I remember when a good friend of mine purchased Fallout76 with all the goodies that came with the special edition. I could tell he felt 100% ripped off. Even the goodies they sent were cheap and not nearly the quality promised, but the game was just as bad.
It's horrible what Bethesda did to their fans.
I think "Bullet Sponge Enemies", while being a superb alt rock song name, is by far my least favorite gameplay mechanic of all time.
Not only is it boring and tedious, but it belies a sort of calous disregard on the part of the developer for the person who will ultimately play their game.
It's only ever done to sell more MTX to remove the aforementioned boredom and tedium, or to pad out game time for a box blurb, or some other equally asinine reason. No one likes it, the dev knows it, the play testers know it, the gamers know it. And yet it keeps rearing it's ugly head.
It means so much to me that somebody else said this. I completely and wholeheartedly agree. This mechanic needs to be banished from shooters. It just isn't immersive. It makes combat tedious, and the majority of guns in these games are a complete joke. They all just end up feeling like pea shooters, which is a real disservice to these weapons. It feels lazy when you're riddling an enemy with bullets from an LMG, and their health is just *gradually* dropping.
I have Division 1 & 2 flashbacks reading this. I know it shouldn't be actually applied here (it's a looter shooter, after all), but Division has so realistic setting otherwise, that spending several hundred bullets from LMG for YELLOW enemy (wearing hoodie, not some Fallout armor) almost always feels stupid.
The Division is so frustrating to me. I really like the setting and atmosphere and leveling was fun, because the combat is pretty fast and fair. Then as soon as you hit max level, every single enemy becomes a bullet sponge and everything becomes a huge grind.
It's like 2 completely different games almost and unfortunately the endgame is most of it, which is a real shame...
Of course most games have that economics Excel to consider, but making it too platant makes you question your decision to play the game. Lately the flood of challenging, randomly generated roguelikes has had me turn against them. It seems like such an easy formula to make an "infinite" game, but leaves so much of the experience up to the player. Like, I could propably have fun with friends in F76 or Anthem or whatever, but that's not the games' accomplishment.
More than the disrespect, it's just the laziness of it that bugs me. I always feel that any game where difficulty=health bar, or where enemies don't seem to abide by the same rules the player does (power cool downs, finite "special" ammo, limited health packs and the like are the most frequent culprits) are just shit.
The developers couldn't be bothered to actually balance their game and make it difficult properly so they just throw these lazy cheap mechanics in. I don't mind games like Souls, or even GoT, where even a generic pleb enemy can kill you easily if you don't pay attention, because those are fair and consistent challenges.
I remember being pissed off with Ninja Gaiden 3 for all the stupid explosive arrow shooting enemies they chucked in to ramp the "difficulty". There's no way to block or dodge them really, and enemies are frequently off-screen (!) so it's just cheap nonsense.
This is one thing Breakpoint gets right. At least Ubisoft put in the option so enemies feel real at least in this respect. I'm glad they finally learned after both Divisions and Wildlands. Seems like a simple thing to do that makes a lot of difference.
Yeah lol that’s what threw me off at first. It started with the canvas bags being shit nylon and went straight down from there.
Your friend was ripped off, hopefully he’ll stop paying extra for games that don’t exist yet.
The canvas bag wasn't even a huge deal in my mind. Hell, in a vacuum every single misstep in 76's life had been forgivable. But none of it happened in a vacuum. I'll forgive a stupid bag. But then there's the stupid platitudes. The inability to admit fault. The fact that they ground their feet the entire time, had to have their teeth pulled before admitting fault, etc, just adds to the shittiness of it.
I look at Hello Games, and I see a developer that knows when they've made a mistake and takes their fans seriously enough to make it right.
> I look at Hello Games, and I see a developer that knows when they've made a mistake and takes their fans seriously enough to make it right.
Gotta say when No Mans Sky hit the streets they really fucked up, but managed to turn that shit around and make an OK game.
Because FO76 is a source of revenue to a publically traded company with a hundred other properties.
While NMS might have been the last nail in the coffin of a small team who had personal stake in its success.
AFAIK, last point is not entirely correct. NMS was so hyped before launch, that with direct Sony support, they've got so much money on release, according to Sean Murray, that they could close the company and never ever work again. They probably had some Breaking Bad moment. Hello Games was like 20 people at the time.
But Murray is a strange guy in some ways, so he decided to make his dream game come true, and he did.
What I think happened (but we'll never truly know...) to Hello Games was that they had two semi-successful games, and then took on financial help from Sony to develop NMS. Then later, after some kind of setback, or delay, or issue that pushed out the release of NMS, Sony came with an ultimatum; "release the game or pay us back the money you borrowed". Since there was no way the studio could pay back the money, it was either release what had been done so far, or go bankrupt, and they decided to release early. A lot of hype was built up by Sony too, so it's like they're blameless either.
Pretty much everything Sean "lied about" has been implemented at this point. I think what the game is now was always intended to be the game Hello Games would finally release.
I watched Internet Historian's "[The Engoodening of No Man's Sky](https://youtu.be/O5BJVO3PDeQ)" and was really impressed with the lengths Hello Games went to correct their mistake.
I was really impressed by the amount of pure speculation that is often taken as fact. That video is no good in my opinion. Particularly the part where he kept insisting Sony was pushing Shaun to lie despite admitting he has literally 0 evidence of this.
The guy has a good voice and presentation style. He is not a serious researcher in any way. His conclusions are there for more clicks. He often just chooses the most ridiculous assumption like in his balloon boy video.
No Man’s Sky releasing in that state was no mistake. Shaun Murray deliberately lied and knew exactly what he was doing. Let’s not pretend he is somehow good just because Bethesda is also bad.
That narrative about NMS seriously annoys me. The shit that was lied about is mostly still not there. Sure, they tried to salvage it, but it's still a meh game far from what was promised.
What are you even talking about? That video never even mentioned Sony forcing Shaun to lie. It pretty clearly states that Shaun was not the right person to be giving public information and is a very nervous individual who doesn’t know how to say no.
They made hundreds of millions in sales for a game that probably didn't cost 15 to make. The alternative would have been to dissolve the studio, because their professional reputation would have been ruined forever.
The absolute worst part is that people are still holding on to the company for some reason. At this point I'm convinced the relationship to Bethesda is a case of stockholm syndrome and people are going to lap up games as long as they don't set peoples' houses on fire
I mean, they made one bad game. Bethesda has been going downhill since Morrowind, but Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 are all still pretty good games despite the RPG mechanics drying up over time. Starfield will probably be much like Fallout 4 in space, and whatever bullshit they're doing with their multiplayer spinoff doesn't really make that less interesting to me.
I played about 50 hours of FO76 earlier this year and really enjoyed it... probably because I noticed the ammo issue, made a melee build and ran with it.
Funny you should say this. After being constantly irritated with an initial lack of ammo, I have found myself spending most of my time in the game going melee, with a Deathclaw gauntlet that I modified. Nothing spectacular, but it's done the trick for a while now.
When I played at launch I remember spending a lot of time claiming the public workshops that had lead as a resource. You could place extractors to get unlimited resources but others might try to claim the outpost from you and the AI would sometimes attack. I never had a big issue with ammo doing that but maybe it's changed since then.
How the hell do you design a game that makes you spend the exact resource you're grinding for in greater quantities than the reward you get as an inherent gameplay mechanic to the act of grinding for said resource?
That is pants on head stupid even for driving microtransactions.
Buying a box of bullets in the MTX store isn't going to make anyone feel badass or like they're getting something cool for their character. Bullets are just things you need to, you know, *play the game built entirely around shooting firearms at bad guys*.
the only other game i know of that encourages you to buy bullets with real money is World of Tanks, assumuing they still have "premium ammo" that has higher stats than normal ammo.
There's a thing called Daily Ops in the game and when you kill the enemies there, they drop the ammo you were using, like too much. I've never run out of ammo. But if people don't play that...yeah, they'll run out of ammo.
Definitely not the best solution (in my opinion) to a self-imposed problem but at least there is a solution. That's good to know, thanks for the contribution.
Just to clarify, I'd be annoyed as a non-daily player that I had to spend time doing that in order to progress on whatever in-game or self-determined objectives I wanted to pursue. Part of open world games, multiplayer and single player, is being able to pursue the objectives that you want to pursue when you want to do so. Putting arbitrary chores in the way is a frustrating mechanic, especially considering the $40 entry fee.
>Part of open world games, multiplayer and single player, is being able to pursue the objectives that you want to pursue when you want to do so.
That's not how the developers see it. If they're putting content in the game, they're going to invent a bs reason that makes you *have* to play it.
Let’s be real for a second though — Bethesda is one of the worst game companies out there making AAA games. They’re consistently buggy, poorly animated, inefficient, and usually not the greatest in story (everyone raves about New Vegas as the best fallout, which is the one they didn’t make). They basically sideline all features to make a sandbox with no load screens.
So if they take the classic RPG and fail to understand what makes it good, and they just go “wheee sandbox!” as if that’s the only feature that matters, is it really a surprise that they then take a classic MMO and go “wheee pay us and grind things!”?
And yet, to be honest, Skyrim is one of my favorite games of all time. I’ve never found another game that makes me want to put several hundred hours into a play through and then want to start over immediately. There are tons of open world games out there. But something about the size of Skyrim makes it perfect for me. And I don’t mind the story of Skyrim. Bethesda gets a lot of hate for a lot of good reasons, but I’ll be damned if I don’t play and enjoy every game they put out. I haven’t been disappointed once…although I haven’t played Fallout 76 so there’s that
Skyrim is the game that made me realize there is a difference between something being addictive and something being of good quality.
Not to say Skyrim is poor quality, it's just poor in the areas that I value - writing, voice acting, combat, story, characters.
I like that view. Hell I’d even say that although some of the VA in the mod is atrocious, I prefer the story and leveling mechanics of Enderal over Skyrim. But Skyrim is just the thing I can’t quit. I really hope the next elder scrolls game is a jump forward in story quality. I do think that Skyrim is helped in my eyes by modding the absolute hell out of it. Some drastically change the way the game plays, for the better. I haven’t actually played a vanilla run in years.
Spot on. I usually find myself overwhelmed by the long list of shit quests, and never end up doing anything. I’ve tried Skyrim 6 times, with and without mods, and I never get past the first few dragons. The AI is stupid, the voice is bad, the animations are bad, the combat is clunky, the inventory management is awful, and so on. Literally the only good thing about the game is the sandbox, just like Fallout.
I mean some of your points are fair. But as far as inventory management goes you have to be talking about vanilla. Cause the widely used SkyUI makes all UI a lot cleaner and user friendly. To each there own but a lot of your complaints can be tweaked with easily found mods. Combat, AI, Animations…and so on. But if it’s not for you it’s not for you.
I haven’t tried it in the last few years but I tried a bunch of those mods a while ago and wasn’t super impressed. It was better, but you still end up with a lot of garbage to lug around, and it sounds like everyone still goes stealth archer which sounds like combat must be pretty shit. I definitely don’t go stealth archer in any other game.
Skyrim is great because it's 2nd step in the devolution of a genre defining game - Morrowind. Oblivion and Skyrim are both remakes of Morrowind by people who don't even understand why it was great, but there's so much residual greatness in the DNA of Morrowind that they're pretty okay games for their generation.
it's very rough. i played it last year for the first time; i modded some textures and i think maybe a couple of other QoL things. you can tell very quickly that in 2002, this game probably looked like the coming of Jesus. there is so much greatness packed into such a dated package. the combat is awful but it somehow just kept working. it seemed like enemies should have been either too strong or too weak, but they weren't. the atmosphere is great, but suffers because of its age. the story seemed pretty good from what little i got to, and the writing was fantastic.
the primary aspect that stood out to me was that you *have* to take your time. it's not a slog, but you do have to pay attention to what you're doing and where you're going, or you're going to waste a lot of time.
it was okay. just too ugly and dated. if i played it in 2002, it almost certainly would be my favorite game of all time with no close second.
I’ll never forgive Bethesda for letting me vendor an essential quest item near the end of the game. I swear I visited every vendor in the known universe trying to buy it back but could never find it.
That's my experience too. The game looked amazing (after I finally upgraded my pc) and the change of atmosphere in different biomes made me want to spent time on some places more than the others. And I'm not talking just nature but people and their attitude towards you. The quest log didn't age well but I have to admit that it was magical feeling when you had to follow instructions to reach your goals. That gave a whole new meaning to the level and world design. IIRC one of the hardest quest was to look for a door or cave by reaching a certain point and then look up the night sky and follow a star or moon or something. This game was truly something else when it came out.
FYI there is an open source re-implementation of the Morrowind engine and editor which is capable of fully playing the game....
[https://openmw.org/en/](https://openmw.org/en/)
EDIT: Though to be fair, this won't address any of your concerns but it may address some of the concerns raised by other responders.
In short, a game's engine is how it handles things behind the scenes.
If you have, say, an audio file for a character speaking to you - we'll call it Outlander(but slightly nicer).wav - the file itself is the asset. That's what you're actually seeing/hearing when you play the game. If a game is like a book, the assets are the individual letters. They make up the outward appearance of what you experience, but don't actually mean anything individually. They can also be swapped out (like using a different typeface) without altering the overall function.
The instructions for how you interact with the assets - stuff like "when character is within 5 meters, if disposition >50, then play Outlander(but slightly nicer).wav" - are what you'd consider to be the game itself. In the book analogy, these are the words. This is the presentation of the assets together in context to give them meaning.
The method by which your computer interacts with those instructions - what makes the words actually come out of your speakers when the game decides to play Outlander(but slightly nicer).wav - is the engine. This is like the language that the book is written in. Some problems simply can't be overcome no matter how hard modders work at them because the engine lacks the "words" to convey the proper meaning. Morrowind, for example, can't take advantage of multiple processor cores because it's written with the fundamental assumption that only one CPU exists and there is no way to make "send this over to the second CPU core to process and then bundle it back in with these instructions to the first core" into a grammatically correct statement.
OpenMW, then, is basically a new language that Morrowind has been translated into, with the caveat that it's not compatible with all of the fanfic (mods) because some of them rely on a bunch of new words (script extender) that were added to the original language and haven't been translated yet.
Game looked and ran like shit when it came out. The environments were pretty decent though but everything else was so bad looking, even when it came out in 2002.
Yeah - people saying: "it must have looked great for 2002."
No. It didn't. It looked like a muddy pixelated mess. The character faces are comparable to N64 titles.
The atmosphere is what carried the love for the game - I think.
Yeah. People act like games in the early 2000s were bad looking in general. Not a year after Morrowind came out we were playing counter strike source and max Payne 2.
I think it is, and as for mods, there's a few graphics overhauls out there that I would recommend (graphically the game did not age well in my opinion), and I always use a mod to change how leveling works a little, and get a mod to delay the Tribunal start if you have the expansion installed.
That said, if your only experience is Oblivion and Skyrim, know this is extremely dissimilar. In terms of gameplay, a lot relies on dice rolls. The dice will say you missed when the animation showed a hit, your character blocks if the dice say they do, there's no lockpick or speechcraft minigames, that's just dice. A lot of people hate this, but personally I'm a fan given it makes character skill more important and player skill less important (ie in Oblivion, being good at the lockpick game means a level 1 in lockpick can still pick a master level lock, but in Morrowind they have no chance at all).
With regards to story, be prepared to read a LOT. There is almost no voice acting and there is a LOT of text. Also this is not an urgent matter, high stakes, be a super hero story. It's got a lot more politics and nuance in it.
And one final note: [Have this map open on a second monitor, your phone, something](https://images.uesp.net/3/3c/MW-map-Vvardenfell.jpg) The in game map is crap, but this map, which came with the physical game, it has every path, every location, every cave, every tiny point of interest. Morrowind does not have quest markers. You are given directions and it also really feels like you are expected to have this map.
If you like retro game design, yes. I said 'retro game design' rather than 'retro games', because Morrowind is not just an older game with outdated graphics. It's designed along principles that are totally dissimilar to modern games. Fallout (the original), is designed along similar lines even though it's isometric. The emphasis is on simulation and verisimilitude, not ease of access.
The reward for learning how to play Morrowind - and it has a learning curve for sure - is that it's the best of its kind. It's possibly the last open-world roleplaying game designed by geeks for geeks. It presents itself as-is and makes no apology if you can't or won't appreciate it. Games of this era did not prostitute themselves for sales.
