Fallout 76. Worried? Excited? Both?

[Triaxx]

I mean... You'll be able to play with mods, but not right away.

[GloatingSwine]

I mean... You'll be able to play with mods, but not right away.

But very likely only mods as approved and possibly sold by Bethesda through the Creator's Club.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

You just addressed one of my biggest concerns about this game. I was leery of the multi-player, so decided to wait until the game was cheaper before buying. However, I was concerned that by waiting, I would screw up being able to play because there wouldn't still be other players by the time I got around to getting the game. Nice to know that it seems one of my fears is gone - I can still play without other people.

I wouldn't exactly say that. Remember, this is still in B.E.T.A. which didn't see a whole lot of adoption, and has strictly limited playtimes. I'd expect launch day to have far higher population densities.

[Balmas]

But very likely only mods as approved and possibly sold by Bethesda through the Creator's Club.

I don't think that's particularly likely. 76 already has the Atom marketplace for in-game purchases; it would seem a foolish move to introduce both another marketplace and another currency to the game.

[Triaxx]

You know, the CC doom and gloom is kind of old now.

[Mechalich]

I wouldn't exactly say that. Remember, this is still in B.E.T.A. which didn't see a whole lot of adoption, and has strictly limited playtimes. I'd expect launch day to have far higher population densities.

The BETA is also not fully launched yet. The PC Beta has yet to begin. That may have a significant impact.

[Kesnit]

I wouldn't exactly say that. Remember, this is still in B.E.T.A. which didn't see a whole lot of adoption, and has strictly limited playtimes. I'd expect launch day to have far higher population densities.

Actually, that reinforces the point I was making. Even with the low server populations of the B.E.T.A., the game is playable. My concern was that MP was so integral that once the server population fades (as it will), the game would be unplayable for anyone who starts a year or more after release.

[Mando Knight]

Actually, that reinforces the point I was making. Even with the low server populations of the B.E.T.A., the game is playable. My concern was that MP was so integral that once the server population fades (as it will), the game would be unplayable for anyone who starts a year or more after release.

The game automatically assigns players to servers upon login, so you should always be in a somewhat-full server (of 24 people, spread across a map four times the size of Fallout 4's Commonwealth). Even if Fallout 76 suffers a staggering 90% loss in average player count compared to Fallout 4, that would still mean an average of over a thousand concurrent players (more than 40 full servers) on PC every day.

[Starbuck_II]

Played yesterday in Beta, went from level 1 to level 8 solo in that time.

I've got a packrat mentality to fight, keep hoarding stuff and not storing it.

I took Lone Wonderer perk so I get DR while solo.

I had about 4 bugs.
1) Game stutter (server didn't detect me), this was bad as I was standing by a barrel of radiation. So I couldn't move, radiation still building up, so I died.
Good thing death isn't a huge penalty (just drop all your non-weapon/armor)
2) random stutter, nothing bad about it.
3) One blueprint doesn't work (supposed to push it in pipboy to learn it).
4) reentered a building where I killed/examined things, and the remains of a petrified corpse started dancing around and hitting things/knocking them over. It was funny and weird. I can guess when you enter a new area things are hit by some invisible bump and that started the whole thing off.


Anglers are tough (lv 15) and scary.

[MCerberus]

Playing with a team it really does seem to capture pen-and-paper RPG shenanigans better than any game I've played.

Patrolling monsters attacking the campsite at night seemingly at random.
People diverging their preferred play styles and consuming/creating resources that fit them.
Finding a good weapon in a supply drop guarded by curious monsters or in a chest deep in a dungeon is like finding Excalibur or The One Ring.
Artificers (int builds) are stunningly overpowered as long as you have dirty meatheads to do the killing.
Overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer.

It just feels so good when you finally hit that level of available resources that you can jump into a public event with the crew and imagine Immigrant Song playing... only to run out of ammo at the end and everything turning into a desperate farce involving fireaxes and piles of frag mines

[Balmas]

So, I finally caved and bought the game. Yes, yes, I know. I hate contributing to pre-order culture too.

Full thoughts on the Beta experience tomorrow. For now, have a bit of a rant.

Spoiler:

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Bethesda? Dear? Beloved of my heart? I'd like to say a few words regarding your interface design.

Stop. Messing. With. It.

Every game, I deal with this crap! You can't seem to leave it alone! You need to poke and twiddle and fuss with it! You spend all your time on making sure that people can use a controller with 10 buttons to perform all their functions in-game, and then spend five minutes throwing darts at a keyboard for the PC version!

And you keep changing it from previous versions! For no reason! Sure hope you don't have 10+ years of muscle memory from previous Fallout games! Q is VATS! V is third person! The scroll wheel, instead of zooming out in 3rd person view like every other main Bethesda title, brings up a rotary favorites menu--and F brings up the same menu! C and Z are integral to making settlements work and finding the main menu because Escape--friggin Escape--is not the menu key! No, Escape is the map screen! This despite fifteen years of precedence in Bethesda games, and the map screen already having its own dedicated button!

Who approved this key layout and how soon can we have them fired?

But rebinding keys, you might say! Well, you can't have tested this, because there are some elements that are hardcoded in! Rebinding the arrow keys, for example, completely breaks the settlement system! Tab is hardcoded, which means that if you're left-handed or use a non-American keyboard layout, get ready for some fun times with third-party keybind programs because you need to hit Tab a lot.

