My cynical friend was sure that the floor for this game’s meta rating was 75, because the game review industry is completely corrupt and that’s where AAA studio games start. It’s currently sitting at a 49 on ps4, and that may be generous because the AAA hype boost is probably already figured in to that number. If you’re not familiar with metacritic, that’s a horrific number, since game reviews basically start at 50, and 0-49 are hardly ever used.
But he said give it a few days, let’s see where the ratings go when the big reviewers chime in, since they’ll be overly generous. But apparently the big reviewers don’t want to touch it. Jeff Gerstmann of GiantBomb said:
“No one on staff wants to play anymore of this videogame [Fallout 76]. I’m not going to subject myself to another 20-30 hours of this [expletive] mess to just put a number on it. My number is ‘Don’t play this game’."
Well, I guess it’s different strokes for different folks. I’m actually quite enjoying it so far. Haven’t met any asshole players since very early in the BETA, and randomly encountering a few people in the wilderness while exploring this vast empty wasteland is actually kind of fun*. It makes it feel like there really are just one Vault’s worth of people trying to re-establish some sort of society.
If they’d just fix the storage problem I’d be happy.
*Just playing it today, I ran into a group of Super Mutants who mopped the floor with me. A few minutes later, I saw another player getting attacked by the same group, and helped him out with a few sniper kills on those Mutate SOBs.
I don’t know the technical details behind this, but having the CAMPs available to other players adds to that “We’re all in this together” feel of the game. Because if you run across another player’s CAMP, you can use all their crafting stations, which is often a critical factor in surviving. Crafting food, in particular, is far more important to survival in this game than in earlier versions. I’ve actually made a point of going out of my way to hunt Radstags and the like, just for the food.
But I don’t kill the foxes, I feel sorry for them, for some reason. They just want to be left alone!*
Is survival actually hard or interesting? Or is it just sort not-actually-survival like gathering up every random bit of tape and scrap metal you can find in FO4?
I guess, it’s a little bit of both? With the limits on how much stuff you can store, you have to focus a lot more attention on the few key ingredients that are relatively scarce, and take care in how you use them. I had to go scrounging for some aluminum today to fix my chest armor, for example.
I’m honestly not seeing the reason for all the hate. I haven’t seen more bugs than the average game at the one week stage. And I don’t feel that getting quests from robots,or computers, or area triggers, instead of humans, is the end of all that I hold dear about Fallout. It’s just a different atmosphere. It’s half survival, half investigative-anthropologist really. Look though the remnants of a civilization, and try to figure out what happened to them, while zombies and mutants try to kick your ass. I’ve always half-assed the main story line in Bethesda games anyway,going rogue to start and only getting back to it when I am done with everything else.
There is definitely stuff that needs tweaked, and a few other things that need serious rework, but I’m enjoying the rest of the game while they can work on those.
How is the gameplay? Is it fun to fight? Is it still an exploration - fighting - looting/crafting loop and if so, how does it compare to previous iterations?
I love the exploring, it is my favorite part of Bethesda games, and it is as good as ever.
I find the fighting fun, my days of being a master fast twitch gamer peaked around the time of the first Doom, and are going downhill with the aging dexterity of my fingers, but it is exactly the same as the other Fallouts to my mind, a major part of the experience that I am adequate at at best.
The looting-crafting loop is one of the things that needs work. I have a 3 by 3 box(wooden floor, walls, roof, with 6 crafting stations and 5 turrets, and my CAMP budget is sitting around 75% max. Functional hovel is the best it seems I will be able to do, but I have seen much nicer bases by other players, so I don’t know what I am doing wrong. It seems weird that gathering all the crap in the world up to build with only came in the last game. 1,2,3 and NV didn’t have it but I am so Pavlovian in bringing tons of shit back to … well I don’t know, is the problem. I gather, stumble back, look at my full Stash box, and drop it.
