Exactly. It’s not just that they added crappy MMO features to the game; it’s that it works like 1999-era Everquest. They could have paid a little attention to the fixes made to MMOs in the past two decades.
However, F76 made a valiant effort toward fixing my quest problem. They achieved this by deleting every single one of my active quests. Amazing!
The joy was short-lived, however. Minutes later, I was disconnected from the server, and upon reconnecting my quests came back, including the kill Evan one. Over the course of a couple hours, I was kicked three more times, and each time I looked for Evan. Still dead. I think it’s been eight times now.
IIRC, if one went far enough down either’s quest line, they ended up fighting the other. So you could join both, or all three, but couldn’t complete all three.
It has been a long time. But almost all the quests were radiant, weren’t they? Not much crossover between guilds. And I didn’t see any reputation loss for other factions when advancing in another one. Are you sure you’re not confusing it with Morrowind?
In that game, one path through the Fighters’ Guild leads to you wiping out the Thieves’ guild. You can also work with the non-corrupt FG guy and stage a coup. The TG quests eventually involve rooting out the corruption (led by a rival criminal group), blackmailing or killing the corrupt FG members.
No they were not at all not at all Radiant Quests™. They didn’t create that name for them until Oblivion.
In Daggerfall it was obviously a carefully crafted story element that had you pick up a package from a dude and deliver it to… that exact same dude and get money for it.
So true. Again, it’s been ages since I’ve played Daggerfall, so I’m going on admittedly faulty memory, but progressing past a certain point in one guild stopped progression in another. I think it was fighter and thief, but it might have been fighter and mage. And Quimby, I agree. If anything, I would have liked to have seen even more exclusivity between the guilds.
Oh is Radiant a Bethesda thing? I thought it was a generic name, but I guess it’s like Xerox now.
Morrowind had exclusive houses (choice between boring-ass Redoran or Hlaalu, or cool magic social Darwinist Telvanni). The Daggerfall knightly orders are all pretty much the same except what stats they like and where the HQ is.
I’m at level 35 and have taken down a bunch of lvl 50-60 ghouls. I figured I should try the lvl 50 scorchbeast near my camp.
Mistake. Absolutely wrecked me, burned through all my stimpacks and a bunch of my ammo.
Not sure why it’s so much tankier.
For what it’s worth, I’ve been playing the game since Beta and I’m having a great time. I can understand why the bugs and such could be irritating, but they don’t bother me too much. The part of Fallout games that I most enjoy is done very well, which is the little side stories told through holotapes, terminals and arrangement of scenery. The voice acting on some of the holotapes, in particular, is very good.
Basically I’m playing the game as if it were “What Remains of Edith Finch”, with occasional breaks to shoot zombies in the head or pick up alarm clocks and boxes of indestructible Twinkies. At that level it works for me. I also like the camp building aspect. And my few interactions with other players in game have been very positive.
From discussions on other message boards my impression is confirmed that there are an awful lot of people whose goals in games like this are very different from my own, and who are very disappointed in the game. I get that. But I don’t think that the foundation that Bethesda has built here is ever going to support the kind of game that those people might be looking for.
From watching streamers/youtubers play (I didn’t buy Skyrim or FO4 until about a year after they came out, so I wouldn’t have been likely to be playing this yet regardless), the problem with the whole read/listen for plot thing is the multiplayer. Same problem that Borderlands 2 had at times, where you click on a thing, it triggers a 5-minute monologue that nobody listens to because you’re in a 4-player group where everyone is running around. Except Borderlands 2 was designed that way from the start, so it flows through better.
I guess I’m done with the game until they add more content. I’m level 42, completed the Enclave quest, and explored most of the map and finished off most of the side missions. And, well, I’m just not interested in grinding blast zones or whatever.
It sure seems like the game has driven away all but a grindy hardcore base. Most players on any given server seem to be well into level 100+. There is a definite dearth of players at ~50; either they’re much higher because they’ve spent a ton of hours on grinding levels or they’ve given up the game well before that point.
The server reliability has gotten absurd. I still get kicked maybe once an hour, and sometimes a few times an hour. Often I can’t even reconnect until I restart the game. There are questlines I’ve given up because I literally can’t finish them before being booted, and when I restart I’m back at the beginning. It’s unbelievable that this hasn’t gotten better in the past weeks.
I’ve had a grand total of two positive, emergent multiplayer experiences. Once, in the beginning, where exploring around a town I overheard a guy singing “Take Me Home, Country Roads” to himself in a bar. He was singing badly but enthusiastically. It felt… post-apocalyptic. The other time I was exploring a gas station when someone triggered an invasion of wolves. I stood on the roof, sniping the wolves, while the other guy acted as a tank on the ground. We didn’t team up or anything, just a bit of random interaction that made for an emergent outcome.
But that’s really it. It’s not enough to make up for degrading every other aspect of the experience, often to the point of making the game literally unplayable. And now that I’ve explored most places and run through most of the questlines, I see no reason to continue. Which means it’s fallen far short of previous games in the series.
Also:
You’re standing a crafting station, scrapping some junk weapons. You click on a crappy short hunting rifle. Up comes a prompt, asking if you want to scrap the short hunting rifle, and giving you the correct list of components that it will disassemble to. You click accept.
Did you scrap the short hunting rifle? Nope! Fuck you; you just scrapped your favorite gun, which was right below it. And there’s no way to get it back since there’s no reload.