It's 2018. I shouldn't have to use third-party programs to fix your ****ty programming. This crap is not acceptable.

[Triaxx]

I don't think you can necessarily blame Bethesda on that one. I think it's the developer at fault here.

[Rodin]

From what I've seen coming out of the Beta, it's clear that the PC version is secondary at best to the consoles. This was sort of true of the last couple games, but apparently 76 has taken it to a whole different level and the PC version is just downright shoddy.

An additional thing which was pointed out that I hadn't considered - because of the multiplayer, there will be no "unofficial" patches sorting out the usual Bethesda craziness.

Oh, and the new VATS just looks ridiculous. Yes, normally bullets do fly out of my gun at a 45 degree and 60 degrees upwards to strike a guy in the head, why do you ask?

[Triaxx]

I mean there will be eventually, but not until private servers appear.

[Balmas]

Alright, y'all ready for a second-draft version of my initial impression? Total playtime in game is rounding towards twelve hours, so while I'd not claim to know everything about the game, I think I feel comfortable with giving my first thoughts.

THESIS: Fallout 76 is the Arcade version of Fallout. In nearly every area, you find gameplay that's designed to hook you and get you to spend your metaphorical quarters in its game, and enforce a cycle of "kill-loot-build-repeat." Many vital aspects of what make Fallout great have been sacrificed in the name of a multiplayer fallout.

Spoiler: Instead of using good story or human interaction to drive plot, the developers of Fallout 76 have chosen to lock progress behind a lot of grinding.

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To get weapon and armor mods, you need to find a duplicate weapon, scrap it, and hope you get lucky. At first, scrapping a weapon yields three or four weapon mod types, but this quickly drops off to one weapon mod learned per two or three scrapped. Consider that the Fallout 4 version of the hunting rifle had thirty-five different kinds of weapon modification, locked behind four ranks of Gun Nut. The Fallout 76 seems to have even more weapon mods, locked behind five ranks of Gunsmith.

Do you remember how Fallout 4 had the Picket Fences magazines that would allow you to unlock some bonus settlement items? Imagine that, but each magazine unlocks only one item (which may require a separate perk to build), and there aren't any fixed magazine spawns. To begin with, your settlements are the extremely basic construction mostly seen in Fallout 4: ramshackle wood planks, sheet metal shutters, concrete foundations, and limited furniture. In order to expand past that, you need to find diagrams for them out in the world. There's no way that I've found to reliably find plans for more advanced furniture, apart from receiving them as randomly generated loot, or as absurdly expensive items in vendor inventories. Oh, and you can receive duplicate plans for items you already know how to make, and the random loot chance doesn't appear to be weighted towards any particular kind of plan. Unless you're investing heavily in Charisma and are grinding for caps, that means that you have a long road ahead of you in order to get anything more than ugly wood and corrugated metal.

Weapons, perks, and armor are all locked behind level ups. I'm normally for perks having high requirements, as this serves to distinguish between characters and make for more replayability, but the lack of transparency in what you can take when bothers me. More annoying is the way the game holds out armor and weapons and says, "you can have this now, but you won't be able to use it until you kill another hundred more Scorched." It's meant to keep the player coming back for another tantalizing bit of reward, of progress.

Spoiler: The above also serves to reinforce the cycle of going out into the world, killing things, looting them for their stuff, and coming back to base to build.

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Improving guns or settlements requires you to go out and kill things for more guns, before bringing them home to scrap.

As ammunition is absurdly expensive at vendors, you will most likely be either making your own or hoping you scrounge enough off the people to kill to replace more than what you spent killing them. Unless you're lucky enough to find a tinker's workbench in the world, that means heading home to make ammo.

Raw meat and vegetables spoil absurdly quickly. That means that if you want to get most of the benefits from them, you need to head back to base to cook them quickly.

Everything has weight. While there are perks that reduce weight by considerable amounts, that only applies to particular categories. Unless you spend 15 levels' worth of cards and SPECIAL on making sure that everything is low weight, you'll need to head home to scrap.

Once you're home, your Stash only has space for 400 pounds' worth of crap. That means that sooner or later, you're going to have to head out and either sell some scrap, or find a lower-level player to whom you can sell some lower level weapons.

Your weapons have levels. As such, it's not a good idea to get too attached to a given weapon, as eventually it'll just be outclassed by a higher level weapon you find, buy, or craft. As weapon mods are scrapped instead of stored, that also means that you need to remake any weapon mod attached to those weapon. Better get out there to get more scrap!

Spoiler: In choosing to make a multiplayer Fallout, many elements of roleplaying were sacrificed. In addition, multiplayer with anybody but your friends doesn't even add a lot to the experience.

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Because of multiplayer, nothing can change in the long-term. Monsters can't be eliminated. Areas can't be cleared. Quests must always be available for completion, which means that events have to launch themselves any time somebody approaches that area, even if there are other people who've seen the same event pop off twenty times before.

Multiplayer also means no NPCs, which means no conversation with them, no interrogation, no engagement with them. No NPCs means that no matter how much you may like a person, you can't fall in love with them because you'll only ever meet them through holotapes. You can't get to know a corpse.

Let me divide multiplayer into co-op with friends and meetings with strangers.

