Please convince me to like Fallout 76, I beg you
I picked this thing up in a Steam sale at 75% off after having avoided it like contagious illness since launch, reasoning to myself that for a cost of about £7.99 it'd still pay for itself through sheer amount of content.
And content is what I got, all right. Nebulous, homogenous, thoroughly unexceptional content. My experience has been, more or less:
- Find the three unmarked items in this room and craft them into a parcel, then deliver that to another settlement.
- Pick up and listen to countless audio tapes made by people long-dead and never particularly captivating when they were still alive.
- Boil some water.
- Read through reams of discarded notes about the daily minutiae of life in Shitsville.
- Grill some steak to go with that water.
- Slowly feel your initial interest fade as it dawns on you that this isn't a story, this is what somebody thought constituted lore.
- Realise that some people paid up to £59.99 to do this on launch day, while the fanfiction on AO3 is free.
- Struggle to see the landscape, and enemies, through the film of clown vomit that is the Gamebryo engine's gasping attempts to render lighting effects and shadows that aren't pixellated.
- Shoot at enemies who move in fits and starts, or not at all, in response to your presence.
- Shoot at them again because the lag means you can't be sure if the first shot connected.
- Question what you're doing with your life.
- Christ, shoot him again, he's still dancing. - Re-level your wobbly desk leg.
- Stare in wonderment at a game which is somehow uglier, and runs worse, than Fallout 4.
- Appreciate a passing three-headed opossum.
- Check out the pop-up for the overpriced store, which is the first thing you see every time you log in.
I thought I'd at least enjoy exploring the wilderness of a new location full of fresh landmarks, enemies and particularly cryptids (none of them yet), but I think I might've already checked out in a matter of days. I just...don't care. This is the least compelling Fallout game I think I've ever played. I can't imagine how bad this must have been on launch.
And the Camp UI is an absolutely headache-inducing abomination.
Anyway, do you think I can still get my money's worth? Can this be saved?
Are there...mods???
Ultimately, don't try to like a game you don't like. My only exception to this rule would be if someone has a dramatically different approach to it that you missed completely.
In the case of FO76, I think you've got the gist. I made a comment in a different thread about my (mostly positive) experience with it, but the summary is what others have already said - it's an MMO themed to Fallout. There are many solo aspects of it, but the main reasons people continue playing for a while are for the different events and to build/show-off their CAMPs.
This isn't specifically targeted at you OP, but I think we can make tildes a better place if we have less "anti" themed posts and comments. It's easy to hate on something as a group, but it's depressing. It's a bit harder to respond in positive ways, but if we support each other then we'll all feel a little better at the end of the day. Just saying that I don't want tildes to become full of ragebait like so much of the internet has.
For what it's worth, I did enjoy reading OP's post -- it's a humorous take on a lousy game. Is it something I would want to see constantly? Definitely not, but once in a while it can tickle my funny bone.
It's not a Fallout game. It's a barebones MMO with Fallout art.
Google seems to suggest there are mods. I played for a bit when they first made a big deal about adding humans to the game. I didn't last one day, so you did better than me.
I had fun with it solely because I had friends who played it too, but we made our own fun. I feel like the game would be a deeply unenjoyable experience as a solo player.
Yeah, I had no friends interested in playing it so I'm sure solo is the worst way to play. But all the more reason to say it doesn't provide a Fallout experience.
Ehh, life's too short
:) here's a suggestion: for every dollar you spent on this, play ONE game from your free collection you picked up but haven't played. Compare it to this one and tell us what you liked about the free game. Maybe you'll look back on this as the summer you found a lovely hidden gem due exclusively to how much you didn't enjoy FO76~~
On launch it was...oh yeah, it was so hilariously, laughably, class-action law-suit worthy bad. You are playing the best possible version of it likely and it's still a dog's dinner. Seriously though, there's no salvaging this experience for you. Just write off the £8 and move on. Go back, install a shit ton of FO4 mods and play that through. Don't fall for some suck cost fallacy shit, cut your losses and go on to the next thing.
I came across a post in /r/anime that I've been thinking about recently (mostly the "it gets better" bit), but I think it applies to you, too. Just make the appropriate substitutions.
I've generally found this advice to hold true, including the idea of giving shows a second chance. As an example, I originally dropped Konosuba, wondering what "the point" of the show was. But after returning to it much later, I realized "the point" was the characters, and now Konosuba is one of my favorite anime.
