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Fallout 76: Yay or Nay?
I've been seeing a lot of conflicting opinions on Fallout 76. Most of it seemingly boiling down to people being in favor of the experimentation by Bethesda, but against the lack of mod support or the always online component. I'm wondering: for those who are invested in the Fallout franchise, where do you stand on the idea of Fallout 76 and why?
I'll probably elaborate my own thoughts a little later in comments but for now I'm interested in reading other people's opinions.
I'm certainly not getting myself hyped up for it. I don't particularly trust Bethesda when it comes to experimentation and the always online throws up a big warning to me. If the reviews seem decent I'll give it a go but right now I am super skeptical about the entire project.
Honestly, this is my approach to nearly every game anymore, with a few exceptions. The hype machine is getting tiring, so now I try to find out a little info about the game to see if it sounds interesting, then wait until launch to watch some gameplay to see if it's worth buying.
Cyberpunk 2077 is the only game I have allowed myself to get even remotely hyped for because CD Projekt has a decent AAA track record so far.
Bethesda, on the other hand... Fallout 4 was a competent enough shooter but a pile of garbage as both a Fallout game and RPG so I am not terribly excited or hopeful about Fallout 76. :/
Fallout 76 sounds to me like the new Fallout Tactics—it takes place in the Fallout universe and has a Fallout aesthetic, but it's its story-telling and gameplay have nothing at all to do with the main games. I'm a fan of the main games because I like being immersed in the world, discovering its stories, exploring at my own pace, talking to to NPCs. Building bases and PvP are not something I'm interested in having in a Fallout game, or any game. I don't care for online play at all at this point.
Would've I preferred if they left the Fallout franchise alone instead of making an online survival game with its name? Probably, but after Fallout 4 I don't really have much hope for the next Bethesda Fallout game, whenever that might come. (I loved FO3 and I still play it from time to time, and yes, Fallout 3 is a pretty good Fallout game despite the anti-FO3 bandwagoning). I'm not against Bethesda trying out new things, and I get that they're looking for ways to keep the cash flowing while they work on Starfield, and then TESVI. So they're doing what every other studio is doing. It's probably going to sell pretty damn well, too.
So, for me, FO76 is a definite "nay". It focuses on things I don't care about, and offers none of the things I want. It's a Fallout game in name only. But I'm getting used to that, as I've found myself caring less and less about new games each year. The industry as a whole has been moving in a direction that I don't find particularly appealing. Bethesda is just following suit.
See, this is a sentiment I've seen quite a few times online now. And it's one I have some trouble understanding, because the game that's often referred back to, Fallout 3, was itself a departure from the standard form of previous Fallout games. Sure they share a setting, and some of the mechanics and core gameplay were translated into the new system but you can't deny the vast difference between a classic cRPG and what is effectively "Oblivion but with guns".
And the existence of FT to me cements that idea even more: that Fallout is a setting and not a rigidly defined series of games or principles (admittedly part of that is because I also looked into the existence of S.P.E.C.I.A.L. or GURPS as a standalone RPG system, so I might be a little biased towards an idea that never fully took root)
Absolutely, but I think the resulting experience was in line with previous games, even if the gameplay and some aspects of the setting and environment are very different. And I've personally never been a big fan of turn-based gameplay, so I enjoyed having a Fallout game without it. There are also differences in writing style—Bethesda's more goofy and juvenile brand of humor vs the absurdist, dark tone from the first two games comes to mind—or the "simplification" of dialogue, which is a direct result of doing away with voiceless characters and having to record thousands upon thousands of lines.
I think the "Oblivion with guns" meme as an argument is pretty lazy. If you remade Oblivion as a turn-based isometric RPG, would you end up with "Fallout but with magic and swords"? The games have a lot in common, because they're both open-world ARPGs developed by the same studio, using the same technology. But saying they're effectively the same is, in my opinion, pretty inaccurate.
The Fallout universe is a setting, sure, and even on that front Bethesda is making some very questionable moves with FO76, from what I've seen in the teasers. But to me Fallout is more than a post-apocalyptic game set in a retro-futuristic 1950s-inspired version of America. The sense of exploration and being lost in a hostile and strange world; an open-ended world where you can be any character you want; exploring the ruins of humankind, almost wiped out by its own technological hubris; seeing pockets of civilization holding on to the old ways or building new societies, while others just thrive in lawlessness and violence; unearthing personal stories of people who are long gone. To me, things like these are what make a Fallout game. This is why settlement building felt out of place in Fallout 4, or why it's main quest bored me to tears. My character is no longer whomever I want them to be, doing whatever I want—they're now a concerned parent looking for their kidnapped child, and a builder of shanty towns. Saying the execution of the main quest was "ham-fisted" is extremely generous. And settlement building, while fun at times, isn't what I play Fallout games for.