Co-op is brilliant fun. The ability to run around Fallout's world, shooting the breeze and the occasional super mutant with my buddies, is great. You can tell stories about the world you're finding, or just go off on your own and explore. You can do stuff like find a pair of graves with gnomes perched on top, steal the gnomes, and have your friends tell you the gnomes are evil and will kill you in your sleep, or find an interesting location and call your buddies to come look at it with you. This game is really good at encouraging chill hangouts with friends.

Other people, on the other hand, are hell. Voice chat is enabled by default, and if you never go into third person, it's easy not to notice that anything you're saying is coming out in voice. There's never any tension to spotting another player, because the anti-griefing safeguards means they're not likely to attack and players being marked on the map means you know where everyone is at any given time. Being around other players means you're constantly having people interrupt the holotapes you're listening to, having their names pop in and out of view, and having them compete with you for experience and resources. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that multiplayer is actively detrimental to my enjoyment of the game, to the point that I usually try to head where other people aren't, as it means a better experience for me.

The only positive thing to come out of Fallout 76's multiplayer is the ability to play with friends. In all other ways, multiplayer has been a negative, removing roleplaying opportunities, needlessly removing NPC interactions, and generally serving to draw me out of the game. If Fallout 76 had been Fallout 4 but with 4-player co-op, I'd have been ecstatic; I'm not so happy about 24-player multiplayer where I'm running away from the annoyance that other players represent.

CONCLUSION: If you approach Fallout 76 as a roleplaying game, you're going to be disappointed. In its mechanics and its approach to multiplayer, it feels too much like a video game to truly allow for immersion. If grinding isn't your thing, you'll probably get bored of it quickly.

However, I found that as I turned down my expectations and, more importantly, got some friends online with me, I found a surprisingly enjoyable game underneath. It's not what I'd consider a good Fallout title, but it's decent enough to spend a week or two vegging out on. I even find myself looking forward to its full release, so I can actually find a timeslot where all of my friends can get online at once.

Only time can tell where Fallout 76 goes. There's a lot of nitpicks and complaints that need dealing with, and my long-term enjoyment of the game depends on how much end-game content there is once you finish all the quests. Still, it's a fun enough little romp, and worth checking out.


NITPICKS:

• The game can detect when you have a max-level perk card. If you have a max-level perk card, the game should not award you another of those cards in a perk pack.
• The enemy respawn timer is far too quick for my liking. All too often, I'll kill my way through an area, and then start to go around to loot the place blind and start to read terminals. Usually, by the time I'm three-quarters of the way to sweeping the place fully, the entire place is fully respawned again and I need to once again kill the enemies that were just dead.
• For a game centered around multiplayer, Fallout 76 is missing key features like Push To Talk. Instead, voice chat is enabled by default, which adds another layer of

FULL CRITICISMS

• One of the major selling points of the perk card system is that it allows you to slot perks in and out as needed. However, SPECIAL points are permanent, and cannot be re-allocated. There should be a way to respec your character.
  
  Fallout 76 is grindy in nearly every aspect. Leveling up your character requires significant time investment. Building better settlements requires you find vendors selling expensive diagrams, and then grind for the money to buy them. Getting the weapon mods you want involves finding weapons, tearing them apart, and hoping you happen to get the right mod recipe, and then going back into the world to either gather supplies or farm more weapons to try again.
• While the writing in Fallout 76 is surprisingly good and the voice acting excellent, the lack of NPCs means that I'm often missing a place to buy into the world and get engaged.
  
  This one is just… I hate to criticize it. I like the high quality of the writing. I enjoy how dark it gets as everyone reacts to their world ending. The voice-acting is truly incredible. The problem is that it all gets to feel like it’s the same after a while. You find a note, or a terminal entry, or a holotape, or a radio broadcast, and follow where it leads you. It's all high quality stuff, but it starts to feel like you're listening to an audiobook instead of playing a game. You're learning about others' stories instead of making your own. You don't get to meet them, or grill them for information, or have any affect on their world beyond shooting things that presumably killed them
• This game is poorly optimized, to say the least.
  
  My PC meets or exceeds the recommended hardware levels in every area. Where it recommends an i7-4790 and a GTX 970, I have an i7-4790K and a GTX 1070, both of which are overclocked. I have twice the amount of available system memory and VRAM recommended. And yet, I'm still dealing with aggressive stutters, areas that drop to 40 FPS, game crashes, and long-term slowdowns that have the game chugging along at ten frames per second, all while Resource Monitor insists that neither CPU nor GPU are working at 100%.
• Fallout 76's PC version is a lazy export of the console version. It lacks basic graphics options like an FoV slider, a way to adjust or turn down the crazy-strong Depth of Field effect, and a way to disable Vsync in a way that does not require third-party software to limit frames per second. Controls that should be rebindable are not, which screws over left-handed users and anybody using a non-QWERTY keyboard.
  
  The depth of field is particularly aggravating, as anything over 15 yards from you is going to wind up blurry, as if Bethesda is afraid to let players look at the scenery. There's a part of me that feels that this is to disguise the aggressive pop-in of scenery which you'll find if you disable depth of field in your .ini files.
• Enemy variety is piss poor.
  
  No human NPCs means that you'll be facing a lot of Scorched, Feral Ghouls, robots, and Super Mutants. (I'm not even going to touch on Super Mutants being in Fallout 76, as I've beaten that dead horse many times before.)
  
  While new enemies have been added in, most of them are either cryptids (unique monsters, spawning only in one area), or benign things like squirrels, opossums, frogs, and cats. While I appreciate the nods towards realism in the environment, it means that you have a very limited variety in what you face on a daily basis, which gets boring fast.