Maybe you'll return to Fallout 76 one day and be able to appreciate it in a different light. Or maybe it's just a game you'll never vibe with, and that's fine too.
I agree with this sentiment. Video games, like all forms of art, are best when targeted at a specific audience. So just because there are a lot of people playing it doesn’t mean that it’s going to be good for you. For whatever reason, you just aren’t the audience for it and you don’t have to be.
I was in the same seat as you. Just move on. Maybe play FO4.
For now: Dump the game, watch the Fallout Series (again if need be) and then fire up either FO4 or FO New Vegas and enjoy the wasteland experience until FO5 comes out in 2032 or so.
I'd rather try to convince you to play FO or FO2.
Granted, they're a bit of a hard pill to swallow nowadays, but if you loved FONV, that is what FO3 should have been and 4 should be the one coming out next.
(I may or may not be snobby when it comes to Bethesda messing games up... :)
Not that you can even play them on your phone if you own a copy.
If you can play them on your phone, there is no excuse not to do so.
You can play them on a 3DS if you have the inclination.
I say chalk it up as a "bad restaurant" purchase and play something else. It's possible to get yourself accustomed to a game and learn to like it, but the less you like it, the more that's going to be an exercise in just sort of settling for less, in my opinion. No need to have a game be that for you, and you can always come back to it later and see if your mind changed. You also have it in case a friend gets it or something.
I also tried it out when the show hit and struggled to find the great game people were raving about. I heard there was kinda a tipping point when you get to a high-ish level and you can focus on getting parts for your end game build where the game hits its stride, but I never got close to there before getting burned out on the same dozen world events and reasonably dull quests.
I played with my brother too which usually takes the strain off the content but we didn't even find much to laugh about, it felt a bit dry.
All in all we got vintage story when I saw a post here and loved that, so agreed with the comments in this thread, don't try and love something you don't.
Well, those were some good answers that made me feel less unhinged or out-of-touch. Thank you all for contributing. I guess maybe it wasn't meant to be. Of, as John Fallout himself put it, "Conflict never evolves." Maybe I'll drop the game for a while, or check out some mods for it.
This is kinda rambly, and for that I'm sorry.
I wrote this game off years ago. Picked it up free from Amazon a couple months back.
It still didn't click with me, until I had 3 of my friends in a party. Like others have said it's a barebones MMO, but that said, it's a casual MMO. I can pick it up for an hour and put it down. After a couple weeks I just started joining the casual parties people make and doing events with them. For me it's just a "numbers go up" game.
I was pleasantly surprised by it being enjoyable at all. It's not on par with any of the actual fallout games, but then again I never expected it to be. I got into some of the base building and enjoyed making a couple themed builds, and I did end up spending like 10 dollars on it.
As far as the quests go, I don't pay attention to 90% of what they're even for. Just kind of a time waster game. It is kinda fun being able to swap your SPECIAL build once you hit level 50 btw. You can experiment with different play styles.
As everyone else has said, it's okay to write it off as just not being for you, and you could do a lot worse than $8 to learn that lesson.
If you can find a guide online to set you on the right path, I would check out the original storyline (following the Overseer). The impact isn't the same now that we have human NPCs running around being goofy, but the meat of the story is still really solid.
I don't think the modern story is worth a playthrough in the same way the classic pre-human-NPC story was. The original story was dark, unsettling, lonely, and imo one of the best in 3D Fallout. You exit your vault to find a world completely devoid of human life, but full of signs of human inhabitants. Humanity has clearly survived and thrived up until very recently and it's your job to figure out why. I can't properly convey how creepy playing that original storyline was. Everyone is dead and you have to piece together why from environmental storytelling, terminals, notes, and holotapes. It was like being a post-apocalyptic detective.
There's also an overarching theme about the impact of automation and robots on the working class, government corruption, unchecked capitalism, etc. The usual Fallout tropes, sure, but given that 76 takes place so shortly after the bombs fell, it's a bit more impactful.
Which isn't to say the story and gameplay is perfect. Far from it. There are outright boring, tedious, and painfully obnoxious stretches of the storyline. But overall, I really enjoyed it, especially as someone who reads every single terminal, listens to all the holotapes, etc.