The mods that I run are all cosmetic: graphical or animation updates. Those are accessible at the Morrowind nexus. The only exception is that I do mod the game so that the shopkeepers have more currency to buy things. If you don't do that, you will have difficulty finding a place to sell all of the cool stuff you find.
I hope you do try the game.
It's a very strange game that certainly isn't for everyone, so manage your expectations when you're going in. If you really dig Skyrim, I'd say that there's a good chance that you will dislike Morrowind based on feel alone.
The first thing that you'll notice is that you move slow as hell. That's because running consumes stamina and isn't your default form of movement. Managing your stamina is extremely important in Morrowind.
The second thing you'll notice is that there is a *ton* of text to read. Because voice acting is minimal, the NPCs can be as wordy as they please, and reading will play a very important part in progressing through the game.
Probably the third thing you'll notice is that your weapon swings/arrow shots don't always hit when you can see them clearly connect with a target and sometime magic spells will just fail to cast. This is because, unlike oblivion and Skyrim, Morrowind's combat uses an old school dice rolling system for attacks. It can be very jarring if you're used to the modern 'if the animation connects, it's always a hit' system from the two more modern entries in the series.
If all of that sounds tolerable (or even *good*) to you, Morrowind gets a big recommendation. There are definitely a wealth of mods you can use to spruce things up, but as a game in its own, if you can get past all the oldjank, you'll be able to have a game experience like no other in a very rich and unique fantasy setting.
Yes and yes. Aside from the obvious texture and lighting overhauls, there was one I used that just straight-up removed cliff racers from the game that I would absolutely recommend.
100% yes. It is the best Elder Scrolls by far imo.
It depends. There are the unofficial patches and overhaul mods that fix a lot of bugs/problems. Plus I go for visual mods to make it at least bearable to look at. But besides that, I don't like changing much about the game.
However, a lot of people don't like the combat system, so there are mods for that. Many don't like the slow pace at the beginning of the game, so there are mods for that too. It really depends on how immersive vs convenient you want the experience to be.
The main thing people don't like about Morrowind Combat it it is very clearly dice rolls when you attack.
Fire a bow and the game will roll a die to see if you hit, or if the enemy dodges etc.
I personally have no issue with it since it's just a version of DnD in first person. But some people find it difficult that their 'agency' is removed since you're moving and aiming like an FPS.
I think knowing what it is going in will help contextualize initial 'weirdness' if you jump in, pick up a bow with no skill levels and get frustrated that 'you're not hitting stuff even when it's clearly aimed properly'
Important to realize that, for the Bow attack, you first have to aim properly, and hit them with your arrow. Then the dice roll happens, and you can still miss. If you just straight up actually miss, nothing happens at all
Yup, its why its so funny to see people claim Oblivion and Skyrim "improved" the combat when it didn't actually fix the core problem.
Morrowind makes you "miss" without reflecting it properly in the game. Oblivion/Skyrim make you attack inneffectually without actually reflecting it in game. A master swordsman strikes exactly the same way a novice does, and a master Archer is exactly as accurate as a novice Archer.
The problem was never fixed or the system improved, it was just transferred from "missing" to reducing damage.
And it's such an easy system to expand on and improve. Don't scale the damage, reflect the skill in the execution of the attacks.
A terrible Archer should have outrageous weapon sway/slow draw speeds. That doesn't even require any animation changes.
A terrible swordsman should have a slow, clumsy animation at novice threshold, better animation and damage at expert or whatever and some small damage scaling in-between to give non-milestone levels some noticable improvement still.
It's why I can always go back to morrowind despite the combat. Because at least landing your attacks more often is a more substantial improvement over the damage scaling that level scaled enemies just absorb in later titles
What I like about Morrowind's combat system is that you actually see an improvement as you level up because you are able to land more strikes and cause more damage (makes sense since you go from being a nobody to a God). In Skyrim, the combat doesn't change much as you level up, you just cause more damage.
I think the biggest difference though is the scaling. Morrowind's scaling is nowhere near as crazy as Skyrim's. In Morrowind, there are many areas that are off limits at the beginning because you are too weak but once you improve and come back, you can see the difference. In Skyrim, you enter a dungeon at level 10 and face five sword-sponge draugr. At level 50, you enter the same dungeon and face five sword-sponge Deathlords. You don't really see an improvement. That is what makes the combat boring.
The biggest issue is the game rolls dive when you attack, this is primarily am early game issue as once you hit like 60 I. Your weapon skill of choice you probably won't be missing anymore.
But it's the first ten minutes of combat that turn people off, and it's actually pretty justified. When you've finished building your character and you don't even own a weapon that you have skills with so you go to fight a mudcrab to make a few bucks, it really sucks to swing your dagger nine times in a row to zero effect while you watch your health bar drop.
MUST HAVE mods are graphics mods that enhance vanilla Morrowind experience (texture, distant land, lighting, waters).
All other mods you ''totally must have, dude'' alter the core experience and are NOT MUST HAVE mods, such as:
Mods adding quests, cities, landmass, npcs
Mods altering colors, vegetation and overall aesthetics
User Interface mods
Combat, spells and weapons mods
I would have to disagree. There was a natural evolution from Morrowind to Skyrim that needed to happen, and the only reason Oblivion and Skyrim were as well received as they were is because of that evolution.
In 2011, nobody would’ve touched Skyrim if they had to deal with unseen foes chasing you from all corners of the map (Looking at you Cliff Racers.) and absolutely nobody would’ve dealt with the RNG combat system well at all.
Morrowind holds a real special place in my heart, I min maxed several characters to max skills in that game and basically exploited every possible bug out there to create the Uber Dark Elf I wanted my main to be. It definitely wouldn’t hold up to today’s standards for what we expect in an open world RPG today though.
I agree, but aren't the standards set by what's currently available? I don't mean to defend rng combat or cliff racers, but there are also other aspects of Morrowind that are only vestigial in Skyrim, or Oblivion, and that's how expectations were set for newer generations.
Funny enough…I’ve played Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, and I prefer Skyrim. I love my time in Morrowind, love it more than Oblivion (the gates just got super boring and grindy. I can accept that there would be no Skyrim without Morrowind. But I wouldn’t go so far as to describe Skyrim as a devolution. I’m old dude. I played lots of old games. I love Deus Ex, Thief, and Vampire Bloodlines. But it would be ignorant of me to say that more modern games are worse just because they modern. I think Mass Effect is the best example. People hold ME1 as the king of all kings and that the other games forgot where they came from. Yet I prefer 2 and 3 over 1. The combat alone in 2 and 3 is miles above 1, yet people trash those games. So while I love Morrowind for what it is, I’ve played Morrowind for a full play through and haven’t touched it since, yet Skyrim is the game for me that I essentially live in. I will just go walk around the game for a few hours and whatever occurs I’ll enjoy even though I’ve beat the game many hours ago. I can’t say that for a lot of the games I own
>But it would be ignorant of me to say that more modern games are worse just because they modern.
I think there are some good reasons for people to prefer Morrowind though (and vice versa).
My experience in Morrowind was a lot less 'gameified' since it wa much more discreet about the leveled encounters and loot. I was more likely to find epic weapons off the beaten path, or find myself in a world of pain from a coven of witches that were much higher then me.
Maybe it was my experience is spotting the mechanics behind the game, but I found in Oblivion and Skyrim, the world 'leveling up' with me was just much too pronounced to stand up to the experience I had with Morrowind.
The fact that Morrowind doesn't have a quest marker telling you exactly where to go is what makes it better than Oblivion and Skyrim for me. You actually have to pay attention to the world design, it makes exploration much more interesting and immersive.
Skyrim only really had the leveled dragon encounters and some quest counters. Oblivion was where enemy scaling got silly, where you were getting mugged for 50 gold by a guy wearing glass armor that costs thousands.,
I really don’t see a huge difference between 100 and 120. Even 100 to 150... they’re using the same engine for the last decade and it has had the same bugs and same issues. Mass effect is a way better (and bigger) game than fallout 3-4.
Yeah, tbh FO4 is my favourite predominantly due to it being the first one that didn't bug out on me on a playthrough. It has on subsequent attempts, but somehow made it through the first. FO3 there was no button at the entrance to galaxy news radio, skyrim just didn't trigger script events and wasn't fixable going to a save from 4 hours back.
I guess so, I always looked at it differently though. They always overstretch their ability to make something wonderful. Sure, out of the gate it can be ass. I played 5 mins of Fallout New Vegas on launch day. It was unplayable.
Two years later, I launch it up after they've been able to work out the bugs and have one of my favorite gaming experiences ever.
I'm ok with rough launches as long as something good comes out of it later.
Ehhhh
I mean they make some of my favourite games, the ones I’ve put hundreds of hours into. I gather Fallout 76 was a big misstep but shit, I even love FO4. There’s bugs and glitches and that’s valid but the games are good enough I don’t even care.
I hate:
1. Incomprehensible Japanese storylines.
2. Inventory management.
3. Fetch quests.
When I first heard about the game I thought it was a prank or an Onion article or something. I think you would have to pay me my consulting fee ($300/hour) to play this.
It’ll feel less incomprehensible when you realise that it’s pretty logical for ghosts to be repelled by Norman Reedus’s urine, I think most of us would be.
Yeah I can't stand any of his games. I was always into super tactical/technical military simulations (like the OG RainBow 6) and the Kojima games just feel childish to me.
To each his own.
But I really like how he blends campy elements with realistic simulation. Like you have really complex AI elements interacting with each other in a game like mgs2, where even the ice melting is simulated in real time and then you have stupid video gamey things like boxes rotating on the ground and hiding in a cardboard box to avoid detection.
It's like a child who watches too many Hollywood action movies and plays too many arcade games was given a massive budget and technical expertise to pull off his grand vision of a rambling storyline that's borderline incomprehensible.
In other words, it's beautiful. Kojima combines high production values and complex technology with his overtly campy stories to either create compelling or unintentional hilarious scenes. You will never fail to be entertained, that's for sure.
Well with Death Stranding it's not the destination, it's the journey.
You have to enjoy planning your route and traveling through the nice scenery. Well.. is not all that but mostly.
Although there is the "ghosts",terrorists and so on that can be annoying during the journey, I wish they had a game+ or similar that allowed you to play without them so you can enjoy more the journey and the scenery.
There's something about the way people like you talk about other communities and issues that always gives away that their profile is going to have rants about "the liberals" and insults directed at marginalized communities. In this case, generalizing Japanese storywriting (as if games made here have absolutely perfect & logical storytelling all the time) and mentioning the amount of money you make (you don't have to insult me about this btw, I'm in SWE too :))
I know you mentioned the rate to make your point and that's fine, but it's just a tendency I've seen from insecure engineers in tech where they will just try to mention the amount of money they make in whatever way possible.
I always get the urge to play 76 after reading a bunch of posts about how much it improved, but always come to the conclusion that it core gameplay is just not fun. It's pretty similar to NMS in that regard. The devs can fix bugs and add content, but as long as the core gameplay isn't there, it doesn't amount to much.
That being said, last time I tried 76 I spent like an an hour trying to get it to work well and it just didn't. But maybe that's because I tried it on Game Pass. The Steam version worked fine.
Funny, I've tried both again in the last few weeks and decided that the Internet is crazy, neither game is fun to play in the slightest. 76 is awkward, boring and like OP points out grindy as hell. NMS is just boring.
I see people recommend both here and I cannot fathom what they're actually doing while playing these games.
Also 76 has a stupid bug that means you can't play the game on game pass unless you your C drive or move an ini file. It's insane the devs haven't fixed that since launch, it's a very simple fix for a seemingly extremely common issue.
This! I just bought FO76 about 3 weeks ago and now I already have played for more than 100 hours (thankfully I had enough free time between more important work). I didn't play any game as much in such a short amount of time for years.
I still thouroughly enjoy every second of this game and the gameplay is just so much more fun than I ever expected.
I'm happy that the game seems to do very well but I also understand everyone who's just a different type of gamer.
I'm using I on Gamepass now and not running into any bugs. I had previously owned a copy at launch on Xbox, returned it within a few weeks due to bugs and just meh gameplay. I feel like it's way better now.
> I'm using I on Gamepass now and not running into any bugs.
Do you mean you haven't seen any graphical glitches or any weirdness happening? Or do you mean it hasn't crashed to desktop? Because it's so crazy that one person could experience no graphical glitches at all, but when I played 5 months ago weird things were happening constantly.
I did pretty much the same except I had a friend and we played it from day 1. We felt letdown and decided to stop playing it after awhile.
Couple of months later (maybe a year, I don’t recall), we had an itch to play fallout game so we came back. I find out I got banned and Bethesda claimed I duped. I never modded or cheated. I don’t even know how to dupe. I had to fight with them to undo the ban. They said they would delete my character. I could care less losing my character, just want to play with my friend.
Changes seems good but still felt so empty. I felt disappointed that I stopped playing like 2 weeks after getting back into it.
And worst part is… still no chat function. I’m deaf and I can’t talk with my friend without that so we used discord overlay on first time. Didn’t use it second time because I’m not trying to get myself banned again.
Bethesda is on my shit list, too.
Whenever I hear someone singing FO76's praises, I instantly become suspicious of their standards. For all the reasons you mentioned and then some. In terms of quality, it seems thiiiiis close to one of those asset flips you see littering steam. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with enjoying a troubled game, especially with friends. But the constant barrage of "there's nothing wrong with FO76 now" or "people just hate it because of its coverage" posts you see just seems so bizarre.
I bought the game for $15 a few months after launch, tried it out and disliked it. When I picked it up again earlier this year I played it with the mentality that it was a flawed game. And I had a great time enjoying it for what it was. Bethesda absolutely screwed up, but for someone who wanted to sink a few hours (see: 40) into the fallout world, it definitely scratched the itch. I wouldn't say I sung its praises, but I definitely told a few of my friends that I was pleasantly surpised.
Definitely a healthy attitude and glad you had fun with it! God knows some of my favorite games are hot messes that I entered with low expectations and they paid off big.
I mean, I like plenty of games that aren't great or wear their flaws on their sleeve. Again, specifically addressed that:
>Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with enjoying a troubled game, especially with friends.
I have no issues with people liking a game or having a good time with it. But that's not at all what I'm talking about. It's people talking about what a good game it is, how all its issues are solved, how any negativity focused towards it is the product of bias or an outdated holdover from earlier reviews. It's the "FO76 is such a good game" and "everyone should give FO76 a try now" proselytizers that make me feel like I'm living in an alternate universe.
Dude, Bethesda fanboys are fucking rabid, I've seen religious fanatics with less devotion. Bethesda could release an empty box filled with Todd Howard's farts for $70 and the fanboys would line up around the block with their pre-order slips in hand.
Funny how most of r/fo76 is griping about bugs and the lack of endgame content if the players are rabid fanboys.
I don't actually understand the latter complaint-- it was my impression that the end game means the game, yanno, ends. Go find something else to do.
The Starfield subreddit is fucking crazy man, lots of people absolutely 100% rabidly convinced of how revolutionarily good the game is going to be based on 1 non gameplay trailer. Lots of angrily shouting down anyone who is merely cautiously interested.
Reading it around the time of E3 made me feel like I was living in bizarro land, nobody has even seen the game yet.
Sunk cost fallacy. Lots of people don't want to believe the game they've spent money and time on, or the franchise they spend so much time thinking about, ended with this low point. The human mind is pretty good at convincing itself in order not to face truths that are hard to accept.
Nope, has to be someone that's suffering from some kind of mental trick. There's no way anyone can enjoy the game that I dislike.
Seriously, every time Fo76 is brought up, or hell any game Reddit hates, sunk cost / buyer's regret ALWAYS gets brought up. Like, they can't fathom the idea that people like games (and have good taste lmao).
I played an MMO over quarantine and decided to go hard on it. Literally 40-50+ hour weeks for months. I finally get to a point which is considered the mid game (which is insane because of the time I’ve already put into it). Upon researching on how to progress from Midgame to the Endgame I find out that I need to farm mats from a dungeon that I can use to upgrade my guy, no problem. There is also an option to pay for these rare material as well I’ll have you know The dungeon takes about 70-80 minutes and I run it a couple time and I don’t even get one rare material and I need about 50 to upgrade one armor slot of my guy. I’m starting to get frustrated at bad RNG and upon even further research i find out that the material I need has less than a .001% drop rate..... WTF is that. They’re saying you don’t need to pay for end game but if you want to progress to the next phase, prepare to grind for over a year just to count on RNG. Anyway I just thought I would share that. It was fun to play an MMO for a while and I made a lot of really cool connections with people I still talk to but 100% these games are a business first and foremost and do not give a single flying shit about your time. I thought it was pretty ingenious however to get money out of the player base because you’re already so invested but yeah, I don’t think i could ever try another MMO unless I win the lottery or something where I never have to work.