DESIRED MODS/FIXES

• iHUD, or something like it. Between information about yourself, your companions, your quests, your compass, events popping up, and missions finishing, your HUD is very cluttered. There's an opacity slider in the menu, but there's no replacement for being able to turn your hud off and on again selectively with the press of a button.
• Fully rebindable keys. I've gotten used to C and Z being a secondary left and right when in menus, but I'd still prefer to be able to rebind arrow keys for something other than settlement system usage.
• Ammo breakdown. Just as you can use gunpowder, lead, and miscellaneous materials to make ammo, I'd appreciate the ability to turn that ammo back into its component pieces. That way, if I decide I don't need seven hundred rounds of .308, but could really use some shotgun shells, I can use some of one to make the other.
• Some form of extended HUD like Skyrim's MoreHUD or Fallout 4's DEF_UI. What I'm mostly after is the ability to look at an item in the world and know what scrap I can get out of it without needing to pick it up, look at it in the pipboy, and then decide whether or not to drop it.
• Deleveled perks. This one may seem kind of weird, given what I said about just embracing the video-game nature of Fallout 76. However, I do wish that more perks were available off the starting line. If I'm going to treat it like a video game, then I'm going to want to minmax. That means that I need to know when certain things become available so I know when to get which perk cards.
• Going with the above criticism of permanent SPECIAL stats: a way to reset your special and, ideally, rebuy your perk cards. In a perfect world, it would be expensive enough to discourage constant build-swapping, but achievable enough that if you really decide you're tired of being a power-armor-wearing shotgunner, there's a way to instead become a charismatic wandering trader without sacrificing all of your progress.

[Mando Knight]

As ammunition is absurdly expensive at vendors, you will most likely be either making your own or hoping you scrounge enough off the people to kill to replace more than what you spent killing them. Unless you're lucky enough to find a tinker's workbench in the world, that means heading home to make ammo.

Scrounger. If don't want to have to craft ammo all the time, the Scrounger perk combined with a common ammo type (such as .308, 10mm, or shotgun shells when in the Forest) will give you a lot to go on.

This game is poorly optimized, to say the least.

My PC meets or exceeds the recommended hardware levels in every area. Where it recommends an i7-4790 and a GTX 970, I have an i7-4790K and a GTX 1070, both of which are overclocked. I have twice the amount of available system memory and VRAM recommended. And yet, I'm still dealing with aggressive stutters, areas that drop to 40 FPS, game crashes, and long-term slowdowns that have the game chugging along at ten frames per second, all while Resource Monitor insists that neither CPU nor GPU are working at 100%.

There hasn't been a dedicated driver tweak from nVidia for Fallout 76 yet, and the game's performance passes so far were focused on Xbox (which got into the beta first). Between updates to 76, updates to the drivers, and good ol' .ini tweaking, the performance should improve at least a bit by the time the game officially launches.

[Rodin]

Thanks for that review Balmas, that pretty much matches what I've seen elsewhere - that the game is basically Fallout-4 Lite, with multiplayer co-op attached and a vestigial stub of PvP. Also that the game was built for consoles. Given that I am a primarily solo player on PC, it's pretty much confirmed that the game isn't for me.

Hopefully someday we'll get a Fallout that isn't "Junk Scavenging City Builder", but the way they've been taking the series makes me unhopeful on this point.

Just have to pray for a new, non-MMO Elder Scrolls to get my Bethesda fix, I guess.

[Balmas]

Well, I wrote an essay today. It just kind of happened. Allow me to preface this by saying that there's going to be a lot of negativity in this post. If that's not your jam, you might want to stop reading here.

Spoiler: The Failure of Fallout 76.

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I have been a fan of Bethesda for almost ten years. Since the release of Fallout 3, I've invested several thousand hours into the worlds of Bethesda, and then thousands more when you add in modding, fanfiction, videos, Let's Plays, and so on. When I heard that they were making a new game, I was eager to find out everything I could. I read leaks, watched videos, sat in anticipation of the Bethesda event at E3. I watched hours of footage shot at the Greenbriar press event, of XBOX beta footage. I played in all but one of the PC beta timeslots.

We're three days out from the full launch of the game, and I'm almost certain that this is one of the few Bethesda games that I'll not be playing.

You see, Fallout 76 in its current state suffers from a severe crisis of identity. At some point in its conception, Bethesda's marketing arm decided that the next Fallout game should be multiplayer. It should be a live service, to rake in that sweet microtransaction money. It should have PVP as a means to draw in the Fortnite crowd. It should have roleplaying to appeal to the hardcore fans of Bethesda's single-player RPG games. It should be a hardcore survival game, but it also shouldn't be so hard that casual fans would be turned off. It should be a base-building game where players can go into the world to retrieve junk to improve their house. And, in order to cast as wide a net as possible and get as many people as possible to pay the full sixty dollar cost of a premium Triple A studio game, it should be all of these things at once. The end result is that Fallout 76 is a wishy-washy, deviant bastard hybrid that has elements of each, but which fails to fully deliver on any of them.

Fallout 76 is a failure as a game with Player-vs-player combat. PVP has been an element of multiplayer since Pong. Bethesda had an issue to face, then: how to include PvP in a way that doesn't drive away people who just want to play unmolested? Traditionally, it'd be a simple matter of game settings on a server; players who want to enjoy their game without being shot at by other players could join a server with PvP disabled, while those who want to play Rust-but-in-the-Fallout-universe could join one with PvP enabled. Whether due to time constraints or laziness, however, Bethesda has not yet allowed for private servers, and so had to come up with a compromise to keep both groups happy.