FO76, like Tactics in its day, is not what I think of when I think "Fallout". Tactics was a pretty decent game on its own, and 76 can certainly be a good game too, I'm not saying it'll be shit or anything. But I'm not interested in it because, under the familiar coating of retro-futurism and 1950s Americana, the core elements of a Fallout game seem to be missing or pushed to the side. That's a much bigger departure than going from turn-based to real-time combat.
I think it's going to come down to personal preference then. But I do want to briefly address another comment you made:
The criticism may have been repeated to death but I don't think the core idea is actually inaccurate. Fallout 3 and Oblivion are strikingly similar in many ways. The most egregious one being their combat systems.
The melee in both games is remarkably similar, and the guns in Fo3 are tied to this weird chance based-system instead of the more straightforward hitscan system of Fo4. I think Joseph Anderson said it best when he described Fo3's guns as "magical objects, with bullets functioning like oblivion's basic damage spells". And there's also the ways in which the enemy AI acts: in both games the AI's primary attack function seems to just be permanently approach the player at whatever distance their weapon/spell dictates and strafe around them at that distance or walk at them when the player moves away, with only a bare minimum of pathfinding to prevent them from getting stuck in terrain (something Skyrim also somewhat suffered from, but with slight improvements).
Also there's, to some degree, the fact that Fo3's dialog system leaned very heavily on Oblivion's, with characters staring at you for the duration of it, and the big improvement being that addition of head and eye movements to give less of a death glare issue.
The heart of the "Oblivion with guns" argument isn't one of equivalence, it's that the underlying systems of Fo3 and Oblivion are so similar you could probably import things from one game into the other wholesale and, technical issues aside, it wouldn't break the game. Because the mechanics wouldn't conflict with each other. Compared to, let's say, Mass effect 1 and 2. Where 2's bigger focus on movement and reliance on ammo clips just would not translate to 1's combat system which was based more around staying in position and waiting for your gun to cool down.
That's a weird criticism to throw when the original games were built around a chance-based system. If anything, the implementation in FO3 is less chance-based than that of the original games—hits are not randomly decided outside V.A.T.S., the only part where chance comes into play is in the damage calculation and critical hits—or that of New Vegas, which follows the original damage calculation formula much more closely. Hit boxes and collision detection are shit, which is probably where this "hits are chance-based" idea comes from—and they have been a very weak point of the Gamebryo/Creation engine from the start, that much is true. I agree that combat feels much more responsive and fluid in Fallout 4 than in 3. But like combat, all the other aspects you list are examples of what I was talking about in my previous comment when I said:
Collision detection in Oblivion was crap. It's a bit less crap in FO3, but still pretty crappy. Combat AI in Oblivion is laughably bad, and it's only a bit less laughably bad in FO3. But I don't recall combat in the original games being anything else than "hit them first, pray you don't miss, and manage your AP wisely". I certainly don't remember enemies using any sort of tactic that didn't involve planting themselves in front of you and hitting you.
Yeah, I know this is what the argument is at its core, and I agree with that. I don't see it as a negative however, and I definitely think it falls on the lazy side of criticism when dealing with Fallout 3. It focuses on the technical similarities of the games and ignores everything else. As a big fan of FO3 I can tell you there are a lot of aspects that could've been handled better, as well as a few instances where they messed up in a spectacular fashion. Fallout 3 is not a perfect game by any means, but I think it's much closer to the original titles than the vast majority of its critics are willing to admit, and that the similarities between it and Oblivion say mean very little when looking at the experience and not the under-the-hood aspect of the game.
That being said, I do agree that this is all personal preference ;)
Edit: Words.
Why do you feel like you have the right to designate what is and isn't a "true" Fallout game?
And for that matter, do you say the same about Fallout Shelter?
If you actually read my posts you'll notice they're filled with disclaimers that I'm merely stating my opinion, which is kind of expected in a thread where OP says they want to read other people's opinions. Nowhere did I make an attempt to "designate what is and isn't a 'true' Fallout game", nor did I present my opinion as anything more than that, so I'm not sure where you're going with your comment.
My comment does read a bit hostile, sorry about that. I was replying specifically to this:
I actually try to cut down on the amount of "I think", "I believe", "for me", etc. in my comments because they end up breaking the flow of my argument, and because I don't think it's necessary to add the disclaimer to every sentence when I'm very obviously (at least for me, but maybe it's not that clear for others) stating an opinion. So yeah, to me, based on what I like and have come to expect from Fallout games, 76 is a Fallout game in name only.
And yeah, I think Fallout Shelter falls under that same category. It's a fun game, I played it for a while when it came out, and it was amusing to see well-known characters from the main games show up now and again. But to me it's not a Fallout game in the way the main-series games are. It's a resource management mobile game with a Fallout aesthetic and characters.