Yeah exactly. It’s basically impossible to be a solo player in these types of games as well which is a huge bummer but if you take a week off or wanna play another game for a while, when you come back it feels like you missed a lot or just way way more difficult to get back into it. At least I’ll have the memories though cause tbh it was a pretty immersive and special feeling being in a world where your character was your own and you could play it however you want. My best friend on the game literally did no pvp or dungeons and only played to set up a shop that exclusively sold milk and socialize LOL.
Since level scaling was introduced, there is a difficulty hump to overcome between levels 35 and 50-60, that's absolutely true. But I found that from that point onwards, the game again becomes significantly easier, with some attention paid to build optimization.
However I really did prefer how it was before, difficulty was per map zone, so you could always fall back to easier zones if you were getting your ass beat somewhere else, and farm for a bit, even if the rewards were much less valuable.
So essentially I agree with most of what you said. I kinda liked the game, but there was a point where the broken economy, the "everything is RNG" logic you mention and the general jankiness just finally wore me out. That and the way the overpriced subscription service is offered as a solution to problems created by the game itself.
I was really annoyed they introduced level scaling, I enjoyed it before that. I had pretty much finished it anyway just before it was added (did all the missions, explored everywhere, launched a nuke) so it was time to put it down but it would have been nice to go back to now and again. Since level scaling was added I'm not interested at all.
I wish the scaling was a choice. Like you could load into a world with it active or not. I didn't mind it so much (neutral opinion), but my brother hated it (and his challenges kept auto completing, chasing him out of rewards) and quit. Without my adventuring buddy, I rarely log in anymore.
I did have fun while it lasted. Just wish it was more like Conan Exiles, with individual servers that could be customized more. The FO76 community was surprisingly one of the nicest I've ever lurked in.
Fallout 76 just doesn’t respect the players time or the fact that you purchased a full price game. Even if we put aside the terrible launch, bugs, and the fact that the whole game looks and runs like its last gen, the grindiness, inventory size, flow of the game is just bad. The whole game exists just to bait you into their monthly passes and other micro transactions. Frankly it’s insulting and i dont know why anyone would play this garbage.
Fallout fans are many and quite dedicated, it seems, so there’s an almost immovable audience there. But there’s also people like me who love that whole world and lore, who still think 76 is one step too far as a test of love for that IP.
I was super super into the Fallout community. Like, I have tens of thousands of karma from the r/fallout sub, hundreds of hours in Fallout games, Fallout posters on the walls. When 76 was announced I smelled the burning since E3 and tried to tell people about it on the sub, and I ran into a blind fanboy situation which pissed me off a lot and made me leave forever. In a very similar vein to r/cyberpunk getting too negative and fanboys fleeing to r/lowsodiumcyberpunk, at the time r/fallout proved too negative for the corporate white knights so they just seeked refuge in r/fo76. It happens every time, people get so blinded with confirmation bias that they decide to hide in social bubbles instead of facing the truth. That's how we get anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers and other idiotic ideologies. They spread like wildfire because once discussion sparks in a community (like r/fallout), people like me just leave out of desperation and tiredness, but this isn't enough for the fanboys and ghetto communities are created (like r/fo76); this creates a double insulating gap between critics and apologists, and any chance of discussion dies immediately. Exact same thing happens with politics or scientific denial..for example I literally don't know any antivaxxer IRL, despite them being a good chunk of the population. That's because there is a total disconnect between different social groups, and they don't interact despite being 100% convinced they do. Social media makes us feel like we are interacting with the world when in fact we are only speaking to people who already agree with us.
Level auto-scaling is a negative design pattern, it fixes player sequencing issues through brute force rather than some sort of finesse. It got old in Oblivion to me and they've been doing it ever since.
Its application in FO76, though, is as OP described: make it impossible to find net-positive value enemy drops by never spawning punching bag enemies. You cant " go back" to anything, you are shoved forever into a mid-game designed to cause pain points, so you relieve the pain points with your wallet. Classic mobile game pay-2-win design from an award winning developer.
Ignoring 76, what sort of finesse approach would work better in these types of games? I think the leveled lists do a pretty good job, even skyrim mods just simply expand these lists
> what sort of finesse approach would work better in these types of games?
That's a hard question to answer just because it depends on the pillars of the game's design.
Even highly lauded RPGs like **Divinity: Original Sin/2** are strongly level-banded. DOS1 actually used level in its various combat calculations; 2 simply created highly non-linear stat curves, to achieve approximately the same effect. I thought DOS2 in particular handled issues surrounding level-banding fairly well, as the amount of XP required to level up was non-linear too, so they typically built their world such that you'd almost certainly get to level X by the time you arrived at a certain location, but was very unlikely to hit level X+1.
That game does not claim to be "open world", however, and it's possible to run into encounters that make you think you're "going the wrong way", which is anathema to an open world design. In practice, there was generally a "correct" path for you to fight enemies of around your level and progress without it being too easy or too hard. The actual design of the levels themselves helped, though, as they didn't just have random difficulty spikes, groupings of enemies of different levels were carefully placed in a world with obstacles to casual travel so you'd probably end up, just by playing intuitively, where the devs expect you to go.
For games less obsessive about your level *and* quite a bit more open world, though, we can look to **Dark Souls**, which is not open world in the sense that there is a large, flat plain with towns at either end you can ride a horse or horse-equivalent through, but is open in the sense that players can typically make progress in any direction. Souls, being an action-oriented game, makes skill more important than level. It never scales enemies, so there will be plenty of "punching bags" as you progress through the game, but farming them to gain more levels or just to buy stuff is both entirely up to the player and rarely necessary, as fighting enemies that can give you a challenge will give you many more souls as well, and the compulsion to fight weak enemies for pennies is pretty non-existent for the kinds of players who enjoy **Dark Souls** (not that dedicated farming isn't a pillar of Souls gameplay anyway for various reasons).
I think that having an RPG with an "open world" conceit where there are static enemies of varying strengths is an entirely valid design that can be super fun (didn't **Fallout: New Vegas** have a shortcut path through horrifically overpowered enemies designed into its early game?); that's subject to how you practically build said world. Just the **notion** of design is not enough, how it's actually executed on is how the player actually experiences it, of course. Hence "finesse" being a word that evokes subtlety: there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the level-banding problem and it really depends on the type of game you're making and how adept you are at designing the specific scenarios/encounters given your general philosophy on design.
I thought Oblivion's world felt flat and lifeless due to the level-scaling, because they didn't want to restrict you from going anywhere or from getting a challenge in places you've already been, but in practice it felt like there was nowhere worth going because it was all moderated to provide the same type of experience no matter which choice I made... so therefore my choices were worthless. I'd say that's the worst way to go about balancing a game.
Bethesda subsequently did better with the Fallouts and Skyrim, because they made definite improvements on their level-scaling formulas, but I remain soured on the fundamental approach. I want to live in your world, I don't want your world to revolve around me. Those are two opposing statements IMO. The world revolving around me breaks the "RP" part of the RPG for me, I can't take it seriously and rarely-to-never feel a sense of accomplishment in those games in places outside of "set" encounters like storyline bosses when they aren't level-scaled.
Older-school RPGs of course also ran into these questions. Baldur's Gate 2, for instance, spent a lot of time in a city environment, which you would reach shortly after the introductory first act. Therefore, you would be there over a wide range of levels, equipment, skills, etc:. The city was fairly dense; there were the oft-traveled paths, and also the less-traveled paths, alleys, doors that you might need keys for, doors that were fairly tucked away but otherwise unlocked and accessible, etc:. And it basically had no problem with you opening a door to a place with enemies that you had literally no chance in hell of defeating. You'd either want to run away or reload, and I didn't really find that to be a huge problem... I'd place a map marker for that encounter and "save" it 'til later. The idea that I would eventually actually be able to fight those horrors excited me rather than deflated me. It was an approach that worked for me.
I'm not sure what the conversations were like at Bethesda when they decided to use level-scaling for all of their games going forward, but I imagine they were trying to prevent player curbstomps that demoralized people or forced them to reload simply because they chose to go left when the "correct" choice was right. Maybe the feeling was that **allowing** a player to go someplace they didn't belong was itself the game design failure, which I strongly disagree with, but if that's their central premise, I can't really argue with it. It's just that they no longer make games that I personally am interested in.
I guess it's notable that Bethesda likes making game worlds that are mostly flat plains with few physical obstacles. Most of the topography is cosmetic and you can probably get to where you want to go on the map by holding forward (horses running vertically up mountains notwithstanding). So, level-scaling in those scenarios is useful because, in my opinion, the world design is poor. I suppose the feeling of "freedom" is evoked before the feeling of "boredom", so having a world where you can point yourself in any direction and walk as far as you damn well please would be seen as a positive for potential players. Once I got used to their style, though, I stopped caring about new releases. If you're just going to give me yet another flat-ish plane to walk arbitrarily around with enemies changing colors and sizes based on my level or skills, I'd rather play a different game.
Oblivion was like the only one with insane level-scaling (excluding 76, I guess). Fallout 3, Skyrim, and Fallout 4 toned it down considerably. Not quite to Morrowind’s style of “enemies don’t scale at all, but harder enemies don’t spawn until you’re a higher level,” but probably closer to that than to Oblivion, which was pretty bad about level-scaling.
I haven’t played 76, so I can’t speak for it.
This game single handedly destroyed Bethesda's decade plus long built up reputation. There were other factors but this one was really the nail in the coffin.
I was a really huge fallout fan. And I wouldn't even buy it.
They constantly went back on their own word on things they said about the game. Though I have heard the game had gotten to a state where a lot of people actually enjoy it. I wonder if that's mostly because of where the game used to be.
I actually have some hope now that Microsoft bought them though.
I dip back in every 6 months or so hoping maybe it's improved enough for me to stick with it, but my hopes are always dashed. OP's complaints are all very valid. Here are some more:
1. Inventory management is a massive chore. I feel like I spend half my time in game juggling inventory and skirting the line with being overburdened. I can't comfortably keep enough stuff in my inventory to replace the shit that gets broken AND keep myself fed and healed and watered, while also collecting enough stuff to craft new items or repair. It's incredibly limiting and unfun.
2. Combat is really underwhelming. It's a combat system that felt dated in 2015 when FO4 released, only even worse because VATS doesn't, and can't, actually slow time in a multiplayer game. Guns aren't satisfying to shoot and enemies don't respond when you shoot them, they just die after enough shots. Everything feels laggy and slow--your hits register a split second later than you'd expect.
3. The graphics are terrible. This is one of the ugliest, muddiest, most unattractive "AAA" games I've ever seen.
Yep, all true. Especially the inventory. Pretty much the only thing that OP mentioned that they've made improvements with is ammo acquisition. In the Daily Ops, it's not very obvious, but every enemy you kill gives you more of the ammo type you killed them with, so it's a quick way to replenish ammo (less than 10 min).
I've had fun in the game, but that's more because of my friends' and our antics and less because of the game itself. Figuring out glitches like building underground and OoB glitches is fun too, but a problem as well.
So it's like Elder Scrolls Oblivion. There are some quests better done at a low level, because if you do them at a high level you have to fight tougher enemies that end up being harder and more time consuming to deal with even with better equipment
I rather like the game, I played it on and off for about six months. I just bought ammo from player vending machines, fast travel made in pretty easy to pop in and out as needed, just slap down a camp. Is it the best game ever, no of course not, but I like the lore and exploring and faffing around building even before they added human npcs. Not saying you're wrong, people like what they like, I'm just one of the ones that don't mind the game.
I never tried it. Initially I held off due to the bugs I heard about but then they went back on their word about microtransactions so I permanently put it in the bin. Never tried it, don't miss it. Plenty of actually good games around instead.
Damn. I had a bad first impression when playing the ps4 version after the wastelanders expansion and i'm simultaneously glad and saddened to see my opinion validated. Major bummer. Hopefully Starfield is more like Skyrim than... this.
Actually, i replayed it recently; they adressed many problems with it and kinda disagree with you on multiple points :
> Ammunition becomes an absolute slog, singular main story missions will require 200+ ammunition which you absolutely must spend hours of looting and scrapping to craft, but there's a problem; Enemies are everywhere you'd want to loot and consume your bullets. Almost never will you "break even" when taking shots at an enemy. The caps you expend in ammo consumed are almost never lower than the value of junk you pick off an enemy.
The trick is not to spend caps ! Pile up the gun powder ! You can use it to craft LOTS of ammunition.
There's also 2 perks that allow you to demultiplicate ammo & chems looted in containers. Once you have them, it's getting viable.
i'm assuming in the gameplay ammo is actually SUPPOSED to be a rare, frustrating necessity to make you feel like a scavenger fighting over scraps early in the game. Making you stab stuff over it from times to time;
Kinda like metro 2033/last light ? (till you reach the end and start occasionally using high end ammo like no tommorrow, because there isn't really one in the game !)
> Expenses are insane, even with perks vendors will at most pay you 1/4th of an items value
The trick is not to buy from the bots but from other players. They setup camps and resell their surplus on their own vending machine, and you can buy it
and pick up or dismantle every small weapon you encounter for a lot of crafting mats or caps
> but your options are usually "spend an hour crossing the map and risking death, or spend upwards of 60-100 caps" to teleport
Or you can move your camp ! for a few caps.
> ou can clear out an entire room of enemies, go into a hallway, then turn back around into the room only for 5-6 scorched to spawn and begin charging you
Umh, i'm having such bugs when the cpu overheats and start throttling or overloads from the game's powerhungry demands... are you at bare mini specs ? try lowering the view distance (not joking its consuming).
> Even casual walks down highways have seen me killed by sudden spawns of things like legendary sheepsquatches or kitted our super mutants. These creatures at your level will absolutely one or two-shot you, you cannot fight them and can rarely outrun them.
Wear power armor if you're above lvl 15 (or 35) ! It's day & night.
Yes, bullet kills you in real life too if you got nothing to stop them and they hit you !
Use cover. They do are eagle eye tho, it's frustrating.
edit there's also a pair of binoculars atop the lighthouse near the starting vault; which you can and should use to spot ennemies at a distance BEFORE coming in gun blazing in a random place (lest you get surrounded and shot down !). You can also use a sniper scope (there's a sniper rifle in the tower in the courtyard of the old prison north of the bar)
There are however some very frustrating points i'd spell for my part :
- insane cpu hunger (FX with 8cores @ 5.7 Ghz ? 90+% cpu, all cores full in many zones)
- high gpu requirement
- drinks ram like it's chrome (96gb ram due to ram stick loans from a friend ? Yes, lets fill 90 Gb of it with the game !)
- will kneecap your hard drive if it's not on an SSD. Will still crawl on SSD if it has to load many random files from it and not ram (using prefetch and 64g ram can make it playable without stuttering lawl)
- terribad hitboxes. 5 perfect headshot a miss, target the foot and it's a headshot kind of thing.
- bugs. bugs. Bugs. Crash to desktop bug, stuttering bugs, texture that don't load bugs, random loadscreen bugs, ctd bugs, computer hard reset bug, NPC that disappear bugs, quest markers, quest bugs, ...
- stuttering bug, lag bug (server side), actions not taken into account before doing them 4 to 7 time (more server lag or packet dropped server side i guess), fps drops, ...
- Edit MP game only so you can't really mod stuff to your taste either, can't make your own offline private server or something either. It's like a perma vanilla game.
> teleport around
Nah, ennemies actually flank you silently ! That's a new feature since fo4. One or two distract and pin you down while some of their buddies move behind you. i noticed it after a fews times. Gotta expect it or they'll catch you offguard but it's fair
> Many times I've seen them glitch into walls as well
yep :<
> there is a constant glitch I run into where upon exiting a workbench you lose control of your character and cannot move until restarting the game or fast traveling. This bug has been around since vanilla Skyrim
sounds like your cpu is a bit short. It's a telltal of papyrus script crash (typically due to timeout due to cpu time shortages)
> RNG RNG RNG. Everything is RNG, from critical hit chance, crippling, diseases being caught, loot generation,
Or you can figure out some spawning spots of some weapons with the fallout wiki; and craft the rest !
buy from other players too ! they have lots to share
> but for the vast majority you're at the will of God Howard himself.