The compromise Bethesda reached is one that is riddled with faults. The way it works is that if I wants to fight someone else, I can shoot that player for chip damage. If they shoot back, we both take full damage from our attacks. The problems here are twofold. First is that PVP in this manner is aggravating and frustrating if the attacked player refuses to engage. The attacker can then either give up in disgust, or continue attacking for chip damage until they kill the other player, which kind of defeats the purpose of making it do chip damage. The second problem is that in this system, full damage starts when the second player shoots back; as such, there's nothing stopping the attacked player from pulling out a full suit of power armor, dosing up with Psycho, and hitting the attacking player with a VATS critical to the head. Between that and the lack of any real rewards when killing someone, PVP is so heavily disincentivized that it might as well not exist. It's an optional feature, but its current state means anybody who's playing Fallout 76 for multiplayer PVP is going to be disappointed.

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Fallout 76 is also a failure as a roleplaying game. As a genre, roleplaying games are perhaps best defined by Bethesda's own motto: "Another life in another world." Roleplaying allows you to explore what it's like to be someone else. Who are they? How do they react to different situations? What choices do they make? What do they think of a given person? How do their choices affect the fates of the people and cities around them?

Fallout 76 allows you to do none of this. As an always-on, live service multiplayer fallout, all quests have to be able to be completed at any time, so nothing can be allowed to change because of what you do. Who your character is can never be explored, because the player is never allowed to make a choice beyond "do I participate in this meaningless, repeatable event or not." As there are no choices, there are also no consequences, no ability to see how your actions have helped or hindered the people of the world. Then again, you couldn't do that anyway, as Bethesda has made the curious decision to remove all human NPCs in the game. In theory, this allows you to tell your own story with the human players you meet; in practice, it means that each player you come across reminds you just why you couldn't be playing a proper roleplaying game.

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In truth, what Fallout 76 resembles more than anything is a massive multiplayer online game. And, true to form, it's not even a particularly good MMO. Its quests are stale and rote, rarely varying from the pattern of finding a note, following a map marker, killing a thing or looting an area, and returning. It lacks basic multiplayer features like the aforementioned push to talk or text chat. What little features that there are--the emote wheel, inviting to group, and inviting to trade--are awkward and stilted.

The major focus of the game is gathering loot: junk to build and upgrade your home and gear, weapons to kill others, chems to keep you going, armor to keep you alive. The gameplay cycle is all about going out into the world, killing things, looting their crap, and coming home to use what you found to let you build more. It's an utter failing, then, that Fallout 76's loot is boring. Junk is plentiful enough that with the exception of a few commonly used items like adhesive, plastic, and aluminum, there's never real excitement at finding it. Quest rewards are usually just more than what you use in doing them. There's usually only one boss monster in each area that you really need to loot, because they're the only ones with a chance of having something more than a weapon with ammo and maybe some gunpowder. It got to the point that after about twenty hours of play, I no longer felt the urge to explore areas because I didn't feel like there was much of anything to be found there, and certainly not enough risk to thoroughly entertain.

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Fallout 76 markets itself as softcore survival, and for once Bethesda is telling the truth. However, I would argue that this is to the game's detriment. In my twenty hours of play, I never really felt like I was in danger of losing progress. Stimpaks are not uncommon, and heal an enormous portion of health. Even at 1 Endurance, and wearing crappy raider and leather armor, it would take an entire prison's worth of super mutants focusing fire to bring me to half health. When I died, it was usually because I wanted to preserve stimpaks by ducking into cover to eat food, and found that the cover wasn't as secure as I thought. And when I *did* die, there was no stress to it; I retained everything but the junk I'd been carrying, and could spawn essentially right on top of where I died with no real progress lost. I've seen multiple stream of people playing in a group where the general consensus was that if you died, it was simpler for everyone if you just killed yourself fully instead of waiting to be revived. For a survival game, death is awfully cheap in Fallout 76.

Other survival mechanics feel similarly half-hearted. Players need to eat and drink, but water and food are not difficult to come by. It's so simple to come across food that the real challenge is getting the raw meat or vegetables back to a cooking fire in time to cook it before it spoils. If, at any time, you run out of food, the starting area has enough wood, fresh water, and respawning brahmin to keep you rolling in ribeyes for days. It just feels like one more thing inserted into the game by a meddling marketer because survival games are all the rage, doncha know, can't ship a multiplayer Fallout game if it's not going to be survival. And, if you're really desperate, your CAMP and its stash are never more than two button presses from being right with you.

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As an aside, and because I've been ranting for close to half an hour now, I feel that Fallout 76 is also a failure of a base-building game. I appreciate the ability to build a base anywhere, but I feel like I would like it would be a major improvement if "anywhere" didn't lead to a footnote that reads, "except indoors, or within a hundred feet of a map marker, or near somebody else's camp/workshop, and heaven help you if you try to build in busy or uneven terrain." You'll find yourself walking forward with your CAMP in front of you, waiting for that moment when the game finally deigns to let you put it down. Choose your spot wisely, as you won't be able to scrap anything already extant in the game, or build where your camp is placed; as such, your camp is usually built to fit the environment instead of the other way around. Then, all you have to do is spend ten minutes wrestling with your user interface, another ten minutes wrestling with Fallout 76's building rules, and you have your house!