Even though I've been a fan of the Fallout series since the first game (not Wasteland, just Fallout), I'm not interested in this game. I wouldn't have been happy with another game in the form of Fallout 4 either, but the multiplayer open world survival genre doesn't interest me. I'm not the person that has a band of friends to play games with. I prefer single player experiences. I admire that they're taking a risk and doing something different with this game, even if it's not for me.
I do find it a little funny that they're pitching it as a game that can be a single player experience too. All indications are that this is a game like Rust, with no NPCs. It seems that this means the single player experience is either joining a public server and ignoring or dealing with the rest of the assholes on that server, or playing solo on a private server solely populated by monsters. Neither of those options sound very appealing.
I get a feeling Bethesda won't ever deliver on the classic Fallout any more, Not after the runaway success of Fallout 3. Have you looked at the Wasteland reboots though?
This thread is the first time I've heard of the Wasteland games. The reboots look interesting, I think I may pick one up and see how it plays. Thanks for cluing me in to those!
I have! I kickstarted Wasteland 2 and I've kickstarted (or figged, or whatever) Wasteland 3.
Wasteland 2 is a game that I feel suffered from giving me early access. I played some of it at whatever pre-release state it was in when I got it. It was alright, but I put it down to wait for the full release. Full release came and I was playing something else. By the time I would've gotten around to it, they announced the director's cut, so then I was waiting for the director's cut. By the time that came out, I was playing something else and haven't really gotten back to it.
Now that I've been through a few crowdsourced games, I know better than to play those pre-release versions. I'll wait until I get the 1.0 version of Wasteland 3 and hope I can give it some proper time.
There's lots of conflicting opinions because the vast majority of them are based on hype, no one has many details about the game. That said lack of mods and online only is a huge red flag. As always I'll wait for the reviews and watch some gameplay before I purchase.
They said mods will launch after the game, which is how it worked for at least Skyrim and Fallout 4 as well, though in those cases people were creating mods before the official tools were launched, which won't be possible for Fallout76 since custom servers won't launch with it either.
I don't see how "online only" is a red flag so much as defining a characteristic of the game. This isn't a main entry, it's a multiplayer game, so of course it's online only.
It's about control. If it's online only, then it's highly probable that mods will be strictly regulated through a official mod workshop type environment, nothing that changes gameplay or the feel of the game will likely be available.
Fallout 4's official mod support has mods that make changes to gameplay. In fact I believe the only mods that aren't allowed are ones that are adult, or ones that use a script extender (dll injection).
In any case, I got the impression that custom servers would be user-hostable. If they are, given that the game uses the same Creation engine, I would be surprised if overhaul-level mods didn't work.
I'm interested in playing this game. I like how it's announced as a sort of MMO, but only a small amount of people (I think they said 12) will be in a game at most. Which, to me, makes sense. It's supposed to be a post apocalyptic wasteland not a place teeming with life. The Fallout landscapes were pretty fun to explore and from what I've see from the release video is it has a sort of monster hunter feel to it, with some survival mechanics. I think it will be fun when it comes out.
I don't know why people are upset about the online only component. The game is still playable solo and honestly everything is online anyway, but lets not get into that as that's worthy of it's own discussion all together. I'm just making a quick point on that here, nothing more.
Part of the concern is the "no NPCs, just other players" part. Most of the quests in Fallout/Elder Scrolls are delivered through NPCs that you interact with over the course of the game.
Removing that component dramatically changes the tools the devs have for delivering stories, and people are (IMO understandably) concerned about what that will do to the game, even if you have the option to play offline with no other players.
I think that, maybe, that's because this isn't a game intended to be about reading designer-written stories, but rather a canvas upon which to project your own player-written stories through your interactions with the systems and other players.
Absolutely, that seems to be the case, and it represents a significant change from the previous games in the franchise.
I'm interested to see Bethesda make the best version of that game they can, but a bit skeptical that it'll be a good match to what I look for in a Fallout game.
Thank you for that. I was not aware of the lack of NPCs in the game.
Still I think that could work. It means quests will likely activate when you find something. After all you are supposed to be one of the first people to move back outside. So I'm guessing/assuming that quests will be doled out via exploration maybe? Something maybe like when you discover a building of interest you get a "explore the _____ building" then while inside you find clues that lead to something else?
But that's all speculation on my part. I think the no NPC thing will make it more interesting. Bigger focus on exploration and doing whatever whenever.
All of the gameplay footage gave me a very similar feeling to LFD2 with the coop experience. I think if you have a group to play with this game will be fun but outside of that it remains to be seen.