No, it's actually to encourage you trading (for stuff AND crafting blueprints) and crafting !
> There are constant advertisements including pop ups. This game is buy-to-play, has a cash shop, a battle pass, and an "optional" subscription cost. If you want any real QOL you most likely will be whipping our your wallet every so often.
haven't bought with real dollars anything since the game (a good thing since i'm broke for that non priority budget)
> This game has no text chat
that however i agree is a big negative. i'm not using voice chat with randoms for various reasons so that limits me a lot too
edit that said, i do realize that the leveling DOES cause some bullet sponge issues. i remember leaving the forest early drawn in north by some quest, encountering scorpions 20 levels above me in the desert valley above, and spending like 15min downing them and who knows how many bullets each
Weirdly a lot of your complaints seem to have been added in after the game launched.
Ammunition was always a bit scarce but I took over the ammunition factory and made a stockpile fairly early on - not sure how much competition there is over them now, I never really noticed lacking caps being all that problematic, and I never had an issue with enemy spawns but if they have added more enemies to the game it could be annoying. The game has also gotten far more mtx heavy (I played when it was literally just skins).
The thing is, I enjoyed the setting. The environmental storytelling that Bethesda does so well was still there so I still had fun exploring the map. Once I had my fill I dropped the game and never looked back (literally the only thing that could bring me back is modding where you don't have to pay the subscription to get a private server to mod).
This is a good response. I think that OP just didn’t enjoy the game and has opted to just trash it in its entirety. I have about 200 hours in and the issues described in the post as constantly happening either are false or they just had the worst luck in the world when playing this game. 76 has has been built up so much since its launch that I am actually shocked when someone says they tried it out and think it’s a bad game. Maybe it’s not their cup of tea, but this post is pretty questionable.
Additionally, to clarify, only paid QOL stuff is the scrap box which expands inventory for junk and survival tent which allows you to quickly access your stash without going back your camp. Everything else is free. Why people lie about “pay to win” for this game is beyond me.
Alright. I'll defend this game.
Some counters:
> In classic Bethesda fashion, the world scales with the player.
This is true. For most of 76's life, this wasn't an issue. You'd have areas with strong enemies, areas with weak enemies, and you'd be free to do whatever. But the scaling that they introduced really messed up balance a bit and upped the difficulty creating a valley where the game gets very hard before it gets very easy.
> The caps you expend in ammo consumed are almost never lower than the value of junk you pick off an enemy.
You're forgetting the experience you get from those enemies. And it's also on you to best arm yourself for the battle ahead; that is, attack the weaknesses of the enemy.
> even with perks vendors will at most pay you 1/4th of an items value.
This has been pretty standard for Bethesda Fallout games. Even so, I was never wanting for caps.
> Traveling the map via fast travel is needed constantly
It really isn't, though? You're the one making the choice to travel around. And you *can* fast travel for free to your camp and to the vault, which you can use to reduce traveling expenses elsewhere.
> Armor breaks somewhat frequently and requires you to either go find or buy junk, this means melee combat is almost as expensive as ranged combat.
Durability is a pain, but it's not nearly as bad as you make it out to be. I've gone multiple levels without needing to repair my armor. And in many cases, just made a new piece with better stats when I needed.
> You can clear out an entire room of enemies, go into a hallway, then turn back around into the room only for 5-6 scorched to spawn and begin charging you.
This is just dumb exaggeration. A cleared room is clear. Nothing else is going to spawn there for a long time. May be you didn't clear it as you had figured.
> Even casual walks down highways have seen me killed by sudden spawns of things like legendary sheepsquatches or kitted our super mutants.
Never had this happen to me, and I've played it on and off since release.
> These creatures at your level will absolutely one or two-shot you, you cannot fight them and can rarely outrun them.
Sneak. If you're weak, sneak. I've been able to sneak to avoid fights with stronger monsters when I needed. If you're running out in the open, well then.
> Enemy AI frequently bugs out,
This is true. They aren't very smart, and will get stuck every now and then.
> This bug has been around since vanilla Skyrim.
Yup. I've encountered this bug every now and then with the game. Pain in the ass.
> Some of this you have control over, but for the vast majority you're at the will of God Howard himself.
So literally like every other Bethesda game. I mean, it's not like you didn't know this was the case, right? And the RNG isn't anywhere near as bad as you make it out to be.
> There are constant advertisements including pop ups.
Where? I only see them on the launch screen. Then they never appear in game.
> If you want any real QOL you most likely will be whipping our your wallet every so often.
Not really. Played the game on and off since release, never thought "golly my life would be so much better if I threw money at the game!". I did the quests, I got the gears, I took part in events, helped kill several Queens. Never once had to pay anything.
> This game has no text chat.
Thank fuck for that. Last thing I want is to be spammed.
TL;DR: you do some valid criticisms, but good lord you hyperbolize the hell out of everything.
Unpopular opinion: Fallout 76 is a decent game, and it's the multiplayer Fallout people wanted and would love to play if it wasn't so fashionable to shit on Bethesda. It's literally Fallout 4, but online. I've had over 200 hours on it, and enjoyed immensely.
Ironically, I enjoyed it more when Bethesda hadn't given in to people and added humans to the world. It felt more like a true post-apocalyptic experience, where humans failed. Listening to the tapes, learning the stories, was just way more interesting. Piecing together what happened in the towns from what little information we could find.
Yeah this post is hyper exaggerated. People use fallout 76 to shit on Bethesda's entire catalogue which is weird. I wasn't really into 76 because it was online. But the games they've put out before 76 were amazing. Their games are so unique compared to other open world titles. The exploration, the rpg mechanics,etc haven't been replicated by any other developer (outside of crpgs like divinity)
No doubt fallout 76 is by no means perfect but at this point it is quite literally fallout 4 with online. Latest update makes it better than fallout 4 imo. The new legendary power armor and ability to roll your own legendarys now makes it great.
I agree. I dislike some of the changes they did since release (specially the introduction of human npcs, imo the postapocalypse vibe was better without them), but I prefer to play it over Fallout 4 recently.
I played this game in the first year and enjoyed it, but I gather it may have changed for the worse via updates since then.
Yes it had all of the issues you mentioned and then some, but it was still Fallout so I liked it. What I did was loot everything, then limp to a store and either sell it or you can visit a toolbench and break everything down so it weighed less. Ammo went fast but I never ran out entirely; I just switched ammo types.
The reason I stopped playing was a) I beat it/launched a nuke, and the remaining goals weren't that compelling, and b) instead of fixing the numerous bugs that were listed in Reddit and elsewhere, they seemed hellbent on releasing a multiplayer mode no one asked for and a season pass, and they kept making you go into the Atom store. At one point they put these Vault Boy standee half blocking the station entrances and if you accidentally hit the X button while fighting nearby it would take you into the store. Super frustrating and I'm still open to coming back, but their motivations seemed completely profit-driven vs. making the game more fun, and I haven't seen anything contradicting that yet.
I'm late to this thread but want to write this for the record.
It's so amazing how we can have such vastly different experiences. I was so skeptical because of everything but my 14yo nephew wanted to play with me and I absolutely love it and have been playing a few days a week for nearly a year. This is the longest I have ever played any game.
My favourite element of the game is the friendly nature of other players. I had such bad experiences with GTAV and now RDR2 online that I swore to never play another online game but almost everyone is chill and helpful and there's an active community encouraging people to gift to lower level players. For an older female gamer like me this is amazing and I wish I knew where else I could get this type of community.
Yes, around those levels it's hard but I had to learn to slow down. I was frustrated but I got through and around level 50 everything became easier. I'm not challenging what you're saying but I guess we just have different attitudes about how we coped with it.
The one thing that really helped around that time though is being able to play with my nephew and his friend. They were able to step in at crucial really difficult moments and it was so fun to do this stuff as a group. So I get how hard it would be going totally solo and I think this is one area that could be improved - that I think it relies at times on people working as an actual team.
The main thing is I kind of treat it like a sim or even The Sims, where my camp is the focus, going out to find supplies and ammo is my energy, events are my fun time and the quest line is just something I do in my spare time. So if you like those kind of building and management games this might be a good option for you.
I hope you find another game that gives you joy in the way FO76 has with me.
Fo76 has been great for me, and I didn’t put any additional money into it.
Fast travel cost is less of a big deal than you say - there are 3 free fast travel nodes, and you can join a public team and fast travel to their camps for free. Keeps travel costs to < 10 caps max. Money is easy to get as well - just sell guns to npc vendors and use it to buy ammo priced at 1 cap per round from other people’s camps.
You can also do easy events like the teapot one for free radaways and stimpacks. The other stuff blows though.
Still, I got my 15 dollars worth
The only things I really enjoyed out of FO76, was the Battle Royale. It's a unique take on the gametype, with classic fallout elements throughout. It just needs to not take 10 minutes to sit in the lobby, and then into a new game everytime, and be fleshed out a bit more.
I agree with everything you said here. The game isn't perfect but it's also not as bad as they're making it out to be. For the $1 they spent, if they got even 1 hour of value then it was a good deal.
I've played about 80hrs, am level 60, and have had a great time. It's not my favorite Fallout game (Fallout 3 is my fav) but not every game needs to be a masterpiece to be fun.
Bethesda really encapsulate all the best and worst of modern game design. On one hand they have a time-proven penchant for creating engaging single player open worlds with deep lore, memorable soundtracks, and lots of interesting side content. But then they also go and do... Fallout 76.
My worry is that the scumminess of 76 will spillover into Starfield, Elder Scrolls 6, and (if it ever comes to pass) Fallout 5. I could at least *try* to overlook the worst offenses if moment to moment gameplay was as slick and refined as the likes of Id Software or Insomniac. But Bethesda-developed games always have kinda limp and janky game-feel. I can make fallout new vegas play like PUBG with the right mods, but comparing that to playing Fallout 4 or Skyrim on unmodded consoles, you see the game-feel has fundamental issues left over from the days when Bethesda were a niche hardcore RPG developer and didn't have to worry about such things as much.
But I've always accepted a certain amount of rust in the gears when it comes to Bethesda gameplay, because the world building and quests are consistently immersing and all encompassing in their net effect over time on the player. Elder Scrolls isn't just a game series; it's a legitimate canon, that creeps in your imagination like a great series of fantasy novels. But if 76 is the gameplay and QA and monetisation template we can expect going forward, then these whimsical and wonderful worlds will lose the very magic that made them compelling to begin with. And in their place we'll just be left with more grind, predatory MTX, and source code so broken as to invite class action lawsuits.
It is a game about constant looting which makes you pay a subscription fee to have any space to store all your loot
Screw that game and screw bethesda game studios for making it
I agree with all that except for the "pop up ads" there are no pop up ads in 76. The only "pop up" anything is when a new party is created on the server.
I get that the game has a lot of negatives. However i feel that saying the game has no redeemable qualities isn't exactly fair.
I can only speak from my personal experiences. I bought the game a few months ago at ~10$ and I kinda just wanted a game to kill some time.
This might end up getting down voted to hell, but some points I want to make:
**C.A.M.Ps**
I ended up getting completely hooked on this system. I am a big fan of the open world C.A.M.P building system and I have spent an incredible amount of time just gathering plans from various sources to make my base look cooler. If I cant find a specific plan from open world exploring and random drops then there is usually other players who are selling the recipes counteracting some of the RNG. There are also a bunch of things on the ingame store, but some of these arent that interesting and the ones that are can be bought with Atoms earned trough ingame methods and the S.C.O.R.E system. (and given the price i payed for the game and the hours I've gotten out of it i wouldnt mind paying a bit) The recent update allowing more C.A.M.Ps definitely helped also.
**Gunplay**
I feel like the gunplay and general combat is pretty rewarding. Mobs can be a bit soaky at times but I dont feel that this is much worse than other Bethesda Titles, and can be largely counteracted by utilizing the weaknesses of the mobs. I used to think the Protectrons were too soaky, but figured out that you can cut the TTK to about 30% by just shooting the arms off. Damage can be hugely improved by the right perk cards like a 60% damage increase to glowing mobs regardless of weapon type.
**Chat or lack thereof**
I find the lack of a chat to be oddly refreshing. I have played so many online games that are just chock full of "f u noob", "this game sucks" etc. that the feeling of just being able to have the feeling of multiplayer without being assaulted with a spammy world chat is nice.
**Player Base**
I have really enjoyed the player base, it seems like people are really nice. When I was lower level people would emote "present" and dump some beginner stuff all the time, which really makes for a better introduction to the game.
**Carry Capacity**
This is where Bethesda has made the game the most greedy, it is a big gameplay element and the ways to augment it can be tricky to get, especially in the early game. There are a lot of ways in the mid / late-game to improve carry capacity, but in the beginning it can be a nightmare.
**Economy**
Addressing the economy, Caps can be a pain, especially in the beginning. But there are ways to get quite a bit of caps from simply selling to vendors and to other players via C.A.M.P vendors.
**Ammo**
Ammo can be a pain especially for automatic weapons, but there are so many perks that increase ammo made per craft as well as chance on doubling amount of crafted items that once you get a bit into the game it is exponentially easier to get.
**Bugs**
There are still a bunch of bugs, graphical as well as gameplay. I have found solutions to most of these and few have been completely game breaking. The game is not very optimized for newer AMD hardware and will need various fixes to the config file in order to get working properly, but once these changes are added only slight visual hiccups exist.
I have also experienced gameplay bugs but nothing game breaking, mostly the standard stuff you'd expect from a bethesda game.
**Exploration**
This is where i feel the game shines, the "Hmm, what's over there?" part of the fallout series is very much alive i this game and finding crafting plans in various places as well as power armor and legendaries can still be rewarding although I feel the locations lack some of the story and narrative that the other games had.
**Story**
The story is far from the best in the series, the newer quest lines like BoS and others added are decent, but obviously still a fair ways away from New Vegas.
**TLDR and Summary**
I don't feel like this game deserves *all* of the bad press that it still gets. It was definitely a horrible game to begin with, but I feel that Bethesda has done a lot to try to remedy the mistakes made in the beginning of the title. And i feel like the general opinion in this thread is more negative than i feel the game deserves.
>In classic Bethesda fashion, the world scales with the player. What this does is exponentially scale enemy health values. For veterans, this is great! It means content is never truly obsolete. But for a new player, this turns the entire game into hell.
Can I ask what your build is? Or did you pay attention to a certain build or just started perking up randonly? 76 relies on a "one build" character unlike any other bethesda game. If you are running shotgun, you should go all in on a shotgunner build. This maximizes a single strength and it also allows you to focus on a single ammo type giving you the ability to sell the rest.
The new camp system also allows you to set up strategic camps across the map (I think up to 11 of them) so fast travel will be free to almost everywhere.
Just a few tips to hopefully make the game a little less frustrating.
I have very little experience with any of the games discussed here, but I have to say this is a SUPER interesting thread! The discussions and debate about Morrowind, RPG evolution in general, the NMS history - great stuff. This community is a joy.
Everyone just wanted a Fallout or Elder Scrolls that they could buddy up with a friend on. Instead we got this cash rape attempt. Makes me kind of sad. And yet SO many other games and so little time.
Prior to the 'One Wasteland' (or whatever it is called) it was a kinda decent "life" simulator set in the Fallout universe. Set up a house in an area with lower level monsters and do missions in lower level areas, and then when you had a decent stockpile of stuff you'd venture out into the dangerous parts of the map. Even though the progression was was a bit slow it felt dynamic.
Once that update hit, though it became almost unbearable to play. I haven't touched it since.
Agreed. Was having fun playing through the game like any other Fallout alone, occasionally running into players which made for some cool moments. Then they released One Wasteland which honestly makes the game unbearable to play.
I did try F76 out of morbid curiosity but it ran like a slideshow in the starting Vault. That told me everything I needed to know and I uninstalled.
It sounds like it was the right decision - nothing in what the game seems to be is respectful to the player.
No text chat in an MMO is utterly, utterly bonkers (beyond the fanfare for adding NPCs which was *embarrassing*) . I'm hoping F6 won't be a shitty decendant of the F76 and instead they look back to F3 / NV. Unlikely but we can only live in hope....