Don't even bother with blueprints. I appreciate the thought that went towards blueprints, but they simply don't work as advertised. Fallout 76 is much more finicky about where and when you can snap and build structures than Fallout 76. When you store up your camp and move it somewhere else, it's not as simple as pulling out the blueprinted design and slapping it down. Instead, you'll often find that your lovely structured house has fragmented into a foundation with a crafting station, two foundations held together with a rug, a collection of assorted walls that don't want to snap together, and anything else you had going. I often had to rebuild my house from scratch when I got to a new location, as it was simper to adapt what I had to the environment than it was to try to shoehorn the parts into going where they didn't want to fit.

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I have been writing for about an hour now. In my previous review, I called Fallout 76 a decent game that got better if you had friends. After twelve more hours of gameplay since writing that review, I think I should like to revise my stated opinion. Fallout 76 is a bad-to-mediocre game that is only truly fun if you have friends to play with, and even then the fun will be coming from your friends and not from the game you're playing.

It's not fun to go into the wasteland and get the same loot as the last five times you went out. It's not fun to join a server and have to retake all the workshops that were previously yours, or to rebuild your house because the settlement-building algorithms throw a hissy fit about your previous design. It's not especially fun to grind for experience, weapon mods, caps, and building sets. PVP is not fun or satisfying, and neither are the roleplaying or interplayer options available. At present, there's many people--myself included--who would argue that Fallout 76 fails to function as a game at the most basic level, and that's not just talking about the nauseating fixed field-of-view, the speedhack-inducing on high refresh rate monitors, the hacking, or the clientside backend full of unencrypted plain-text coding.

At this point, the best thing Bethesda could do with Fallout 76 is delay it. As is, Fallout 76 is shoddily done, with an incomplete feature set and design decisions that are flawed from the outset. This game shouldn't ship until modding and private servers are both available and tested, at the very least, as that would alleviate some of the issues with three different target audiences with contradictory goals.

What's more, Bethesda would benefit from taking a step back, deciding what its core audience is meant to be, and then building their game around that. I don't care which direction Bethesda takes this game, although I'm obviously biased towards single-player RPG. All I ask is that Bethesda picks a direction and sticks with it. You want to make a PVP game where players must always be on their guard, lest they lose everything when they die? Make that game, but do it well! You want a heavy, story-driven game that explores how people react in the first years of a nuclear apocalypse? Make that game, but don't futz about trying to make it so that multiple people can all experience different stages at the same time! Pick the game you want to make, and you make that game; don't try to make three different games, and fail at all of them.

But, at least Fallout 76 has the microtransaction store up and running, ready to sell you emotes at two dollars fifty and a clothing set at nine bucks. After all, it wouldn't do to fail with the one thing you care about, right?

[Triaxx]

Anyone else getting the feeling Balmas is not a fan? Just a hint or two.

[Balmas]

I want to like it. I want it to succeed. But then I just... Then I get hit with a seven-minute-holotape's worth of telling instead of showing, or then I go to a place like the space station in the north of the map or the Ohio River Adventure in the south with nothing but junk and just... just sigh and go, "I could be playing literally anything else right now.'

Bethesda, why are you like this? Why do you do this?

[ShneekeyTheLost]

I'm mostly chiming in with Balmas here, although I have a slightly different take on it.

Bethesda is, at the same time, both too sensitive to backlash and tone deaf as to what the players are wanting. When the game was first announced, there was a big focus on the PvP aspect, where the other players are going to be the biggest threat. The majority of their fanbase did not react positively to that. So then they 'leaked' (I'm betting it was more 'hurried up and added') the nerf to the PvP system to the point where griefing wasn't too difficult (you can still train enemies on other players all you like), but actual PvP was all but impossible to actually accomplish, garnered you diddly squat, and painted you as a big target for everyone else on the server. Which the Fortnight/Rust group who started getting interested in the offering from talk of PvP reacted to with utter disgust.

If you thought Fallout 4 was more a FPS than an RPG, then Fallout 76 is pretty much a straight FPS. It has almost no roleplay elements, no ability to play a role outside of the limited emoji with other players, no NPC's to react with anything other than combat, and no immersion whatsoever with quests respawning every ten minutes so the next player can do it. If you complained about Fallout 4's reaction to any stimulous being "Yes, Scarcastic Yes, Greedy Yes with RNG to gain caps, and Not Right Now", then you'll be pleased to know that this has been eliminated entirely, and in fact the entire interaction capability has been eliminated entirely. Because, yanno... that was the problem, right? Interacting with NPC's getting in the way of your Kill/Loot/Repeat cycle?

Fallout 76 is basically an MMO-lite. It doesn't have any non-hostile NPC's to actually interact with, but otherwise it's the same sort of zones and spawn points and loot mechanics we're all familiar with. Only it doesn't even track which quests you've completed, as any other MMO does, so it keeps giving you the same ones over and over again. Because why not? You have to have some reason to go out there and teabag six deathclaws and come back with two molerat farts, right?