I'm excited just to see how it goes. I understand there's a chance for it to be bad and that's fine. I'm mostly just happy they got their engine working with multi-player. Although some people won't be interested and Bethesda does need to make a traditional ass RPG since a significant portion of their older fan base was unhappy with the changes to fallout 4.
I did pre-order. Fallout is the only game series that I've ever pre-ordered, and I wanted the helmet. As for the game itself, it is not my ideal. However, it isn't Fallout 5, and I don't see this as a completely new generation. I can remember people modding Fallout 2 for co-op, so this doesn't come as a huge surprise for me. Unlike others, I do trust that Bethesda wants to make a good gaming experience. The fact that there is a beta is encouraging to me. I do not like multiplayer games, but I feel this will take an Elite: Dangerous approach of Solo Play vs Open Play. I'm definitely willing to give it a try.
I've been reading some more thoughts on this, and I wanted to share my own as well. But I don't really feel I can accurately do that outside of a long-form rant. So bear with me please as I try to divide this into multiple parts for the sake of legibility:
New Vegas and Skyrim ruined Fallout 4 for me
I've never played Fallout 4, and I'm not sure I ever will, barring critical curiosity. I'm part of the crowd for whom New Vegas and its DLC are the better iteration, not discounting Fallout 3 which I still think is a very good game.
The issue with Fallout 4 then became that it was clearly not going to be the same game (after all it wasn't going to be Obsidian at the helm) but what really killed it for me were the changes they showcased. It doubled down on things I didn't care for (voiced protagonist, dialog wheels, more action oriented gameplay, settlement building) and showed no signs of carrying over things I did care for. Like the interesting lore behind each faction and their relationships to each other, and more importantly: how you could use this in your interactions with them. Or how stats checks could give you vastly different game progression.
This also happened after I had fallen out of love with the "Bethesda game" after being underwhelmed by and giving up on Skyrim 80-odd hours into the game. I theorized that what I liked about Fo3 and NV and what both Bethesda and the fans wanted out of Bethesda games were not really the same things any more, and it seemed like Fallout 4's RPG elements were more or less just concessions made out of fear that fans of those systems would raise too much of a stink if they weren't there.
And while it may seem petty to say so: I think the somewhat lukewarm response Fo4 got shows I wasn't that far off.
Ok...But what does this have to do with Fallout 76?
What this leads up to is that, prior to knowing what Fallout 76 was going to be, I was not interested. I figured it would be more of what I had not cared about with Fo4. So imagine my surprise when I heard that this was actually going to be a kind of departure from that game as well, with comparisons like Rust or Ark being thrown around. And while I never went for those games, for reasons that would require a ginormous text post of it's own, I was intrigued for a very simple reason.
A PvP Survival game set in the Fallout universe makes perfect sense to me
I think the fact that Fallout Tactics and Fallout 3 are so different gameplay-wise from the original two Fallout games kind of makes Fallout less of a "game series" and more of a setting. A setting based on a couple of hooks provided by it's post-apocalyptic premise. And in this setting a survival game set in a time of the opening of the vaults makes sense to me because that is exactly what happened in-universe: people came out of the vaults and started figuring out how to build societies and settlements of their own.
And that's the part that has me intrigued in Fallout 76: the possibility not of reading about interesting raider or survivor settlements, but of building your own and creating your own stories through player interactions with either hostile or friendly players (although let's not kid ourselves, it's probably going to be hostile)
I didn't care about basebuilding or better gunplay in Fallout because to me the Fallout RPG wasn't about those things, but they fit in incredibly well in this setting: base building lets you give your own character to your settlement and better gunplay is necessary because ain't nobody gonna sit around for PvP cRPG battles.
Of course, this game mode does preclude the use of mods. Survival RPGs or other PvP games already struggle with cheaters or botters and allowing people to mod their games would likely only exacerbate that issue
But I'm not 100% on board
None of this is to say I think Fallout 76 will be a runaway success or that skepticism of the game is wrong. Bethesda does not have a stellar track record for actually making stable games (and the lack of mods means you won't get third party fixes), and presentations and talks by Todd Howard seem to indicate that the game itself might actually sort of hamstring itself by trying to retain elements from the RPG games to appease the fanbase (IMHO that would just make the experience more confusing and less polished overall)
But I do like the concept overall, and if it weren't for the concerns I raised above I think I would be genuinely hyped for this game.
Thanks for reading if you made it all the way to here. Would love to hear your thoughts.
For me, this is definitely a "wait and see." So much of it depends on how they balance a lot of the online/social rewards and interactions. If they find a way to curb griefing and have a fun endgame, I could see myself and a few friends playing this for quite a while. But if this is something more akin to GTA Online in Fallout, I'm not too interested. At least Todd Howard confirmed that mod support and private servers would be available later down the line which gives me some hope this could turn out okay.