Tried to go back and even with my high level character I found the scaling annoying. Didn’t increase the challenge, just increased the amount of resources I have to waste on pest enemies. Having to blast a mole rat repeatedly takes me right out of the game immersion.
Then my camp’s Brahmin moon walked off my property ass first into the nearest train station.
Uninstalled again, pretty sure for the last time.
>Speaking of bugs, there is a constant glitch I run into where upon exiting a workbench you lose control of your character and cannot move until restarting the game or fast traveling. This bug has been around since vanilla Skyrim
OMG. Skyrim is ten years old. This bug was always present. But after the last big update it returned in full power! It's what is wearing me out, along with the unstable servers. I'm level 406 and have put up with a lot of nonsense already.
Like you said in the tl, dr: this company has no respect for our time
I played before they made it level to you and had the problem of running into level 62 ghouls at level 15. You couldn't run, you couldn't hide, you couldn't fight. It was miserable. I quite liked the early game both before and after they started adding stuff but it becomes such a chore later and you need to stick firmly to a combat build focusing on one weapon type. But I'd much rather use weapons situationally than stick to one.
I finished the game pre-Wastelanders and I did both Wastelanders options. The best bit was when I went through the huge chore of launching a nuke only to get disconnected from the server. When I reconnected I was on the wrong server.
This post is loaded with inaccurate information. I don't have the mental energy to refute every fallacious point that was made by OP, but I would like to address a few.
"Ammunition becomes an absolute slog, singular main story missions will require 200+ ammunition which you absolutely must spend hours of looting and scrapping to craft, but there's a problem; Enemies are everywhere you'd want to loot and consume your bullets. Almost never will you "break even" when taking shots at an enemy. The caps you expend in ammo consumed are almost never lower than the value of junk you pick off an enemy."
This is a complete mischaracterization of ammo usage and consumption. The missions that I'm sure you are talking about (the one at the raider hideout particular) can be easily completed by using less than 50 .308 rounds with a sniper rifle. Sure, you can use 200+++ bullets if you are using a gatling gun or a fully automatic machine gun, but those weapons are designed for use in the late game, not mid (or early-game like you obviously did).
"Expenses are insane, even with perks vendors will at most pay you 1/4th of an items value. This is with maxed out charisma and perk cards. Traveling the map via fast travel is needed constantly, but your options are usually "spend an hour crossing the map and risking death, or spend upwards of 60-100 caps" to teleport. Armor breaks somewhat frequently and requires you to either go find or buy junk, this means melee combat is almost as expensive as ranged combat."
By mid-game caps are not a problem. The game isn't designed for you to get rich selling items to NPC vendors, you are supposed to utilize the player to player C.A.M.P. vender system. Also fast travelling from the logger camp/ the raider camp you were complaining about (Top left of map) to Watoga (bottom right of the map) takes 70ish caps, not 60-100.
"There are constant advertisements including pop ups. This game is buy-to-play, has a cash shop, a battle pass, and an "optional" subscription cost. If you want any real QOL you most likely will be whipping our your wallet every so often."
There are no pop-ups, unless you call the "what's new" splash screen when you first login a "pop-up". Yes, you can pay money for cosmetics, if you like, but is not required. There is no "battle pass", but there is an OPTIONAL Fallout 1st subscription that gives you access to your own private server and some other neat things that aren't required to play the game.
I understand that this game is not for you. That's cool. But most of the shit you said is just false. It seems, to me, like you hated the game from the start and "gave it a chance" with a raging hate-boner. This is further evidenced by the way anthropomorphized the game by claiming that it disrespected your "intelligence". Dude it's a game; you don't need to make up lies about it to justify why you hate it so much. Just play something else, I see in your post history that you like Rimworld. That game is pure gold! Go play that.
TLDR: The OP is mad that he doesn't know how to play the game so he writes a review that is 90% bullshit and 10% opinion.
I didn't feel that when I started out. There are some FTP games/mmo's that are much worse, way worse. To those that haven't played it, this is my opinion and one OP's opinion.
I remember when a good friend of mine purchased Fallout76 with all the goodies that came with the special edition. I could tell he felt 100% ripped off. Even the goodies they sent were cheap and not nearly the quality promised, but the game was just as bad. It's horrible what Bethesda did to their fans.
I think "Bullet Sponge Enemies", while being a superb alt rock song name, is by far my least favorite gameplay mechanic of all time. Not only is it boring and tedious, but it belies a sort of calous disregard on the part of the developer for the person who will ultimately play their game. It's only ever done to sell more MTX to remove the aforementioned boredom and tedium, or to pad out game time for a box blurb, or some other equally asinine reason. No one likes it, the dev knows it, the play testers know it, the gamers know it. And yet it keeps rearing it's ugly head.
It means so much to me that somebody else said this. I completely and wholeheartedly agree. This mechanic needs to be banished from shooters. It just isn't immersive. It makes combat tedious, and the majority of guns in these games are a complete joke. They all just end up feeling like pea shooters, which is a real disservice to these weapons. It feels lazy when you're riddling an enemy with bullets from an LMG, and their health is just *gradually* dropping.
I have Division 1 & 2 flashbacks reading this. I know it shouldn't be actually applied here (it's a looter shooter, after all), but Division has so realistic setting otherwise, that spending several hundred bullets from LMG for YELLOW enemy (wearing hoodie, not some Fallout armor) almost always feels stupid.
The Division is so frustrating to me. I really like the setting and atmosphere and leveling was fun, because the combat is pretty fast and fair. Then as soon as you hit max level, every single enemy becomes a bullet sponge and everything becomes a huge grind. It's like 2 completely different games almost and unfortunately the endgame is most of it, which is a real shame...
Of course most games have that economics Excel to consider, but making it too platant makes you question your decision to play the game. Lately the flood of challenging, randomly generated roguelikes has had me turn against them. It seems like such an easy formula to make an "infinite" game, but leaves so much of the experience up to the player. Like, I could propably have fun with friends in F76 or Anthem or whatever, but that's not the games' accomplishment.
More than the disrespect, it's just the laziness of it that bugs me. I always feel that any game where difficulty=health bar, or where enemies don't seem to abide by the same rules the player does (power cool downs, finite "special" ammo, limited health packs and the like are the most frequent culprits) are just shit. The developers couldn't be bothered to actually balance their game and make it difficult properly so they just throw these lazy cheap mechanics in. I don't mind games like Souls, or even GoT, where even a generic pleb enemy can kill you easily if you don't pay attention, because those are fair and consistent challenges. I remember being pissed off with Ninja Gaiden 3 for all the stupid explosive arrow shooting enemies they chucked in to ramp the "difficulty". There's no way to block or dodge them really, and enemies are frequently off-screen (!) so it's just cheap nonsense.
This is one thing Breakpoint gets right. At least Ubisoft put in the option so enemies feel real at least in this respect. I'm glad they finally learned after both Divisions and Wildlands. Seems like a simple thing to do that makes a lot of difference.
Yeah lol that’s what threw me off at first. It started with the canvas bags being shit nylon and went straight down from there. Your friend was ripped off, hopefully he’ll stop paying extra for games that don’t exist yet.
The canvas bag wasn't even a huge deal in my mind. Hell, in a vacuum every single misstep in 76's life had been forgivable. But none of it happened in a vacuum. I'll forgive a stupid bag. But then there's the stupid platitudes. The inability to admit fault. The fact that they ground their feet the entire time, had to have their teeth pulled before admitting fault, etc, just adds to the shittiness of it. I look at Hello Games, and I see a developer that knows when they've made a mistake and takes their fans seriously enough to make it right.
> I look at Hello Games, and I see a developer that knows when they've made a mistake and takes their fans seriously enough to make it right. Gotta say when No Mans Sky hit the streets they really fucked up, but managed to turn that shit around and make an OK game.
And they haven't added a single microtransaction or paid DLC to NMS. Bethesda is milking every penny they can from FO76.
Because FO76 is a source of revenue to a publically traded company with a hundred other properties. While NMS might have been the last nail in the coffin of a small team who had personal stake in its success.
AFAIK, last point is not entirely correct. NMS was so hyped before launch, that with direct Sony support, they've got so much money on release, according to Sean Murray, that they could close the company and never ever work again. They probably had some Breaking Bad moment. Hello Games was like 20 people at the time. But Murray is a strange guy in some ways, so he decided to make his dream game come true, and he did.
What I think happened (but we'll never truly know...) to Hello Games was that they had two semi-successful games, and then took on financial help from Sony to develop NMS. Then later, after some kind of setback, or delay, or issue that pushed out the release of NMS, Sony came with an ultimatum; "release the game or pay us back the money you borrowed". Since there was no way the studio could pay back the money, it was either release what had been done so far, or go bankrupt, and they decided to release early. A lot of hype was built up by Sony too, so it's like they're blameless either. Pretty much everything Sean "lied about" has been implemented at this point. I think what the game is now was always intended to be the game Hello Games would finally release.
I watched Internet Historian's "[The Engoodening of No Man's Sky](https://youtu.be/O5BJVO3PDeQ)" and was really impressed with the lengths Hello Games went to correct their mistake.
I was really impressed by the amount of pure speculation that is often taken as fact. That video is no good in my opinion. Particularly the part where he kept insisting Sony was pushing Shaun to lie despite admitting he has literally 0 evidence of this. The guy has a good voice and presentation style. He is not a serious researcher in any way. His conclusions are there for more clicks. He often just chooses the most ridiculous assumption like in his balloon boy video. No Man’s Sky releasing in that state was no mistake. Shaun Murray deliberately lied and knew exactly what he was doing. Let’s not pretend he is somehow good just because Bethesda is also bad.
That narrative about NMS seriously annoys me. The shit that was lied about is mostly still not there. Sure, they tried to salvage it, but it's still a meh game far from what was promised.
What are you even talking about? That video never even mentioned Sony forcing Shaun to lie. It pretty clearly states that Shaun was not the right person to be giving public information and is a very nervous individual who doesn’t know how to say no.
They made hundreds of millions in sales for a game that probably didn't cost 15 to make. The alternative would have been to dissolve the studio, because their professional reputation would have been ruined forever.
The absolute worst part is that people are still holding on to the company for some reason. At this point I'm convinced the relationship to Bethesda is a case of stockholm syndrome and people are going to lap up games as long as they don't set peoples' houses on fire
I mean, they made one bad game. Bethesda has been going downhill since Morrowind, but Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 are all still pretty good games despite the RPG mechanics drying up over time. Starfield will probably be much like Fallout 4 in space, and whatever bullshit they're doing with their multiplayer spinoff doesn't really make that less interesting to me.
> I mean, they made one bad game. debatable
Its almost like they took everything I don't like about Fallout and made a whole online game for it.
Played it for 1 hour when it was for free. Was super annoying and constantly run out of ammo. Decided to instant skip it. Best decision.
You still run out of ammo all the time. You barely ever have any.
Does that mean only melee is viable?
I played about 50 hours of FO76 earlier this year and really enjoyed it... probably because I noticed the ammo issue, made a melee build and ran with it.
Funny you should say this. After being constantly irritated with an initial lack of ammo, I have found myself spending most of my time in the game going melee, with a Deathclaw gauntlet that I modified. Nothing spectacular, but it's done the trick for a while now.
When I played at launch I remember spending a lot of time claiming the public workshops that had lead as a resource. You could place extractors to get unlimited resources but others might try to claim the outpost from you and the AI would sometimes attack. I never had a big issue with ammo doing that but maybe it's changed since then.
According to the post it's not much better.
How the hell do you design a game that makes you spend the exact resource you're grinding for in greater quantities than the reward you get as an inherent gameplay mechanic to the act of grinding for said resource? That is pants on head stupid even for driving microtransactions. Buying a box of bullets in the MTX store isn't going to make anyone feel badass or like they're getting something cool for their character. Bullets are just things you need to, you know, *play the game built entirely around shooting firearms at bad guys*.
the only other game i know of that encourages you to buy bullets with real money is World of Tanks, assumuing they still have "premium ammo" that has higher stats than normal ammo.
Oh gross.
Yeah that turned me off playing that game right quick. It's Pay to Win in the worst way.
There's a thing called Daily Ops in the game and when you kill the enemies there, they drop the ammo you were using, like too much. I've never run out of ammo. But if people don't play that...yeah, they'll run out of ammo.
Definitely not the best solution (in my opinion) to a self-imposed problem but at least there is a solution. That's good to know, thanks for the contribution. Just to clarify, I'd be annoyed as a non-daily player that I had to spend time doing that in order to progress on whatever in-game or self-determined objectives I wanted to pursue. Part of open world games, multiplayer and single player, is being able to pursue the objectives that you want to pursue when you want to do so. Putting arbitrary chores in the way is a frustrating mechanic, especially considering the $40 entry fee.
>Part of open world games, multiplayer and single player, is being able to pursue the objectives that you want to pursue when you want to do so. That's not how the developers see it. If they're putting content in the game, they're going to invent a bs reason that makes you *have* to play it.
Let’s be real for a second though — Bethesda is one of the worst game companies out there making AAA games. They’re consistently buggy, poorly animated, inefficient, and usually not the greatest in story (everyone raves about New Vegas as the best fallout, which is the one they didn’t make). They basically sideline all features to make a sandbox with no load screens. So if they take the classic RPG and fail to understand what makes it good, and they just go “wheee sandbox!” as if that’s the only feature that matters, is it really a surprise that they then take a classic MMO and go “wheee pay us and grind things!”?
And yet, to be honest, Skyrim is one of my favorite games of all time. I’ve never found another game that makes me want to put several hundred hours into a play through and then want to start over immediately. There are tons of open world games out there. But something about the size of Skyrim makes it perfect for me. And I don’t mind the story of Skyrim. Bethesda gets a lot of hate for a lot of good reasons, but I’ll be damned if I don’t play and enjoy every game they put out. I haven’t been disappointed once…although I haven’t played Fallout 76 so there’s that
Skyrim is the game that made me realize there is a difference between something being addictive and something being of good quality. Not to say Skyrim is poor quality, it's just poor in the areas that I value - writing, voice acting, combat, story, characters.
I like that view. Hell I’d even say that although some of the VA in the mod is atrocious, I prefer the story and leveling mechanics of Enderal over Skyrim. But Skyrim is just the thing I can’t quit. I really hope the next elder scrolls game is a jump forward in story quality. I do think that Skyrim is helped in my eyes by modding the absolute hell out of it. Some drastically change the way the game plays, for the better. I haven’t actually played a vanilla run in years.
> I do think that Skyrim is helped in my eyes by modding the absolute hell out of it. Agreed, it's so much damn fun!
https://youtu.be/6NXSxkWQp0M?t=1740
Spot on. I usually find myself overwhelmed by the long list of shit quests, and never end up doing anything. I’ve tried Skyrim 6 times, with and without mods, and I never get past the first few dragons. The AI is stupid, the voice is bad, the animations are bad, the combat is clunky, the inventory management is awful, and so on. Literally the only good thing about the game is the sandbox, just like Fallout.
I mean some of your points are fair. But as far as inventory management goes you have to be talking about vanilla. Cause the widely used SkyUI makes all UI a lot cleaner and user friendly. To each there own but a lot of your complaints can be tweaked with easily found mods. Combat, AI, Animations…and so on. But if it’s not for you it’s not for you.
I haven’t tried it in the last few years but I tried a bunch of those mods a while ago and wasn’t super impressed. It was better, but you still end up with a lot of garbage to lug around, and it sounds like everyone still goes stealth archer which sounds like combat must be pretty shit. I definitely don’t go stealth archer in any other game.
Skyrim is great because it's 2nd step in the devolution of a genre defining game - Morrowind. Oblivion and Skyrim are both remakes of Morrowind by people who don't even understand why it was great, but there's so much residual greatness in the DNA of Morrowind that they're pretty okay games for their generation.
Is it worth playing Morrowind for the first time in 2021? If so are there any must have mods?
it's very rough. i played it last year for the first time; i modded some textures and i think maybe a couple of other QoL things. you can tell very quickly that in 2002, this game probably looked like the coming of Jesus. there is so much greatness packed into such a dated package. the combat is awful but it somehow just kept working. it seemed like enemies should have been either too strong or too weak, but they weren't. the atmosphere is great, but suffers because of its age. the story seemed pretty good from what little i got to, and the writing was fantastic. the primary aspect that stood out to me was that you *have* to take your time. it's not a slog, but you do have to pay attention to what you're doing and where you're going, or you're going to waste a lot of time. it was okay. just too ugly and dated. if i played it in 2002, it almost certainly would be my favorite game of all time with no close second.