The base building aspect is, in may ways, strictly worse than FO4. Granted, part of that is the whole 'camp anywhere you like' aspect, it's nigh impossible to try to get anything to conform to the new surroundings every time you show up at a new place, so like Balmas said, it's best to not bother with blueprinting in the first place. But since base building means so much less in F76 than it does in FO4, that's hardly going to be your primary worry. Basically, the only reason for your CAMP in the first place is to ensure you have crafting stations and storage. That's... literally it. At least the Settlements could be used to generate resources. Water treatment facilities and Tato/Corn/Mutfruit sharecroppers producing much needed fresh water (to make yourself the next Water Baron as a way to drain every vendor in the Commonwealth of their caps) and Adhesive (needed to make darn near anything). But no, that's too powerful. How dare something you spent hours pouring resources in pay off in some way, and interfere with the Go Here/Kill That/Loot cycle? How dare you try to make something that actually looks nice?

Basically, The game fails on all of its merits. Like Balmas, I wished this was a decent offering. I've got over a thousand hours played in F:NV. I spent hours making sure it would run on Linux, and ended up making it more stable than most F:NV setups that don't rely on WINE to function. I wanted this to be something glorious, a truly interactive world. Maybe the fabled 'WoW killer' with a rich and in-depth world to explore.

Instead, we are told to go find ten deathclaw asses for our scrap, and like it.

[Mechalich]

I only managed to play the beta a little, but my impression of Fallout 76 is that where it does function best is as a PVE soft-survival game with a hefty amount of lore. It has strong similarities to other games of this type, like Subnautica. However it is quite clear that Bethesda's refusal to commit to a standard design - in particular the refusal to have discrete PVP and PVE servers like every other game in the genre - has enforced a huge number of ridiculous compromises on the game. Honestly, that is something they should be able to fix easily - and hopefully will get implemented. The CAMP system is also a kludgy compromise rather than the usual approach of having players build permanent structures in one specific place because there's no server consistency. Blocking off in-game locations from build over is one thing (and actually, very much a good thing, otherwise players can and will tile over entire maps), but the whole moving-base idea doesn't work within anything above small crafting platforms even on the theoretical level. If you're going to build a giant base you want it to interact with the local terrain. This is also a fixable issue, and having dedicated private servers will surely address it.

If nothing else Fallout 76 needs private servers, and a self-hosting option for true single player, as soon as possible. The map is huge and the lore is extensive, so there's a lot of gameplay there, but there's a bunch of barriers to access right now, because they tried to make the game too many things.

I'm still eagerly anticipating it though, even if it needs a bunch of work.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

I only managed to play the beta a little, but my impression of Fallout 76 is that where it does function best is as a PVE soft-survival game with a hefty amount of lore. It has strong similarities to other games of this type, like Subnautica. However it is quite clear that Bethesda's refusal to commit to a standard design - in particular the refusal to have discrete PVP and PVE servers like every other game in the genre - has enforced a huge number of ridiculous compromises on the game. Honestly, that is something they should be able to fix easily - and hopefully will get implemented. The CAMP system is also a kludgy compromise rather than the usual approach of having players build permanent structures in one specific place because there's no server consistency. Blocking off in-game locations from build over is one thing (and actually, very much a good thing, otherwise players can and will tile over entire maps), but the whole moving-base idea doesn't work within anything above small crafting platforms even on the theoretical level. If you're going to build a giant base you want it to interact with the local terrain. This is also a fixable issue, and having dedicated private servers will surely address it.

If nothing else Fallout 76 needs private servers, and a self-hosting option for true single player, as soon as possible. The map is huge and the lore is extensive, so there's a lot of gameplay there, but there's a bunch of barriers to access right now, because they tried to make the game too many things.

I'm still eagerly anticipating it though, even if it needs a bunch of work.

Private servers aren't going to happen any time soon, and when they do, I predict they will be rented for a monthly fee. Reason? Makes it harder to mod, requiring people to go to the Content Creator's Club to pay for it instead of letting someone practice their skills and release their offerings for free. That also means no unofficial patches, bugfixes, or small quality of life mods that make Bethesda games actually playable. I couldn't imagine trying to play FO3 or F:NV without FOAC/NVAC, for example. It just... wouldn't work.

I also predict that there's going to eventually be a microtransaction market around card packs, which is about as lootbox as you can get without actually being EA.

[Mando Knight]

That also means no unofficial patches, bugfixes, or small quality of life mods that make Bethesda games actually playable. I couldn't imagine trying to play FO3 or F:NV without FOAC/NVAC, for example. It just... wouldn't work.

On the other hand, Bethesda should hopefully feel a little more pressure to go through those bugfixes themselves on a continually-developed always-online game. Probably not to the quasi-obsessive degree of some of the unofficial patches, but better than their usual support for the single-player-only titles, at least where potential exploits and "cannot progress without use of console" issues are concerned.

I also predict that there's going to eventually be a microtransaction market around card packs, which is about as lootbox as you can get without actually being EA.

They're adamant that card packs will not be offered for sale, relying instead on (a significant sub-community's) insatiable desire for cosmetics as the carrot to buy in to the microtransactions.

Given how perk cards are handled currently, I can't really see much benefit from buying more packs anyway unless Bethesda makes some pack-only expansion sets.

[DigoDragon]

Anyone else getting the feeling Balmas is not a fan?

Balmas isn't wrong though. :3

I think Fallout 76 should have looked to games like Minecraft on what it should have been. The multiplayer aspect has options for both types of players--For casuals like me who wanna play with just some local friends, I can host a LAN party at my place. For more robust players--you can rent servers for online play; some have no PVP/Grief rules on their Minecraft worlds, others allow it unabated for the challenge. The servers give their admins White/Black list capabilities and game rules to control who can get on and what's allowed as far as combating each other.

