts.
Right, which is why I suggested private server instances. That way, my friends and I are the ones that get to fix up the world. We can also build up a cool shared base that doesn’t collide with other people’s stuff.
It’s a very different game, but I’ve been playing Astroneer with a friend and it works almost the way I want. My friends and I run around exploring and gathering resources, building a shared base that increases its capabilities over time (eventually launching rockets and other stuff). We can work together or apart depending on the situation, but we’re both contributing and don’t have to worry about other players messing with our stuff.
So they decided to get out ahead of the class action suit and just send people an actual canvas bag.
So all you have to do is submit a ticket, and … wait, apparently while trying to submit a ticket you can gain access to their support ticket back end and see other people’s tickets, names, addresses, and phone numbers.
I wonder if they can go a day without stepping on their dicks.
Could this get worse?
Bethesda looks like a company falling apart. Like a heavily-used nylon bag. Maybe this isn’t the Bethesda I know and respected all these years.
I don’t think so. Lots of companies screw up their collector’s edition rewards. I don’t know why anyone buys that junk. Security breaches are also a dime a dozen.
From my perspective, Bethesda didn’t realize that their games were always a rickety mess, and they depended heavily on the mod community as well as the advantages inherent in single player games like save/reload. From there, they added online support with the same level of reliability as their single-player games–that is, very poor. So we get flaky and laggy servers.
I love the Fallout games but they’re pretty dicey even as single player games, and Bethesda removed the one aspect that made them moderately playable. They just have to go back to what they know and they’ll be the same old company.
That said, the Fallout 4 dialogue system is still a disappointment. At least Fallout 76 avoided that…
Oh, I guess we hadn’t actually discussed the canvas bag issue.
So the people who paid for the $200 special edition were supposed to get this but actually got this piece of crap 3 cent nylon bag.
So someone writes their customer support and gets this reply. Which is, I suppose, pretty honest. They cheaped out.
So Bethesda comes rushing in and says
So they admonished the support people for giving the wrong info, and then basically say the same thing. Well, except they used the excuse “due to a material shortage” like the fucking world ran out of canvas. But still, no plans to do anything.
So after there was an uproar about getting shafted, they offered to give them 500 atom points ($5 in virtual currency) to make up for it, if they filed a ticket. Which was just insulting. I mean they’re even being stingy with the digital currency.
People reacted badly to this - it’s not a real fix to the issue, and it’s a pittance on top of that. Ironically, you can get the canvas bag they promise in game as a virtual item as part of a costume, but that costume costs $18. So… the $5 in virtual currency they give you is less than a third of what it actually costs to own a virtual version of the canvas bag in game. Which brings the absurdity to perfection.
Only after the outrage getting worse at every stage and a law firm starting to gather up a class action lawsuit did they decide to make some canvas bags and send them to people. At which point the security flaw in their ticketing system was shown, and personal information was leaked.
Also, apparently they’re putting in undocumented changes to make the game more grindy. Which seems pretty shady - not to be above board with things like that.
Nah, they’ve known that for decades. They got where they are by not being afraid to push the hell out of the envelope. People act like the community mod-able code is somehow an accident that doesn’t count as part of the design. Tens of thousands of hours of volunteer development was one hell of feature they came upon.
quick history from what I remember.
TES:Arena was already marketed as a gladiatorial combat game, and pretty close to completion when they decided that whole aspect sucked and change the whole game to be the quests.
TES:Daggerfall was an unplayable buggy mess for months, far worse than anything 76 or Andromeda had. And a lot of the issues were because they spent a lot of time to scope the game to play step-for-step like a real sized country, was was a huge screwup, ultimately adding very little to gamepley.
Redguard: I didn’t play much, I had a friend who got it expecting more RPG and got a poor-mans Prince of Persia, so I passed entirely.
Battlespire was just a miserable crap game, with no plot evident, interest in progression, or real reason to exist at all.