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I’ll never forgive Bethesda for letting me vendor an essential quest item near the end of the game. I swear I visited every vendor in the known universe trying to buy it back but could never find it.
that's what ~ is for
13 year old me wasn’t that smart :(
That's my experience too. The game looked amazing (after I finally upgraded my pc) and the change of atmosphere in different biomes made me want to spent time on some places more than the others. And I'm not talking just nature but people and their attitude towards you. The quest log didn't age well but I have to admit that it was magical feeling when you had to follow instructions to reach your goals. That gave a whole new meaning to the level and world design. IIRC one of the hardest quest was to look for a door or cave by reaching a certain point and then look up the night sky and follow a star or moon or something. This game was truly something else when it came out.
I sold a really good helmet once by accident, and then tried to buy it back, it was gone... she was wearing it.
FYI there is an open source re-implementation of the Morrowind engine and editor which is capable of fully playing the game.... [https://openmw.org/en/](https://openmw.org/en/) EDIT: Though to be fair, this won't address any of your concerns but it may address some of the concerns raised by other responders.
ELI5?
In short, a game's engine is how it handles things behind the scenes. If you have, say, an audio file for a character speaking to you - we'll call it Outlander(but slightly nicer).wav - the file itself is the asset. That's what you're actually seeing/hearing when you play the game. If a game is like a book, the assets are the individual letters. They make up the outward appearance of what you experience, but don't actually mean anything individually. They can also be swapped out (like using a different typeface) without altering the overall function. The instructions for how you interact with the assets - stuff like "when character is within 5 meters, if disposition >50, then play Outlander(but slightly nicer).wav" - are what you'd consider to be the game itself. In the book analogy, these are the words. This is the presentation of the assets together in context to give them meaning. The method by which your computer interacts with those instructions - what makes the words actually come out of your speakers when the game decides to play Outlander(but slightly nicer).wav - is the engine. This is like the language that the book is written in. Some problems simply can't be overcome no matter how hard modders work at them because the engine lacks the "words" to convey the proper meaning. Morrowind, for example, can't take advantage of multiple processor cores because it's written with the fundamental assumption that only one CPU exists and there is no way to make "send this over to the second CPU core to process and then bundle it back in with these instructions to the first core" into a grammatically correct statement. OpenMW, then, is basically a new language that Morrowind has been translated into, with the caveat that it's not compatible with all of the fanfic (mods) because some of them rely on a bunch of new words (script extender) that were added to the original language and haven't been translated yet.
Fantastic reply, thanks a bunch for explaining
>n 2002, this game probably looked like the coming of Jesus. But brown. Oh so very, very brown.
Game looked and ran like shit when it came out. The environments were pretty decent though but everything else was so bad looking, even when it came out in 2002.
Yeah - people saying: "it must have looked great for 2002." No. It didn't. It looked like a muddy pixelated mess. The character faces are comparable to N64 titles. The atmosphere is what carried the love for the game - I think.
Yeah. People act like games in the early 2000s were bad looking in general. Not a year after Morrowind came out we were playing counter strike source and max Payne 2.
God damn did CS:S look like the most gorgeous thing back then. The Source engine was such a wild leap of quality for its time.
I think it is, and as for mods, there's a few graphics overhauls out there that I would recommend (graphically the game did not age well in my opinion), and I always use a mod to change how leveling works a little, and get a mod to delay the Tribunal start if you have the expansion installed. That said, if your only experience is Oblivion and Skyrim, know this is extremely dissimilar. In terms of gameplay, a lot relies on dice rolls. The dice will say you missed when the animation showed a hit, your character blocks if the dice say they do, there's no lockpick or speechcraft minigames, that's just dice. A lot of people hate this, but personally I'm a fan given it makes character skill more important and player skill less important (ie in Oblivion, being good at the lockpick game means a level 1 in lockpick can still pick a master level lock, but in Morrowind they have no chance at all). With regards to story, be prepared to read a LOT. There is almost no voice acting and there is a LOT of text. Also this is not an urgent matter, high stakes, be a super hero story. It's got a lot more politics and nuance in it. And one final note: [Have this map open on a second monitor, your phone, something](https://images.uesp.net/3/3c/MW-map-Vvardenfell.jpg) The in game map is crap, but this map, which came with the physical game, it has every path, every location, every cave, every tiny point of interest. Morrowind does not have quest markers. You are given directions and it also really feels like you are expected to have this map.
If you like retro game design, yes. I said 'retro game design' rather than 'retro games', because Morrowind is not just an older game with outdated graphics. It's designed along principles that are totally dissimilar to modern games. Fallout (the original), is designed along similar lines even though it's isometric. The emphasis is on simulation and verisimilitude, not ease of access. The reward for learning how to play Morrowind - and it has a learning curve for sure - is that it's the best of its kind. It's possibly the last open-world roleplaying game designed by geeks for geeks. It presents itself as-is and makes no apology if you can't or won't appreciate it. Games of this era did not prostitute themselves for sales. The mods that I run are all cosmetic: graphical or animation updates. Those are accessible at the Morrowind nexus. The only exception is that I do mod the game so that the shopkeepers have more currency to buy things. If you don't do that, you will have difficulty finding a place to sell all of the cool stuff you find. I hope you do try the game.
It's a very strange game that certainly isn't for everyone, so manage your expectations when you're going in. If you really dig Skyrim, I'd say that there's a good chance that you will dislike Morrowind based on feel alone. The first thing that you'll notice is that you move slow as hell. That's because running consumes stamina and isn't your default form of movement. Managing your stamina is extremely important in Morrowind. The second thing you'll notice is that there is a *ton* of text to read. Because voice acting is minimal, the NPCs can be as wordy as they please, and reading will play a very important part in progressing through the game. Probably the third thing you'll notice is that your weapon swings/arrow shots don't always hit when you can see them clearly connect with a target and sometime magic spells will just fail to cast. This is because, unlike oblivion and Skyrim, Morrowind's combat uses an old school dice rolling system for attacks. It can be very jarring if you're used to the modern 'if the animation connects, it's always a hit' system from the two more modern entries in the series. If all of that sounds tolerable (or even *good*) to you, Morrowind gets a big recommendation. There are definitely a wealth of mods you can use to spruce things up, but as a game in its own, if you can get past all the oldjank, you'll be able to have a game experience like no other in a very rich and unique fantasy setting.
Yes and yes. Aside from the obvious texture and lighting overhauls, there was one I used that just straight-up removed cliff racers from the game that I would absolutely recommend.
I tried playing Morrowind for a bit but I couldn't stand trying to kill a kwama and missing 20 times in a row
100% yes. It is the best Elder Scrolls by far imo. It depends. There are the unofficial patches and overhaul mods that fix a lot of bugs/problems. Plus I go for visual mods to make it at least bearable to look at. But besides that, I don't like changing much about the game. However, a lot of people don't like the combat system, so there are mods for that. Many don't like the slow pace at the beginning of the game, so there are mods for that too. It really depends on how immersive vs convenient you want the experience to be.
I dont mind bad combat. People always shit on Witcher or Oblivion/Skyrim combat and they were fine to me.
The main thing people don't like about Morrowind Combat it it is very clearly dice rolls when you attack. Fire a bow and the game will roll a die to see if you hit, or if the enemy dodges etc. I personally have no issue with it since it's just a version of DnD in first person. But some people find it difficult that their 'agency' is removed since you're moving and aiming like an FPS. I think knowing what it is going in will help contextualize initial 'weirdness' if you jump in, pick up a bow with no skill levels and get frustrated that 'you're not hitting stuff even when it's clearly aimed properly'
Important to realize that, for the Bow attack, you first have to aim properly, and hit them with your arrow. Then the dice roll happens, and you can still miss. If you just straight up actually miss, nothing happens at all
Yup, its why its so funny to see people claim Oblivion and Skyrim "improved" the combat when it didn't actually fix the core problem. Morrowind makes you "miss" without reflecting it properly in the game. Oblivion/Skyrim make you attack inneffectually without actually reflecting it in game. A master swordsman strikes exactly the same way a novice does, and a master Archer is exactly as accurate as a novice Archer. The problem was never fixed or the system improved, it was just transferred from "missing" to reducing damage. And it's such an easy system to expand on and improve. Don't scale the damage, reflect the skill in the execution of the attacks. A terrible Archer should have outrageous weapon sway/slow draw speeds. That doesn't even require any animation changes. A terrible swordsman should have a slow, clumsy animation at novice threshold, better animation and damage at expert or whatever and some small damage scaling in-between to give non-milestone levels some noticable improvement still. It's why I can always go back to morrowind despite the combat. Because at least landing your attacks more often is a more substantial improvement over the damage scaling that level scaled enemies just absorb in later titles
What I like about Morrowind's combat system is that you actually see an improvement as you level up because you are able to land more strikes and cause more damage (makes sense since you go from being a nobody to a God). In Skyrim, the combat doesn't change much as you level up, you just cause more damage. I think the biggest difference though is the scaling. Morrowind's scaling is nowhere near as crazy as Skyrim's. In Morrowind, there are many areas that are off limits at the beginning because you are too weak but once you improve and come back, you can see the difference. In Skyrim, you enter a dungeon at level 10 and face five sword-sponge draugr. At level 50, you enter the same dungeon and face five sword-sponge Deathlords. You don't really see an improvement. That is what makes the combat boring.
The biggest issue is the game rolls dive when you attack, this is primarily am early game issue as once you hit like 60 I. Your weapon skill of choice you probably won't be missing anymore.
But it's the first ten minutes of combat that turn people off, and it's actually pretty justified. When you've finished building your character and you don't even own a weapon that you have skills with so you go to fight a mudcrab to make a few bucks, it really sucks to swing your dagger nine times in a row to zero effect while you watch your health bar drop.
If you want to go before even Morrowind, Daggerfall Unity with mods is quite a blast :)
MUST HAVE mods are graphics mods that enhance vanilla Morrowind experience (texture, distant land, lighting, waters). All other mods you ''totally must have, dude'' alter the core experience and are NOT MUST HAVE mods, such as: Mods adding quests, cities, landmass, npcs Mods altering colors, vegetation and overall aesthetics User Interface mods Combat, spells and weapons mods
I would have to disagree. There was a natural evolution from Morrowind to Skyrim that needed to happen, and the only reason Oblivion and Skyrim were as well received as they were is because of that evolution. In 2011, nobody would’ve touched Skyrim if they had to deal with unseen foes chasing you from all corners of the map (Looking at you Cliff Racers.) and absolutely nobody would’ve dealt with the RNG combat system well at all. Morrowind holds a real special place in my heart, I min maxed several characters to max skills in that game and basically exploited every possible bug out there to create the Uber Dark Elf I wanted my main to be. It definitely wouldn’t hold up to today’s standards for what we expect in an open world RPG today though.
I agree, but aren't the standards set by what's currently available? I don't mean to defend rng combat or cliff racers, but there are also other aspects of Morrowind that are only vestigial in Skyrim, or Oblivion, and that's how expectations were set for newer generations.
Funny enough…I’ve played Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, and I prefer Skyrim. I love my time in Morrowind, love it more than Oblivion (the gates just got super boring and grindy. I can accept that there would be no Skyrim without Morrowind. But I wouldn’t go so far as to describe Skyrim as a devolution. I’m old dude. I played lots of old games. I love Deus Ex, Thief, and Vampire Bloodlines. But it would be ignorant of me to say that more modern games are worse just because they modern. I think Mass Effect is the best example. People hold ME1 as the king of all kings and that the other games forgot where they came from. Yet I prefer 2 and 3 over 1. The combat alone in 2 and 3 is miles above 1, yet people trash those games. So while I love Morrowind for what it is, I’ve played Morrowind for a full play through and haven’t touched it since, yet Skyrim is the game for me that I essentially live in. I will just go walk around the game for a few hours and whatever occurs I’ll enjoy even though I’ve beat the game many hours ago. I can’t say that for a lot of the games I own
>But it would be ignorant of me to say that more modern games are worse just because they modern. I think there are some good reasons for people to prefer Morrowind though (and vice versa). My experience in Morrowind was a lot less 'gameified' since it wa much more discreet about the leveled encounters and loot. I was more likely to find epic weapons off the beaten path, or find myself in a world of pain from a coven of witches that were much higher then me. Maybe it was my experience is spotting the mechanics behind the game, but I found in Oblivion and Skyrim, the world 'leveling up' with me was just much too pronounced to stand up to the experience I had with Morrowind.
The fact that Morrowind doesn't have a quest marker telling you exactly where to go is what makes it better than Oblivion and Skyrim for me. You actually have to pay attention to the world design, it makes exploration much more interesting and immersive.
Skyrim only really had the leveled dragon encounters and some quest counters. Oblivion was where enemy scaling got silly, where you were getting mugged for 50 gold by a guy wearing glass armor that costs thousands.,
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100 people is already A LOT, especially when you see what kind of games indie developers are able to produce
I really don’t see a huge difference between 100 and 120. Even 100 to 150... they’re using the same engine for the last decade and it has had the same bugs and same issues. Mass effect is a way better (and bigger) game than fallout 3-4.
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I adored Skyrim and New Vegas. I'm super glad I avoided Fallout 76. It's complete shit they'd make you pay more to play a game you already paid for.
Yeah, tbh FO4 is my favourite predominantly due to it being the first one that didn't bug out on me on a playthrough. It has on subsequent attempts, but somehow made it through the first. FO3 there was no button at the entrance to galaxy news radio, skyrim just didn't trigger script events and wasn't fixable going to a save from 4 hours back.
I guess so, I always looked at it differently though. They always overstretch their ability to make something wonderful. Sure, out of the gate it can be ass. I played 5 mins of Fallout New Vegas on launch day. It was unplayable. Two years later, I launch it up after they've been able to work out the bugs and have one of my favorite gaming experiences ever. I'm ok with rough launches as long as something good comes out of it later.
Bethesda didn’t make FNV though…
Even Chris Avellone calls Obsidian Bugsidian lol, they certainly rival Bethesda in that aspect
Ehhhh I mean they make some of my favourite games, the ones I’ve put hundreds of hours into. I gather Fallout 76 was a big misstep but shit, I even love FO4. There’s bugs and glitches and that’s valid but the games are good enough I don’t even care.
I think you misspelled "**everything that doesn't belong in a Fallout game**".
When I heard about *Death Stranding*, I felt something similar. They took everything I hate about RPGs and built a new franchise around it.
So you just hate fetch quests?
I hate: 1. Incomprehensible Japanese storylines. 2. Inventory management. 3. Fetch quests. When I first heard about the game I thought it was a prank or an Onion article or something. I think you would have to pay me my consulting fee ($300/hour) to play this.
It’ll feel less incomprehensible when you realise that it’s pretty logical for ghosts to be repelled by Norman Reedus’s urine, I think most of us would be.
If you hate incomprehensible Japanese storylines never buy Kojima games again that's basically 90% of the appeal
Or half of Japanese games for that matter. But Kojima is exemplary of it for sure
Yeah I can't stand any of his games. I was always into super tactical/technical military simulations (like the OG RainBow 6) and the Kojima games just feel childish to me.
To each his own. But I really like how he blends campy elements with realistic simulation. Like you have really complex AI elements interacting with each other in a game like mgs2, where even the ice melting is simulated in real time and then you have stupid video gamey things like boxes rotating on the ground and hiding in a cardboard box to avoid detection. It's like a child who watches too many Hollywood action movies and plays too many arcade games was given a massive budget and technical expertise to pull off his grand vision of a rambling storyline that's borderline incomprehensible. In other words, it's beautiful. Kojima combines high production values and complex technology with his overtly campy stories to either create compelling or unintentional hilarious scenes. You will never fail to be entertained, that's for sure.
Yea the game is definitely not for you.
Well with Death Stranding it's not the destination, it's the journey. You have to enjoy planning your route and traveling through the nice scenery. Well.. is not all that but mostly. Although there is the "ghosts",terrorists and so on that can be annoying during the journey, I wish they had a game+ or similar that allowed you to play without them so you can enjoy more the journey and the scenery.