What happened? Well, between clicking on the gun and the confirmation box coming up, there was a delay. And you moved your mouse during the delay, which caused the selection bar to move onto your favorite gun. Never mind that the confirmation still asks about the original selection, or that you originally clicked on the right thing, because when you hit accept it just deletes the gun under the cursor bar.
The end game is incredibly grindy, no doubt. My character is at 80 right now and I’ve explored most of the map as well. I haven’t done probably half the quests, as they seem pretty boring and I’m not seeing the great rewards. I have done most of the daily events…some of them I do basically every time they pop up (uranium fever is one I always do if I can). And I’ve done a ton of nuke zone raids. Those are the most fun, for me, especially when someone nukes the big hotel. I’ve been in some extremely frantic situations with hordes (literally) of high level irradiated ghouls along with a few (2-4) legendary mobs as well. Heck, one time I got hit by ghouls, legendary mobs, a high level irradiated death claw AND a freaking high level scorch beast. That was pretty hairy, but I managed, somehow, to survive (mainly because the mobs started fighting each other and also because some other players showed up).
That said, it’s a grind at this point. I need a really good legendary weapon in order to do the sorts of damage a lot of the high level characters do. And they aren’t dropping for me. I’m also always on the verge of being overloaded, to the point I don’t bother picking up anything that isn’t a legendary, and even then most of the time I just toss it away since I know it won’t be worth my effort to drag it back to a vendor on the hope they have some caps. They are still a long way from a stable game at this point, but they badly need to be adding new content. The game today is where it should have been in the beta, and they should have extended that beta for at least 6 months. Then they would have worked out all the bugs they have worked out so far and all of the ones they still need, fixed their stability issues and balance issues and at release been ready to start adding new content on a regular basis. At this point they are still trying to figure out how large a stash they should have and stupid shit like that.
I haven’t given up on the game yet. It’s still cool to explore some of the higher level instances with friends in the Fallout world, I still enjoy some of the events that pop up and still enjoy going into the nuke zones, but I can definitely see the end of the road unless they start to do some stuff.
My own wish list atm is for them to lower the number of players per server from 25 to 15, allow for individual (or better yet guild) vaults with instances stashes that don’t have limits or have really high limits, allow players, once they get to 50 to basically be able to have access to buy ALL of the plans (and have plans for all of the power armor mods) instead of making it random, have vendors with larger pools of caps or, at a minimum put caps spend by players back into the pool of caps that vendors have (i.e. if I buy a bunch of stuff from a vendor they should then have caps to buy from me) and, finally, start adding new content for higher level characters. I’d just junk the PvP part or make PvP only servers as well. They also need to do something about the legendary drop system, because basically it’s luck (and grinding) that allows players to become really powerful in the game. Once you get to 50 you are basically capped out wrt SPECIAL…the only thing to grind for at that point are cards you might not have or to respec if you get some new, ridiculous weapon.
I keep going back and forth, either this will be an epic fail that might bring down Bethesda (and then maybe a better developer can buy the Fallout license) or they’ll fix it and make it a good game later like No Man’s Sky.
Yeah, I’ve seen that too. Collected a bunch of flux (the grounds have a ton of flowers), most of which went to waste because I didn’t have the other materials needed to store it.
Another time, I got credit for a couple of scorchbeast kills after plinking at them for a while, with the robots doing the bulk of the damage (this was after the blast dissipated and everyone left).
Ultimately, though, my playstyle is a stealthy sniper. I like to stake out a settlement and take out the guards one by one with no one the wiser (I really wish I could mount a scope to the black powder gun… well, maybe there’s a mod for that). Anyway, this style is pretty much incompatible with running from hordes of monsters.
And dealing with stupid cheats like armor that subtracts from your weight every time you take it off, which eventually has the effect of making your weight limit negative, and the game then treats as infinite (or 2[sup]32[/sup]-1, whichever comes first). Supposedly this is a major source of server instability, though maybe there’s other stuff going on.
Something that people may find interesting. Mild Fallout 76 spoilers follow.
There is a location in the game called Whitespring, which is a Southern-looking hotel and resort. And, as it turns out, the secret location for a bunker complex to house the US Congress in case of nuclear war.
Whitespring is based on a real hotel called The Greenbrier, again in West Virginia. No big surprise that they’d be inspired by a real place.
But here’s the kicker–The Greenbrier was also the location for a secret bunker to house the US Congress in case of nuclear war. It was an enormous bunker, meant to house over a thousand people. It was constructed hiding in plain sight during the expansion of a wing of the complex (somehow, no one noticed that they were digging way further down than they’d reasonably need to). Some parts of the bunker were even open to the public, hiding the blast doors behind screens and again somehow no one noticing the overbuilt concrete support columns.
In the 80s, the hotel took on a new manager that found various discrepancies in their operations, like thousands of gallons of diesel fuel disappearing and paychecks going to people not on the roster. He started snooping around, getting blown off until threatening to go to the police, and eventually called into a secret meeting with a Pentagon official. He was let in on the secret after signing a pledge.
Well caught! But I personally wasn’t aware of its story as a bunker at all. It wasn’t a shock that it was modeled after a real hotel; the shock is that the secret nuclear bunker for Congress part is also real. Not sure about the creepy AI, though…