Morrowwind was somewhat buggy at first, nowhere near as bad as Daggerfall, and was in general a major step in putting the lessons learned from the failures together, to make a classic excellent game.
Oblivion took some other steps in weird directions, and was initially excoriated for it’s differences form Morrowwind, like level 46, ebony armored highway bandits.
Skyrim was the real culmination of what they had learned, an all time great.
For Fallout once they took it over:
Fallout 3 was initially disliked and panned by fans because they dumped much of Black isles deep variation of shades of grey, to make good and heroic closer to mandatory, and just reinvented the game almost entirely.
New Vegas was another polished A+ effort.
F4: As as you mentioned people hated the dumbed down conversations that come down to A. Enthusiastic “Yes” , B. Cynical “Yes” C. Assholish “Yes”, D. Delay the inevitable Yes at least one response.
I can’t even imagine how many people have rage-quit Bethesda games"for ever and ever" over the years, and come back to drop cash because they do keep making damn good and largely flawed games.
As one example of the stupid crap I’m putting up with in F76, there is a quest (“kill Evan”) where you have to take out a zombie. When I first tried to finish the quest, I found that the guy was already dead, making the quest impossible to complete. Eventually the server glitched and I had to rejoin. I checked on Evan again–still already dead. A third time–not just dead, but the door to get to him permanently locked. I’ve checked on him on five different servers now and I still can’t complete the quest.
This is happening because someone else gets to him first and the respawn time is too long. It wouldn’t happen for that reason on a single player game. If it did happen, because a monster got him or something, I could use the console to respawn him (I’ve done this kind of thing many times before), or run a mod that auto-respawns him. But in F76, I just have to keep trying and eventually get lucky. Ugh.
like I said this sounds like all the hassles first gen everquest had …when you had people on waiting lists to kill certain bosses and other things people have complained about ……
Yes, Daggerfall was impossible to complete without a patch. That was my first Bethesda game and I laugh at anyone who claims that New Vegas was pretty buggy.
Same here. But I loved that game. I loved random stats, I loved classes, I loved that the guild quests forced you to chose one (though I think if one went a very, very specific path one could do both Fighters and Thieves…it’s been a long, long while), I loved those horrible, horrible dungeons that were so easy to get lost in (better learn Mark and Recall, even if you don’t want to be a wizard), I loved the timed quests, I loved the levelling system. Every iteration after that got better looking and simpler. I miss the complexity, and I’m in the 1% of RPG gamers who actually likes random stat generation.
Complete? You couldn’t even really start the first print. The first CD I got had a version where most stairs didn’t work. They weren’t recognized as solid so if you try to go up you just swam through them on the ground, and if you tried to go down you fell through to the floor. If there had been a floor built under them that is, a lot of the time you just fell through the game floor into space.
I think the spell crafting system didn’t work at all either initially, and quests were fubared al well.
New Vegas wasn’t Bethesda. It was Obsidian. (AKA the guys who left Interplay after making Fallout 2.)
There’s a reason it felt more like a Fallout game then 3 or 4 did, because it was made by people from the company that created Fallout originally. (Though, the guys who made Fallout 1 left to form Troika, and after Troika went under, many returned to the various Interplay offshoots such as inXile and Obsidian.)
Bethesda did do the publishing, and licensed out the game engine, but that’s all they did for New Vegas.
I didn’t like the pointless stats like learning to speak Centaurian or whatever. Each game successively got “dumbed down,” though I thought Skyrim was an improvement in many ways (goodbye terrible levelling system that either cripples you or requires you to make illogical minmax choices). While Fallout 4 was a step back.
You could be in both Fighter’s and Thieves guild, I’m pretty sure. You could also in Morrowind, though there was an ideal order to play those quests in if you didn’t want to purge half the members. You couldn’t join more than one Knight’s guild etc.
I never had any issues with the first dungeon. Though one of the patches added a cheat (IIRC F11) that would teleport you out of the void if you got stuck in the environment.
One of the early main quests had some issue where it pointed you to a person who didn’t exist, or never gave you such and such letter.