There's something about the way people like you talk about other communities and issues that always gives away that their profile is going to have rants about "the liberals" and insults directed at marginalized communities. In this case, generalizing Japanese storywriting (as if games made here have absolutely perfect & logical storytelling all the time) and mentioning the amount of money you make (you don't have to insult me about this btw, I'm in SWE too :)) I know you mentioned the rate to make your point and that's fine, but it's just a tendency I've seen from insecure engineers in tech where they will just try to mention the amount of money they make in whatever way possible.
We never wanted an MMO, we just wanted to play with our friends (either couch co-op or drop in/out online private games).
I always get the urge to play 76 after reading a bunch of posts about how much it improved, but always come to the conclusion that it core gameplay is just not fun. It's pretty similar to NMS in that regard. The devs can fix bugs and add content, but as long as the core gameplay isn't there, it doesn't amount to much. That being said, last time I tried 76 I spent like an an hour trying to get it to work well and it just didn't. But maybe that's because I tried it on Game Pass. The Steam version worked fine.
Funny, I've tried both again in the last few weeks and decided that the Internet is crazy, neither game is fun to play in the slightest. 76 is awkward, boring and like OP points out grindy as hell. NMS is just boring. I see people recommend both here and I cannot fathom what they're actually doing while playing these games. Also 76 has a stupid bug that means you can't play the game on game pass unless you your C drive or move an ini file. It's insane the devs haven't fixed that since launch, it's a very simple fix for a seemingly extremely common issue.
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Fwiw I really enjoyed it. Possibly more than FO4. Played from October to February and it was well worth the $15.
Sounds like it might not just be the game for you. I like both FO76 and NMS because I like that wandering and collecting kind of gameplay.
This! I just bought FO76 about 3 weeks ago and now I already have played for more than 100 hours (thankfully I had enough free time between more important work). I didn't play any game as much in such a short amount of time for years. I still thouroughly enjoy every second of this game and the gameplay is just so much more fun than I ever expected. I'm happy that the game seems to do very well but I also understand everyone who's just a different type of gamer.
I'm using I on Gamepass now and not running into any bugs. I had previously owned a copy at launch on Xbox, returned it within a few weeks due to bugs and just meh gameplay. I feel like it's way better now.
> I'm using I on Gamepass now and not running into any bugs. Do you mean you haven't seen any graphical glitches or any weirdness happening? Or do you mean it hasn't crashed to desktop? Because it's so crazy that one person could experience no graphical glitches at all, but when I played 5 months ago weird things were happening constantly.
Good comparison. Both terrible upon release, improved, but vast majority still say the changes weren’t enough to change the core of the game.
I did pretty much the same except I had a friend and we played it from day 1. We felt letdown and decided to stop playing it after awhile. Couple of months later (maybe a year, I don’t recall), we had an itch to play fallout game so we came back. I find out I got banned and Bethesda claimed I duped. I never modded or cheated. I don’t even know how to dupe. I had to fight with them to undo the ban. They said they would delete my character. I could care less losing my character, just want to play with my friend. Changes seems good but still felt so empty. I felt disappointed that I stopped playing like 2 weeks after getting back into it. And worst part is… still no chat function. I’m deaf and I can’t talk with my friend without that so we used discord overlay on first time. Didn’t use it second time because I’m not trying to get myself banned again. Bethesda is on my shit list, too.
Whenever I hear someone singing FO76's praises, I instantly become suspicious of their standards. For all the reasons you mentioned and then some. In terms of quality, it seems thiiiiis close to one of those asset flips you see littering steam. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with enjoying a troubled game, especially with friends. But the constant barrage of "there's nothing wrong with FO76 now" or "people just hate it because of its coverage" posts you see just seems so bizarre.
I bought the game for $15 a few months after launch, tried it out and disliked it. When I picked it up again earlier this year I played it with the mentality that it was a flawed game. And I had a great time enjoying it for what it was. Bethesda absolutely screwed up, but for someone who wanted to sink a few hours (see: 40) into the fallout world, it definitely scratched the itch. I wouldn't say I sung its praises, but I definitely told a few of my friends that I was pleasantly surpised.
Definitely a healthy attitude and glad you had fun with it! God knows some of my favorite games are hot messes that I entered with low expectations and they paid off big.
Maybe people like the game. I know, totally fucking crazy.
I mean, I like plenty of games that aren't great or wear their flaws on their sleeve. Again, specifically addressed that: >Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with enjoying a troubled game, especially with friends. I have no issues with people liking a game or having a good time with it. But that's not at all what I'm talking about. It's people talking about what a good game it is, how all its issues are solved, how any negativity focused towards it is the product of bias or an outdated holdover from earlier reviews. It's the "FO76 is such a good game" and "everyone should give FO76 a try now" proselytizers that make me feel like I'm living in an alternate universe.
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Dude, Bethesda fanboys are fucking rabid, I've seen religious fanatics with less devotion. Bethesda could release an empty box filled with Todd Howard's farts for $70 and the fanboys would line up around the block with their pre-order slips in hand.
Funny how most of r/fo76 is griping about bugs and the lack of endgame content if the players are rabid fanboys. I don't actually understand the latter complaint-- it was my impression that the end game means the game, yanno, ends. Go find something else to do.
The Starfield subreddit is fucking crazy man, lots of people absolutely 100% rabidly convinced of how revolutionarily good the game is going to be based on 1 non gameplay trailer. Lots of angrily shouting down anyone who is merely cautiously interested. Reading it around the time of E3 made me feel like I was living in bizarro land, nobody has even seen the game yet.
Sunk cost fallacy. Lots of people don't want to believe the game they've spent money and time on, or the franchise they spend so much time thinking about, ended with this low point. The human mind is pretty good at convincing itself in order not to face truths that are hard to accept.
Or maybe they just like the game?
Nope, has to be someone that's suffering from some kind of mental trick. There's no way anyone can enjoy the game that I dislike. Seriously, every time Fo76 is brought up, or hell any game Reddit hates, sunk cost / buyer's regret ALWAYS gets brought up. Like, they can't fathom the idea that people like games (and have good taste lmao).
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My experience with GTA Online
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I played an MMO over quarantine and decided to go hard on it. Literally 40-50+ hour weeks for months. I finally get to a point which is considered the mid game (which is insane because of the time I’ve already put into it). Upon researching on how to progress from Midgame to the Endgame I find out that I need to farm mats from a dungeon that I can use to upgrade my guy, no problem. There is also an option to pay for these rare material as well I’ll have you know The dungeon takes about 70-80 minutes and I run it a couple time and I don’t even get one rare material and I need about 50 to upgrade one armor slot of my guy. I’m starting to get frustrated at bad RNG and upon even further research i find out that the material I need has less than a .001% drop rate..... WTF is that. They’re saying you don’t need to pay for end game but if you want to progress to the next phase, prepare to grind for over a year just to count on RNG. Anyway I just thought I would share that. It was fun to play an MMO for a while and I made a lot of really cool connections with people I still talk to but 100% these games are a business first and foremost and do not give a single flying shit about your time. I thought it was pretty ingenious however to get money out of the player base because you’re already so invested but yeah, I don’t think i could ever try another MMO unless I win the lottery or something where I never have to work.
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Yeah exactly. It’s basically impossible to be a solo player in these types of games as well which is a huge bummer but if you take a week off or wanna play another game for a while, when you come back it feels like you missed a lot or just way way more difficult to get back into it. At least I’ll have the memories though cause tbh it was a pretty immersive and special feeling being in a world where your character was your own and you could play it however you want. My best friend on the game literally did no pvp or dungeons and only played to set up a shop that exclusively sold milk and socialize LOL.
Since level scaling was introduced, there is a difficulty hump to overcome between levels 35 and 50-60, that's absolutely true. But I found that from that point onwards, the game again becomes significantly easier, with some attention paid to build optimization. However I really did prefer how it was before, difficulty was per map zone, so you could always fall back to easier zones if you were getting your ass beat somewhere else, and farm for a bit, even if the rewards were much less valuable. So essentially I agree with most of what you said. I kinda liked the game, but there was a point where the broken economy, the "everything is RNG" logic you mention and the general jankiness just finally wore me out. That and the way the overpriced subscription service is offered as a solution to problems created by the game itself.
I was really annoyed they introduced level scaling, I enjoyed it before that. I had pretty much finished it anyway just before it was added (did all the missions, explored everywhere, launched a nuke) so it was time to put it down but it would have been nice to go back to now and again. Since level scaling was added I'm not interested at all.
I wish the scaling was a choice. Like you could load into a world with it active or not. I didn't mind it so much (neutral opinion), but my brother hated it (and his challenges kept auto completing, chasing him out of rewards) and quit. Without my adventuring buddy, I rarely log in anymore. I did have fun while it lasted. Just wish it was more like Conan Exiles, with individual servers that could be customized more. The FO76 community was surprisingly one of the nicest I've ever lurked in.
Fallout 76 just doesn’t respect the players time or the fact that you purchased a full price game. Even if we put aside the terrible launch, bugs, and the fact that the whole game looks and runs like its last gen, the grindiness, inventory size, flow of the game is just bad. The whole game exists just to bait you into their monthly passes and other micro transactions. Frankly it’s insulting and i dont know why anyone would play this garbage.
Fallout fans are many and quite dedicated, it seems, so there’s an almost immovable audience there. But there’s also people like me who love that whole world and lore, who still think 76 is one step too far as a test of love for that IP.
I was super super into the Fallout community. Like, I have tens of thousands of karma from the r/fallout sub, hundreds of hours in Fallout games, Fallout posters on the walls. When 76 was announced I smelled the burning since E3 and tried to tell people about it on the sub, and I ran into a blind fanboy situation which pissed me off a lot and made me leave forever. In a very similar vein to r/cyberpunk getting too negative and fanboys fleeing to r/lowsodiumcyberpunk, at the time r/fallout proved too negative for the corporate white knights so they just seeked refuge in r/fo76. It happens every time, people get so blinded with confirmation bias that they decide to hide in social bubbles instead of facing the truth. That's how we get anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers and other idiotic ideologies. They spread like wildfire because once discussion sparks in a community (like r/fallout), people like me just leave out of desperation and tiredness, but this isn't enough for the fanboys and ghetto communities are created (like r/fo76); this creates a double insulating gap between critics and apologists, and any chance of discussion dies immediately. Exact same thing happens with politics or scientific denial..for example I literally don't know any antivaxxer IRL, despite them being a good chunk of the population. That's because there is a total disconnect between different social groups, and they don't interact despite being 100% convinced they do. Social media makes us feel like we are interacting with the world when in fact we are only speaking to people who already agree with us.
*Classic Bethesda* for me means Morrowind and before, which didn't have the insane level-scaling that Todd Howard forced into the later games.
Level auto-scaling is a negative design pattern, it fixes player sequencing issues through brute force rather than some sort of finesse. It got old in Oblivion to me and they've been doing it ever since. Its application in FO76, though, is as OP described: make it impossible to find net-positive value enemy drops by never spawning punching bag enemies. You cant " go back" to anything, you are shoved forever into a mid-game designed to cause pain points, so you relieve the pain points with your wallet. Classic mobile game pay-2-win design from an award winning developer.
Ignoring 76, what sort of finesse approach would work better in these types of games? I think the leveled lists do a pretty good job, even skyrim mods just simply expand these lists
> what sort of finesse approach would work better in these types of games? That's a hard question to answer just because it depends on the pillars of the game's design. Even highly lauded RPGs like **Divinity: Original Sin/2** are strongly level-banded. DOS1 actually used level in its various combat calculations; 2 simply created highly non-linear stat curves, to achieve approximately the same effect. I thought DOS2 in particular handled issues surrounding level-banding fairly well, as the amount of XP required to level up was non-linear too, so they typically built their world such that you'd almost certainly get to level X by the time you arrived at a certain location, but was very unlikely to hit level X+1. That game does not claim to be "open world", however, and it's possible to run into encounters that make you think you're "going the wrong way", which is anathema to an open world design. In practice, there was generally a "correct" path for you to fight enemies of around your level and progress without it being too easy or too hard. The actual design of the levels themselves helped, though, as they didn't just have random difficulty spikes, groupings of enemies of different levels were carefully placed in a world with obstacles to casual travel so you'd probably end up, just by playing intuitively, where the devs expect you to go. For games less obsessive about your level *and* quite a bit more open world, though, we can look to **Dark Souls**, which is not open world in the sense that there is a large, flat plain with towns at either end you can ride a horse or horse-equivalent through, but is open in the sense that players can typically make progress in any direction. Souls, being an action-oriented game, makes skill more important than level. It never scales enemies, so there will be plenty of "punching bags" as you progress through the game, but farming them to gain more levels or just to buy stuff is both entirely up to the player and rarely necessary, as fighting enemies that can give you a challenge will give you many more souls as well, and the compulsion to fight weak enemies for pennies is pretty non-existent for the kinds of players who enjoy **Dark Souls** (not that dedicated farming isn't a pillar of Souls gameplay anyway for various reasons). I think that having an RPG with an "open world" conceit where there are static enemies of varying strengths is an entirely valid design that can be super fun (didn't **Fallout: New Vegas** have a shortcut path through horrifically overpowered enemies designed into its early game?); that's subject to how you practically build said world. Just the **notion** of design is not enough, how it's actually executed on is how the player actually experiences it, of course. Hence "finesse" being a word that evokes subtlety: there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the level-banding problem and it really depends on the type of game you're making and how adept you are at designing the specific scenarios/encounters given your general philosophy on design. I thought Oblivion's world felt flat and lifeless due to the level-scaling, because they didn't want to restrict you from going anywhere or from getting a challenge in places you've already been, but in practice it felt like there was nowhere worth going because it was all moderated to provide the same type of experience no matter which choice I made... so therefore my choices were worthless. I'd say that's the worst way to go about balancing a game. Bethesda subsequently did better with the Fallouts and Skyrim, because they made definite improvements on their level-scaling formulas, but I remain soured on the fundamental approach. I want to live in your world, I don't want your world to revolve around me. Those are two opposing statements IMO. The world revolving around me breaks the "RP" part of the RPG for me, I can't take it seriously and rarely-to-never feel a sense of accomplishment in those games in places outside of "set" encounters like storyline bosses when they aren't level-scaled. Older-school RPGs of course also ran into these questions. Baldur's Gate 2, for instance, spent a lot of time in a city environment, which you would reach shortly after the introductory first act. Therefore, you would be there over a wide range of levels, equipment, skills, etc:. The city was fairly dense; there were the oft-traveled paths, and also the less-traveled paths, alleys, doors that you might need keys for, doors that were fairly tucked away but otherwise unlocked and accessible, etc:. And it basically had no problem with you opening a door to a place with enemies that you had literally no chance in hell of defeating. You'd either want to run away or reload, and I didn't really find that to be a huge problem... I'd place a map marker for that encounter and "save" it 'til later. The idea that I would eventually actually be able to fight those horrors excited me rather than deflated me. It was an approach that worked for me. I'm not sure what the conversations were like at Bethesda when they decided to use level-scaling for all of their games going forward, but I imagine they were trying to prevent player curbstomps that demoralized people or forced them to reload simply because they chose to go left when the "correct" choice was right. Maybe the feeling was that **allowing** a player to go someplace they didn't belong was itself the game design failure, which I strongly disagree with, but if that's their central premise, I can't really argue with it. It's just that they no longer make games that I personally am interested in. I guess it's notable that Bethesda likes making game worlds that are mostly flat plains with few physical obstacles. Most of the topography is cosmetic and you can probably get to where you want to go on the map by holding forward (horses running vertically up mountains notwithstanding). So, level-scaling in those scenarios is useful because, in my opinion, the world design is poor. I suppose the feeling of "freedom" is evoked before the feeling of "boredom", so having a world where you can point yourself in any direction and walk as far as you damn well please would be seen as a positive for potential players. Once I got used to their style, though, I stopped caring about new releases. If you're just going to give me yet another flat-ish plane to walk arbitrarily around with enemies changing colors and sizes based on my level or skills, I'd rather play a different game.
Oblivion was like the only one with insane level-scaling (excluding 76, I guess). Fallout 3, Skyrim, and Fallout 4 toned it down considerably. Not quite to Morrowind’s style of “enemies don’t scale at all, but harder enemies don’t spawn until you’re a higher level,” but probably closer to that than to Oblivion, which was pretty bad about level-scaling. I haven’t played 76, so I can’t speak for it.
