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Fallout 76: Entirely Online
Per BE3, Fallout 76 will be "entirely online" featuring dedicated servers with "dozens, not hundreds and not thousands" of players per server. T Howard reports that progress stays with your character and that death is not too impactful progress wise (not sure what this means).
Apparently, it is 4x the size of Fallout 4, and it does look really good. The gameplay looks good, VATS is not featured.
I am very nervous about it being online, as I almost always play stealth ranged in these games and I don't see that working well. I also play Fallout the most when my internet is down.
What does everyone else think about this?
Also worth mentioning that he specifically stated you can play it solo. Probably doesn't mean true offline, though, sadly.
This will probably make or break it for me. I vastly prefer single player games as, quite frankly, I don't have anyone to play online games with which really takes the fun out of a lot of online games for me. And I just cant get into a lot of MMO's where the world seems to mostly be populated by other players like me whose sole purpose is to be "The Hero". It just makes everything feel so arbitrary and empty.
It really doesn't matter as much as people pretend it does.. There will most likely be a mod or hack to play the game entirely offline a few weeks after release.
Eh, not really.
WoW today can be quite a single player experience if you want.. but if you are offline (let's say you go past the login screen) you'll only see tons on empty maps as the position of assets and NPC are on the server and sent to the client.
The same for Diablo 3 for example.
I like my singleplayer rpgs to stay singleplayer rpgs. I like my multiplayer games to know what they are.
I am quite concerned that Fallout 76 does not know what it is. Nobody is really saying what it is. They are weasel wording for all things. All audiences. All people.
This is a red flag to be honest. A game that does not know what it is will be a game that does not deliver to anyone. I anticipate that they are trying too hard to deliver to all audiences and will likely fail to deliver to any of them.
On a more personal level - Other than fighting games I like single player experiences. I suspect I will be giving this a miss, but I will stay informed on it. I could be entirely wrong, and I have a feeling BIGGGGG changes will occur during beta because it just won't work the way Bethesda WANT it to work.
You can't force players to be something they're not. Anyone that has played GTA online or DayZ knows exactly what will happen when you meet other players - they will all shoot you, all the time. There will be no other experience gained from other players unless you know them outside the game from communities. If Bethesda think they can deliver something that isn't just players shooting players then sure, I am open to something new and unique, I just don't think they can deliver that and I don't think that their language choice indicates a project that knows what it is properly. It is pretending to be like the other fallout games in order to appeal to existing fans, but in terms of gameplay it can't be, because multiplayer.
To me it's actually quite obvious what it is. It's a big studio taking on the popular indie 'Build and Survive' Genre. Rust has been very popular, but they bit off more than they can chew. Bethesda on the other hand already has decades of experience in building grand worlds. Now if they can successfully add Rust elements to that it's going to be amazing.
"You can't force players to be something they're not." If this statement were true, then the idea of "Game Design" would have no meaning. I get what you are saying, but you are nitpicking your games and are ignoring tons of games that have designed systems which do work in this way. I'm interested to see where this goes, I'm not sold on it yet, but I had to respond to your last paragraph after reading it twice.
This game know exactly what it is.
A single player with online persistence.
They are trying to sell the online part as a feature to play with others instead of what it is: an anti pirating measure.
See: Diablo 3
I don't mind it being online. But I hope the survival aspect is focused on. He said "softcore survival" and I'm worried that'll be the main thing that makes it not feel like a Fallout.
I don't associate "survival" with Fallout, personally. I actually kind of dislike the survival modes, I have always been more of a Wild Wasteland person, I like the zany humor moreso than the hardcore survival thing. That to me feels more like Metro or something.
I think he said that more to shut down thoughts of it being like permadeath in Rust or something. Fallout has never really been much of a survival game anyway, even with that mode turned on.
As someone who doesn't like Fallout it has me very interested.
Yeah I'm pretty disappointed it's not a true single player game, ideally they would have released a separate Fallout 'online' and kept the main game as it is. The lack of VATS and the over emphasis of base building is also a big turn off for me, think I'll just wait for Wasteland 3.
I loved Wasteland 2 so much, it really felt like a spiritual successor to fallout 2 as well as Wasteland. At least Fallout 76 is a side game, and not Fallout 5.
Ahh I assumed Fallout 76 was the next in the series, good to know I'll be able to get my Fallout fix some time in the future. Yeah I'm a massive fan of the Wasteland games, you might want to check out ATOM RPG
Will do, thanks!
I'm actually more excited about it now. I skipped fallout 4 entirely because after hundreds of hours between fallout 3, new vegas + all of the elder scrolls games I'm just completely burnt out on their style of single player RPGs. I tried ESO for a little bit but i'm just not at all into MMOs. This kind of sounds to me like a bit of Fallout meets Sea of Thieves meets FortNite. I'll almost certainly check it out if anybody else I know picks it up as well.
IIRC from last night, he said that the world is like 4x as big as fallout 4 (i might be mis-remembering that), which I think would put it roughly on par with the main map from PUBG. He also said you'd be with "dozens" of other players, which i assume means generally less than the 100 you'd get in a PUBG game. Assuming there is no battle-royal style mechanism for driving all of the players together, it seems very reasonable that you could play and never see anyone, or easily avoid other players if that's what you're into.
This is where I'm at, except I don't care for the multiplayer aspect either. I'll give them props for taking the series in a different direction than the last decade. They could keep cranking those things out and people would still love them. They're taking a risk and that's admirable. It still does not look like something I want to play.
A Bethesda game without access to the console? What will I do when I encounter one of 94,201,234 game-breaking bugs?
I want offline single player if single player exists, especially on Bethesda games.
I'm pretty worried about this one. To me, Fallout is all about that single player adventure in the wasteland. While I know people have been wanting to adventure with their friends for a while, I don't think this is what they asked for.
I think that the only way this will end up well, is if they build it like it's a normal Fallout game, but then let other people be in the world, which could be really fun. But that doesn't look like the way they're going. They said you could play it all solo, but it sounds like it's going to be that there will be things that you can't do solo, such as launching the nuke they showed off.
I feel like this will go the way ESO went, where people will play it on and off, but it won't be the massive success that previous games in the series were.
I have played all the Fallout games and love them. My biggest concern however with this one is that essentially if I want to play it I have to shell out over 100 bucks to buy both the game and a subscription to the PSNetwork to be able to play it solo or with friends. It would be great if they went with a preorder combo of Fallout 76 and a three month subscription for a modest cost.
Is it confirmed that PSN is required? Many online-only games do not require PSN to play. Elite Dangerous, for instance, doesn't require this.
They haven't said anything specifically, I am just anticipating it. If it does not require PSN I will most certainly buy it.
I'm curious to see what happens with this. The Division was one of the first games I bought that was completely online and played it as a single player game. It was... lacking. The story wasn't developed, but the gameplay was pretty great. More and more though, triple A games are trying to become social platforms because seemingly that drives extended user engagement (and as a result, more long term money). I'm fairly against this idea, multiplayer games that can be played Solo will always lack the cinematic experience and narrative depth that you'd find in games like the recent God of war.
Single player narratives are more of my draw nowadays, as the amount of free time I have decreases by the year.
I'm not against this. You can't expect them to make (more or less) quality Fallout games so quickly anyway, so by doing this, they're not taking anything away from you. They just wanted to explore a particular genre and the Fallout universe seemed like an appropriate setting. It could also have brought inspiration for some original ideas, not found in existing games. Or I'm just too optimistic.