I have only encountered three immersion braking bugs, Only one of which effected gameplay at all . One was a quest Doodad that was non inter-actable, that the changed in the patch. One is that when I die in Power armor, and respawn, for some reason my broken corpse launches into the air before the loading screen of the respawn fades in. And the other is that I built my CAMP on a road on a hill, and when I fast travel to it I am neck deep in ground and road until I run and jump back to the top of the ground.
But the one thing I do need mats for, fixing weapons and armor, are a fairly constrained few resources. Black titanium, aluminum, springs, gears, adhesive etc, are real tight. While piles of asbestos and ceramic sit soullessly.
You must be luckier than every other reviewer (professional or amateur) I’ve read so far. The number of bugs they mention in a beta at this stage is embarrassing. I’m involved in alpha testing a few games right now that aren’t nearly as bad. For as far along as this game is supposed to be in development it seems like Bethesda has no idea what they’re doing.
I agree with others who’ve said that they seem have grown used to using the modding community as a crutch for so long that without it they struggle to stand on their own power.
Will it improve, do you think? I mean, is it possible that this game has barely met its release date and future updates will make a better game out of it?
It sounds like it has a lot of great environments/towns, but the emptiness created by no NPC’s has made it kind of dull. Maybe they could find a way to fix it.
See, this is what I mean. I wouldn’t call it “dull” at all. In fact, there’s almost too much to do, which often gets in the way of what you want to be doing. Every quest seems to send me into an area where I trigger other quests or “Events”, and I just don’t have the time to do all of them.
The Events are the most annoying, because they tend to spawn monsters that then attack you while you’re just trying to get from A to B to complete a quest. And there doesn’t seem to be a limit on how often they trigger. I got the “Grafton Day!” Event about 6 times in 10 minutes last night, because I was trying to investigate a house just on the edge of where that Event triggers. It gets quite annoying at times.
I’m sure it will improve because they seem to have invested a lot of hype and reputation into it. Maybe it’ll be like No Man’s Sky which was a huge disappointment at launch but is now finally a pretty robust, fun game. It just might take some time to fix bugs and address what’s lacking.
Obviously I was not a fan of the original idea and it has under-delivered on what was even a weak premise. But this is a good developer who has made many great games over the years and I’m sure they’ll make this title into something enjoyable.
Is the game doomed though in the court of public opinion? Will such an awful start be a permanent stain they can never get rid of? I guess we’ll see.
We’ve been wanting to play Bethesda games together for a long time so we bought two game codes last night. I’m building a new computer tomorrow so we haven’t tried it yet
But no subscription fee? I guess I could see trying it if they drop the game to $10 or less in a couple years. And they fully support it with free fixes and some free updates to content, etc.
I’ll let the world beta-test this for awhile before thinking about it.
Got the new PC set up and tried it (and BF5) out Sunday and last night. So far it’s fun. Much more like a typical Bethesda game* and not at all like an MMO. We do see some other players now and then but the server seems pretty sparse. I don’t know if that’s intentional. We saw a few minor visual glitches but nothing that affected gameplay.
*I’ve only “finished” Fallout 3, played a bit of Oblivion and Skyrim, and watched bits of the newer Fallout games.
re: crafting, you can build stuff in your friend’s base and can use their workbenches, which is nice. We didn’t both have to build redundant stuff.
I think if they fix some of the glaring issues it will be the fallout game I always wanted. Basically, an open world that me and a few friends can play in together, beat up monsters and loot stuff and maybe toss a few nukes about in. They need to fix their vendor/economy system, fix the stash system (junk it, IMHO, and go with instanced bases with the loot boxes inside), and maybe allow for mutual semi-persistent bases (i.e. a shared base that is there whenever one of the team or guild is logged in). I’d like to see them add the ability to build vaults of our own (instanced and shared) and I’d REALLY like to see NPC player hub cities and maybe a few scattered NPCs just around the map, but I can live without them if they fix the other things.
