Fallout 76: Idea Man Treading water

The Game Room
21

Falllout 76 was one of the free Playstation Now games this past month, so I’ve put about 30-40 hours into it. Even though I love the franchise, I didn’t have the time/desire to wade through the shitstorm it was when it was first released. As such, I came in with not a lot of baggage.

I really don’t understand a lot of the criticism lobbed at the game here. I have no doubt that after you sink 150-200 hours into it and you’ve played through all the quests, built up your own base, and finished all the events, it loses a ton of its appeal. But until that point, it seems to be a pretty much dead-on Fallout game. You have your factions, a bunch of quests, and a giant post-apocalyptic world to explore. You still have to manage inventory, run from fights where you have no chance, and discover a bunch of stories from long dead people. It’s pretty much what I expect from a Fallout game. The MMORPG seems to be just an additional thing to do, one that I fully expect to ignore as I complete the game as a single person adventure.

That said, there are issues. Hunt quests are incredibly frustrating when you’re never sure how often, when, or even if, the creature you need is going to spawn. But outside of that, I’m really enjoying the game.

22

Yeah at this point it’s pointless to even try to talk to people about the game because…literally you can list out all the things people are actively enjoying in the game…and you will still (look at this thread) have other who just say “IT HAD A BAD LAUNCH! AND THEREFORE IT SUCKS AND I HATE IT”

…ok.

23

Sounds familiar…

24

I bought it on launch, laughed at the issues as being ‘so very Bethesda’, paid for a year of Fallout First, and spend probably hundreds of hours on it.

And good on 'em for trying to keep the gravy train going and awesome for them getting more people in front of it, they could potentially have hundreds of hours of entertainment in front of 'em.

But on the new edges, it’s more of the same with a coat of paint.

And yeah, a lot of it is me being salty. I’m fighting boredom with a dose of having really specific tastes (This, Portal, Bioshock, Half-Life) and I don’t know what it is with gaming in general, but it seems like there’s a glut of…Everything. Want a crafting, Zombie, VR, MMORPG with Minecraft physics? There’s 12 of em. Gaming went from a few people being really imaginative and pushing the hardware to…tens of thousands of kids being ground through game development as a College Major…So Bethesda has a veritable ARMY of kids grinding out skins for guns.

25

On the contrary, I don’t think the people who are critical of the game are very emotionally motivated. You, however, are clearly emotionally motivated to defend your fandom of it. You have a chip on your shoulder about people who criticize the game, like it’s a personal insult to your identity.

My impression from other people who have played it recently is that it went from really bad to modestly bad. I do think that Bethesda’s treatment of the community was disgusting and greedy. My favorite part of the whole saga was that after people purchased the $130(?) special edition to get some extra collectable goodies including a canvas bag, Bethesda sent them out a $2 cheap nylon bag instead and told them to go fuck themselves, because apparently the world ran out of canvas. But here’s the best part - as compensation for this, they gave them $5 of in-game currency.

Now… the item that people were supposed to get in real life, the canvas bag, actually existed in-game as an item. At a real-money cost of… $15.

So Bethesda took the people who paid a lot extra for the collectables, failed to deliver the collectables, tried to market a virtual version of the collectable in-game (for real money), and then compensated those people who gave them all that money by giving them enough virtual currency for… 1/3rd of the cost of the virtual version of the real item they had already paid for. That seems so shitty that it feels like a deliberate insult - why not just give virtual currency, which costs you nothing, to people who paid you for the super special deluxe collectible edition of your game?

Then they kept trying harder and harder to monetize it. Want to have your own server or have some control over the game? Pay them $13 a month.

I don’t know, by the way, why everyone keeps calling it an MMORPG. It has a maximum of 24 players with instanced copies of worlds rather than some sort of connected large world. There are hundreds of games like this and none of them are called MMORPGs. I can only guess they’re trying to push the baseless idea that it’s an MMORPG to push the idea that it’s okay to charge you $13/mo for unlocking in-game features, since people are more accustomed to making a monthly subscription to MMORPG.

Edit: I went and looked up the original thread where we discussed this stuff and it’s actually worse than I remember. The collectors paid $200, not $130. The $5 virtual currency was only given as compensation for people that actually bothered to file a ticket for it, and the in-game version of the canvas bag was $18, not $15, though it came with a virtual costume and not just the bag.

They also made changes to make the game more grindy before they rolled out their $13/mo subscription that then removed some of that grind for those who were willing to pay it.

26

NMS didn’t have “a bad launch” - a bad launch is when people can’t play your game for a few days because your server infrastructure sucks and couldn’t handle launch day, or because you have a few game breaking bugs that are fixed quickly.

NMS was a lie. They were lying about what was even in the game right up until the day before the launch and then went into hiding after launch. It took years to add in some of the stuff they said was already part of the game at launch.

Now, to their credit, they are a lot better than Bethesda, who are actively hostile to their users. They went in and spent the next few years trying to make the game better and didn’t charge extra for it.

But every single thing I said in the NMS thread was true and correct except one: I predicted that they’d take the money and run and abandon the game. I was wrong about that, they spent years improving on it. But it was still a scam early on, it was built on lies, it was a huge disappointment, and it was an example of the follies of preordering a game based on hype rather than waiting a day or two and seeing what the game actually is before you commit your money.

The smart move would’ve been waiting until it was actually fleshed out a bit and grabbing it on sale for half off, or just waiting it to hit gamepass, which is how I played it. I think it still, with all the improvements, doesn’t live up to the original hype. There are a few basic building blocks that combined in different variations and colors on different planets, but you end up feeling like you’ve seen everything very quickly. It’s definitely not the unbound universe of infinite variety that it set out to be.

27

Why do they say that? I completely understand being angry about the shitty launch or the perceived bad faith to squeeze every penny out of people, but as to the games’ actual gameplay, what’s the problem now? Again, I’m playing it for free and won’t become a subscriber, but the actual game itself is pretty much another Fallout game.

28

Do you pay monthly for access to Fallout 76 or is it just like a normal game where you buy it and that is all there is to it?

I’m considering buying it for a single player experience if goes really cheap.

29

Both. You get access to public servers for free once you buy the base game. There’s an ‘added value’ subscription with private servers and more chrome. Monthly or annually at a discount.

30

I assume this still stands even though the moderator has stepped down.

31

Well, when it goes on the reasonably-common Bethesda sales on Steam, it will be fairly cheap. However, you won’t be getting a “single-player” experience exactly. I understand the environments are quite nice, but in general quest design is very simplistic, there aren’t really settlements or complex relationships, although patches added some of that, and other players may accidentally interfere with your fun.

I’m not telling you what to do. Just be aware of it. One reason many players were very peeved by the “Fallout First” fees is that they thought the game would be much more fun to player without other people, which is not really ideal in an online title.

32

Your attempt to bring it up was an attempt at vindication or gloating, but it’s neither. I was and still am 100% right about everything I said in that thread except for my prediction about cutting and running.