As for base building, Minecraft lets you build anything anywhere, and I've seen lots of interesting home base farms to produce lots of different resources. Fallout 76 lacks in that farming part. What if I wanna raise Brahmin for food so I don't have to ever leave home for a meal?

[Triaxx]

It feels sort of like Rocket Raccoon was running the test panels.

We gave you multiplayer like you wanted!
This isn't what we wanted!
This is exactly what you wanted!

[Mechalich]

I think Fallout 76 should have looked to games like Minecraft on what it should have been. The multiplayer aspect has options for both types of players--For casuals like me who wanna play with just some local friends, I can host a LAN party at my place. For more robust players--you can rent servers for online play; some have no PVP/Grief rules on their Minecraft worlds, others allow it unabated for the challenge. The servers give their admins White/Black list capabilities and game rules to control who can get on and what's allowed as far as combating each other.

Minecraft doesn't operate on anything like Fallout 76's graphical space. A better comparison are other modern soft-survival games like ARK, Conan Exiles, Dark & Light, Rust, and Subnautica, among others. Fallout 76 has significant problems in that is has actively disregarded approaches that have become standard in those games. For example, the current Fallout 76 PVP system is an absurd kludge that could easily be solved by simply making dedicated PVP and PVE servers like most games of this type.

The building issue is more complicated. You do need limits on where players can build in a survival game, especially in PVE, because if you don't have them the player base will quite literally coat the map in tiles and render the game unplayable. However, players should be able to build whatever they want outside of exclusion zones, and when you have dedicated servers players just return to the same location time after time and add to their creations (personal example, I have hundreds of hours into Conan Exiles, and spent ~50% of that time inside a single canyon building my skyscraper ever higher). The CAMP system is the messy kludge Fallout 76 went with instead.

[Wookieetank]

So got a chance to play for around an hour and a half now that the game has launched. Here's some initial impressions:

The Good:
-Overall had fun.
-Its so nice to see something other than twisted gnarly tree #3 and leafless bush #4 in a fallout game. My wanderings have been more influenced by where might give me the best viewpoints so far. I'm very intrigued to check out the area to the north on the map with an alligator on the highway.
-Punching things is surprisingly fun, which is good cause that's been my primary combat move so far thanks to level locked gear.
-Wandering around with the classical music station on is very relaxing. They also have a great selection of music for it, gonna be hard pressed to change stations later on methinks.

The Bad:
-Took 15 mins of repeated attempts to finally get into a game without getting a "Disconnected from server" message. While not awful for a launch of a MMO style game, for a company that already runs an MMO, I expected better from them.
-Vats is pretty much useless so far, other than being able to more easily find where enemies are hiding in the shrubberies. I hope there's more use for it later on, cause throwing out one of the core things that made fallout unique mechanics wise just seems like a terrible idea.
-Level locked gear
-The map button has been changed. Only found the map when I was trying to pull up the menu to exit the game. Minor nitpick I know, but I spent like 10 mins trying to find it in my pipboy with no indication that it was somewhere else.

The Ugly:
-First melee weapon I found, just outside Vault 76, was level locked to level 5. First ranged weapon I found, was on a lvl 3 enemy, and level locked to 1. This does not make any sort of sense, or bode well for gear progression.
-Enemy spawns are erratic. Walked into an empty camp ground, start checking things out, suddenly surrounded by enemies that just spawned in. Been running into this in a number of early-access games I'm playing, this shouldn't be a thing in a triple-A game.

Currently looking forward to diving back into Appalachia this evening and can see myself having a lot of fun with this despite the complaints I have.

[MCerberus]

Levels mean a lot less than you think. On gear it's the minimum level to use it and the difference between a level 10 and level 20 hunting rifle is about 5 base damage. Get a fire axe and it'll be your trusty sidekick for a long while.

Anyway, DEEP SECRETS for those who are getting into the game to keep in mind:

Cooked food still goes bad, just very slowly. Always eat your mole rat chunks before dipping into pre-war food.
The syringer has effects based on the kind of barrel it's loaded with (a weapon mod). You only need to craft empty needles.
Your stash has a weight limit. Always break down your junk before storing it, and sell excess chems and food to vendorbots.
There's a friendly super mutant that goes between workbenches that sells rare schematics. That's how I got my crossbow.
Workshops with "junk" as a listed resource produce everything from screws to ballistic fiber at random, but like all resources you need to build an extractor to get at them.
Watchtower locations on the map reveal nearby other locations. Climb to the top of them, look over the edge, and hit the use button.
Without any perks fireaxes one-shot ghouls and most scorched. There's a reason they're popular.
Adhesive, screws, aluminum. Never not scavenge these.

[Wookieetank]

Levels mean a lot less than you think. On gear it's the minimum level to use it and the difference between a level 10 and level 20 hunting rifle is about 5 base damage. Get a fire axe and it'll be your trusty sidekick for a long while.

I'm sure. Its just odd (and a little irritating) that a rusty crowbar I found RIGHT OUTSIDE Valut 76, I can't use for 3 more levels, where this pistol I got from a boss several areas away I could've used when I started the game. It just doesn't make sense, especially with the ranged weapons needing lower levels than melee weapons. Swinging a stick is not that much more involved than punching something ><