Now for modern FO76...idk. I haven't been wowed by any of the storytelling any of the expansions have brought, including the most recent one. They're decent enough stories, but they're short and I don't find the quality of the voice acting to be up to par with what the game's original storyline had. So I don't really continue to play for the story. It's mostly just a light, low-effort MMO to kill time in the evenings. I log in, do my daily challenges, collect my season rewards, maybe tinker with my CAMP (i do enjoy decorating it a lot), and do a few events. It's not really fulfilling...it's the junk food of video gaming.
A few things do set it apart from other games though:
Yeah, I played it for a little bit, but it's MMO pabulum with a Fallout skin, written by people who don't have any understanding of what had been the lore of Fallout prior to 76. The moment to moment experience is... ok. But it's just ok, through and through.
Compared to Fallout 4 and the incredible mods that have been added to it since launch the gameplay is just sad and bad. Compared to New Vegas the writing has no heart or soul. But it brings in the money for Bethesda, so its what we get.
I'm currently playing the game and enjoy it, but de gustibus non disputandum.
The thing that sets it apart from its single-player brethren (which are better games, I agree) is that the nifty end-game gizmos actually require effort and knowledge of the game world to get.
Especially in FO4, it felt to me like it was too easy to become OP. It never felt like an achievement to get a fully kitted set of power armor with all the bells and whistles. The deathclaw fight in Concord is an emblematic example of what I'm talking about: barely an hour in to the game and you've already gotten a mostly complete power armor frame and minigun, and have put down one of the series's toughest and most iconic enemies. There's no build up, no actual effort involved. Sure, fusion cores aren't falling out of every locker and ammo can, but they aren't difficult to get by any stretch.
Say what you want about the quest structure in 76–and you probably won't be wrong–but getting some of the end-game whirligigs feels like an achievement in a way I rarely see in games of this type. At least since Skyrim, if not before. You might see it as grind, and that's fair, but it doesn't feel overly grindy to me. YMWV, of course.
One of the big problems with 76 (aside from the numerous bugs, which are still somehow in on the game after years) is that there's not much challenge anywhere that necessitates the end-game gear. You'll be way OP long before you get a jetpack for your X-01 armor for example, unless you opt for a bloodied build, in which case you probably won't be using PA anyway.
For what it's worth, I was a naysayer about the game from the moment the Todd announced it in his dopey-ass leather jacket. Never liked multiplayer games, and didn't see the point in making a Fallout MP game. Since they've added a fair bit and rejiggered some of the worse game elements, I've come around. The emphasis is much more on co-op than PvP (which is almost entirely absent now), which suits me fine. The community around the game is pretty warm and friendly, possibly because there are no gameplay advantages to being a dick. That alone isn't worth the price of admission, but it helps.
Whatever you do, for God's sake, don't try justifying your purchase by forcing yourself to play a game that doesn't work for you. They can't all capture your heart, and life's too short to be willingly subjecting yourself to something you hate.
The game really isn't for everyone. I play and enjoy it. There's main quests which aren't bad, side quests aren't the greatest, and daily and misc quests are generally not worth it.
Most of the game for most people is doing the events when the pop up, collecting, and exploring. I just hit level 200 and have done quite a bit of content, but my interest is beginning to wane a bit. I really enjoy building up my camp and finding new things to decorate it with. But that's pretty much.
There are mods. But they are more quality of life than new content.
The good bits (and I hestiate to call them that) are the main quest lines, though the earliest ones were written before the game had NPCs. The newest expansion has some quite talkative characters, but I still haven't found myself interested enough to finish the plot. I mostly play it as a "junk food" game that scratches a specific itch, that nice loop of wandering around, fighting enemies, collecting loot and junk, and turning it into a nice base.
There's a couple quality of life mods that improve the UI but not much more than that due to it's online nature, and some very annoying inventory limits that require a subscription to remove. I think I'd have a lot more sympathy for it's flaws and nice things to say about the bits I liked if it was a singleplayer game instead of a multiplayer game that puts most of it's effort into collecting money from it's whales.
I am in the same boat. I tried it (heck I bought it near launch, looking back should have attempted a refund). Played it for a short time and was thoroughly bored. I know it's in a better place now than at launch but IMHO it's just a "better boring". It's more fleshed out, more things to do, NPCs, etc but none of it gave me enjoyment enough to where i want to run back to it to keep playing