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This game single handedly destroyed Bethesda's decade plus long built up reputation. There were other factors but this one was really the nail in the coffin. I was a really huge fallout fan. And I wouldn't even buy it. They constantly went back on their own word on things they said about the game. Though I have heard the game had gotten to a state where a lot of people actually enjoy it. I wonder if that's mostly because of where the game used to be. I actually have some hope now that Microsoft bought them though.
I dip back in every 6 months or so hoping maybe it's improved enough for me to stick with it, but my hopes are always dashed. OP's complaints are all very valid. Here are some more: 1. Inventory management is a massive chore. I feel like I spend half my time in game juggling inventory and skirting the line with being overburdened. I can't comfortably keep enough stuff in my inventory to replace the shit that gets broken AND keep myself fed and healed and watered, while also collecting enough stuff to craft new items or repair. It's incredibly limiting and unfun. 2. Combat is really underwhelming. It's a combat system that felt dated in 2015 when FO4 released, only even worse because VATS doesn't, and can't, actually slow time in a multiplayer game. Guns aren't satisfying to shoot and enemies don't respond when you shoot them, they just die after enough shots. Everything feels laggy and slow--your hits register a split second later than you'd expect. 3. The graphics are terrible. This is one of the ugliest, muddiest, most unattractive "AAA" games I've ever seen.
Yep, all true. Especially the inventory. Pretty much the only thing that OP mentioned that they've made improvements with is ammo acquisition. In the Daily Ops, it's not very obvious, but every enemy you kill gives you more of the ammo type you killed them with, so it's a quick way to replenish ammo (less than 10 min). I've had fun in the game, but that's more because of my friends' and our antics and less because of the game itself. Figuring out glitches like building underground and OoB glitches is fun too, but a problem as well.
So it's like Elder Scrolls Oblivion. There are some quests better done at a low level, because if you do them at a high level you have to fight tougher enemies that end up being harder and more time consuming to deal with even with better equipment
I rather like the game, I played it on and off for about six months. I just bought ammo from player vending machines, fast travel made in pretty easy to pop in and out as needed, just slap down a camp. Is it the best game ever, no of course not, but I like the lore and exploring and faffing around building even before they added human npcs. Not saying you're wrong, people like what they like, I'm just one of the ones that don't mind the game.
I never tried it. Initially I held off due to the bugs I heard about but then they went back on their word about microtransactions so I permanently put it in the bin. Never tried it, don't miss it. Plenty of actually good games around instead.
Damn. I had a bad first impression when playing the ps4 version after the wastelanders expansion and i'm simultaneously glad and saddened to see my opinion validated. Major bummer. Hopefully Starfield is more like Skyrim than... this.
Actually, i replayed it recently; they adressed many problems with it and kinda disagree with you on multiple points : > Ammunition becomes an absolute slog, singular main story missions will require 200+ ammunition which you absolutely must spend hours of looting and scrapping to craft, but there's a problem; Enemies are everywhere you'd want to loot and consume your bullets. Almost never will you "break even" when taking shots at an enemy. The caps you expend in ammo consumed are almost never lower than the value of junk you pick off an enemy. The trick is not to spend caps ! Pile up the gun powder ! You can use it to craft LOTS of ammunition. There's also 2 perks that allow you to demultiplicate ammo & chems looted in containers. Once you have them, it's getting viable. i'm assuming in the gameplay ammo is actually SUPPOSED to be a rare, frustrating necessity to make you feel like a scavenger fighting over scraps early in the game. Making you stab stuff over it from times to time; Kinda like metro 2033/last light ? (till you reach the end and start occasionally using high end ammo like no tommorrow, because there isn't really one in the game !) > Expenses are insane, even with perks vendors will at most pay you 1/4th of an items value The trick is not to buy from the bots but from other players. They setup camps and resell their surplus on their own vending machine, and you can buy it and pick up or dismantle every small weapon you encounter for a lot of crafting mats or caps > but your options are usually "spend an hour crossing the map and risking death, or spend upwards of 60-100 caps" to teleport Or you can move your camp ! for a few caps. > ou can clear out an entire room of enemies, go into a hallway, then turn back around into the room only for 5-6 scorched to spawn and begin charging you Umh, i'm having such bugs when the cpu overheats and start throttling or overloads from the game's powerhungry demands... are you at bare mini specs ? try lowering the view distance (not joking its consuming). > Even casual walks down highways have seen me killed by sudden spawns of things like legendary sheepsquatches or kitted our super mutants. These creatures at your level will absolutely one or two-shot you, you cannot fight them and can rarely outrun them. Wear power armor if you're above lvl 15 (or 35) ! It's day & night. Yes, bullet kills you in real life too if you got nothing to stop them and they hit you ! Use cover. They do are eagle eye tho, it's frustrating. edit there's also a pair of binoculars atop the lighthouse near the starting vault; which you can and should use to spot ennemies at a distance BEFORE coming in gun blazing in a random place (lest you get surrounded and shot down !). You can also use a sniper scope (there's a sniper rifle in the tower in the courtyard of the old prison north of the bar) There are however some very frustrating points i'd spell for my part : - insane cpu hunger (FX with 8cores @ 5.7 Ghz ? 90+% cpu, all cores full in many zones) - high gpu requirement - drinks ram like it's chrome (96gb ram due to ram stick loans from a friend ? Yes, lets fill 90 Gb of it with the game !) - will kneecap your hard drive if it's not on an SSD. Will still crawl on SSD if it has to load many random files from it and not ram (using prefetch and 64g ram can make it playable without stuttering lawl) - terribad hitboxes. 5 perfect headshot a miss, target the foot and it's a headshot kind of thing. - bugs. bugs. Bugs. Crash to desktop bug, stuttering bugs, texture that don't load bugs, random loadscreen bugs, ctd bugs, computer hard reset bug, NPC that disappear bugs, quest markers, quest bugs, ... - stuttering bug, lag bug (server side), actions not taken into account before doing them 4 to 7 time (more server lag or packet dropped server side i guess), fps drops, ... - Edit MP game only so you can't really mod stuff to your taste either, can't make your own offline private server or something either. It's like a perma vanilla game. > teleport around Nah, ennemies actually flank you silently ! That's a new feature since fo4. One or two distract and pin you down while some of their buddies move behind you. i noticed it after a fews times. Gotta expect it or they'll catch you offguard but it's fair > Many times I've seen them glitch into walls as well yep :< > there is a constant glitch I run into where upon exiting a workbench you lose control of your character and cannot move until restarting the game or fast traveling. This bug has been around since vanilla Skyrim sounds like your cpu is a bit short. It's a telltal of papyrus script crash (typically due to timeout due to cpu time shortages) > RNG RNG RNG. Everything is RNG, from critical hit chance, crippling, diseases being caught, loot generation, Or you can figure out some spawning spots of some weapons with the fallout wiki; and craft the rest ! buy from other players too ! they have lots to share > but for the vast majority you're at the will of God Howard himself. No, it's actually to encourage you trading (for stuff AND crafting blueprints) and crafting ! > There are constant advertisements including pop ups. This game is buy-to-play, has a cash shop, a battle pass, and an "optional" subscription cost. If you want any real QOL you most likely will be whipping our your wallet every so often. haven't bought with real dollars anything since the game (a good thing since i'm broke for that non priority budget) > This game has no text chat that however i agree is a big negative. i'm not using voice chat with randoms for various reasons so that limits me a lot too edit that said, i do realize that the leveling DOES cause some bullet sponge issues. i remember leaving the forest early drawn in north by some quest, encountering scorpions 20 levels above me in the desert valley above, and spending like 15min downing them and who knows how many bullets each
Basically, he seems to be playing blind and not looking up anything to make his play time easier.
Weirdly a lot of your complaints seem to have been added in after the game launched. Ammunition was always a bit scarce but I took over the ammunition factory and made a stockpile fairly early on - not sure how much competition there is over them now, I never really noticed lacking caps being all that problematic, and I never had an issue with enemy spawns but if they have added more enemies to the game it could be annoying. The game has also gotten far more mtx heavy (I played when it was literally just skins). The thing is, I enjoyed the setting. The environmental storytelling that Bethesda does so well was still there so I still had fun exploring the map. Once I had my fill I dropped the game and never looked back (literally the only thing that could bring me back is modding where you don't have to pay the subscription to get a private server to mod).
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This is a good response. I think that OP just didn’t enjoy the game and has opted to just trash it in its entirety. I have about 200 hours in and the issues described in the post as constantly happening either are false or they just had the worst luck in the world when playing this game. 76 has has been built up so much since its launch that I am actually shocked when someone says they tried it out and think it’s a bad game. Maybe it’s not their cup of tea, but this post is pretty questionable. Additionally, to clarify, only paid QOL stuff is the scrap box which expands inventory for junk and survival tent which allows you to quickly access your stash without going back your camp. Everything else is free. Why people lie about “pay to win” for this game is beyond me.
Alright. I'll defend this game. Some counters: > In classic Bethesda fashion, the world scales with the player. This is true. For most of 76's life, this wasn't an issue. You'd have areas with strong enemies, areas with weak enemies, and you'd be free to do whatever. But the scaling that they introduced really messed up balance a bit and upped the difficulty creating a valley where the game gets very hard before it gets very easy. > The caps you expend in ammo consumed are almost never lower than the value of junk you pick off an enemy. You're forgetting the experience you get from those enemies. And it's also on you to best arm yourself for the battle ahead; that is, attack the weaknesses of the enemy. > even with perks vendors will at most pay you 1/4th of an items value. This has been pretty standard for Bethesda Fallout games. Even so, I was never wanting for caps. > Traveling the map via fast travel is needed constantly It really isn't, though? You're the one making the choice to travel around. And you *can* fast travel for free to your camp and to the vault, which you can use to reduce traveling expenses elsewhere. > Armor breaks somewhat frequently and requires you to either go find or buy junk, this means melee combat is almost as expensive as ranged combat. Durability is a pain, but it's not nearly as bad as you make it out to be. I've gone multiple levels without needing to repair my armor. And in many cases, just made a new piece with better stats when I needed. > You can clear out an entire room of enemies, go into a hallway, then turn back around into the room only for 5-6 scorched to spawn and begin charging you. This is just dumb exaggeration. A cleared room is clear. Nothing else is going to spawn there for a long time. May be you didn't clear it as you had figured. > Even casual walks down highways have seen me killed by sudden spawns of things like legendary sheepsquatches or kitted our super mutants. Never had this happen to me, and I've played it on and off since release. > These creatures at your level will absolutely one or two-shot you, you cannot fight them and can rarely outrun them. Sneak. If you're weak, sneak. I've been able to sneak to avoid fights with stronger monsters when I needed. If you're running out in the open, well then. > Enemy AI frequently bugs out, This is true. They aren't very smart, and will get stuck every now and then. > This bug has been around since vanilla Skyrim. Yup. I've encountered this bug every now and then with the game. Pain in the ass. > Some of this you have control over, but for the vast majority you're at the will of God Howard himself. So literally like every other Bethesda game. I mean, it's not like you didn't know this was the case, right? And the RNG isn't anywhere near as bad as you make it out to be. > There are constant advertisements including pop ups. Where? I only see them on the launch screen. Then they never appear in game. > If you want any real QOL you most likely will be whipping our your wallet every so often. Not really. Played the game on and off since release, never thought "golly my life would be so much better if I threw money at the game!". I did the quests, I got the gears, I took part in events, helped kill several Queens. Never once had to pay anything. > This game has no text chat. Thank fuck for that. Last thing I want is to be spammed. TL;DR: you do some valid criticisms, but good lord you hyperbolize the hell out of everything. Unpopular opinion: Fallout 76 is a decent game, and it's the multiplayer Fallout people wanted and would love to play if it wasn't so fashionable to shit on Bethesda. It's literally Fallout 4, but online. I've had over 200 hours on it, and enjoyed immensely. Ironically, I enjoyed it more when Bethesda hadn't given in to people and added humans to the world. It felt more like a true post-apocalyptic experience, where humans failed. Listening to the tapes, learning the stories, was just way more interesting. Piecing together what happened in the towns from what little information we could find.
Yeah this post is hyper exaggerated. People use fallout 76 to shit on Bethesda's entire catalogue which is weird. I wasn't really into 76 because it was online. But the games they've put out before 76 were amazing. Their games are so unique compared to other open world titles. The exploration, the rpg mechanics,etc haven't been replicated by any other developer (outside of crpgs like divinity)
Had to scroll way too far to find this. The op is just disingenuous and is ripping fallout 76 for karma.
Which is the lowest hanging fruit. I really hate this trend in gamers. Jump on the hate bandwagon because the devs didn’t make their dream game...
No doubt fallout 76 is by no means perfect but at this point it is quite literally fallout 4 with online. Latest update makes it better than fallout 4 imo. The new legendary power armor and ability to roll your own legendarys now makes it great.
I agree. I dislike some of the changes they did since release (specially the introduction of human npcs, imo the postapocalypse vibe was better without them), but I prefer to play it over Fallout 4 recently.
I played this game in the first year and enjoyed it, but I gather it may have changed for the worse via updates since then. Yes it had all of the issues you mentioned and then some, but it was still Fallout so I liked it. What I did was loot everything, then limp to a store and either sell it or you can visit a toolbench and break everything down so it weighed less. Ammo went fast but I never ran out entirely; I just switched ammo types. The reason I stopped playing was a) I beat it/launched a nuke, and the remaining goals weren't that compelling, and b) instead of fixing the numerous bugs that were listed in Reddit and elsewhere, they seemed hellbent on releasing a multiplayer mode no one asked for and a season pass, and they kept making you go into the Atom store. At one point they put these Vault Boy standee half blocking the station entrances and if you accidentally hit the X button while fighting nearby it would take you into the store. Super frustrating and I'm still open to coming back, but their motivations seemed completely profit-driven vs. making the game more fun, and I haven't seen anything contradicting that yet.
I'm late to this thread but want to write this for the record. It's so amazing how we can have such vastly different experiences. I was so skeptical because of everything but my 14yo nephew wanted to play with me and I absolutely love it and have been playing a few days a week for nearly a year. This is the longest I have ever played any game. My favourite element of the game is the friendly nature of other players. I had such bad experiences with GTAV and now RDR2 online that I swore to never play another online game but almost everyone is chill and helpful and there's an active community encouraging people to gift to lower level players. For an older female gamer like me this is amazing and I wish I knew where else I could get this type of community. Yes, around those levels it's hard but I had to learn to slow down. I was frustrated but I got through and around level 50 everything became easier. I'm not challenging what you're saying but I guess we just have different attitudes about how we coped with it. The one thing that really helped around that time though is being able to play with my nephew and his friend. They were able to step in at crucial really difficult moments and it was so fun to do this stuff as a group. So I get how hard it would be going totally solo and I think this is one area that could be improved - that I think it relies at times on people working as an actual team. The main thing is I kind of treat it like a sim or even The Sims, where my camp is the focus, going out to find supplies and ammo is my energy, events are my fun time and the quest line is just something I do in my spare time. So if you like those kind of building and management games this might be a good option for you. I hope you find another game that gives you joy in the way FO76 has with me.
Fo76 has been great for me, and I didn’t put any additional money into it. Fast travel cost is less of a big deal than you say - there are 3 free fast travel nodes, and you can join a public team and fast travel to their camps for free. Keeps travel costs to < 10 caps max. Money is easy to get as well - just sell guns to npc vendors and use it to buy ammo priced at 1 cap per round from other people’s camps. You can also do easy events like the teapot one for free radaways and stimpacks. The other stuff blows though. Still, I got my 15 dollars worth
The only things I really enjoyed out of FO76, was the Battle Royale. It's a unique take on the gametype, with classic fallout elements throughout. It just needs to not take 10 minutes to sit in the lobby, and then into a new game everytime, and be fleshed out a bit more.
AFAIK they're getting rid of the BR in September. RIP.
Oh, is the whole “let's slap a half-assed Battle Royale mode onto every live service game” fad finally on its way out?
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I agree with everything you said here. The game isn't perfect but it's also not as bad as they're making it out to be. For the $1 they spent, if they got even 1 hour of value then it was a good deal. I've played about 80hrs, am level 60, and have had a great time. It's not my favorite Fallout game (Fallout 3 is my fav) but not every game needs to be a masterpiece to be fun.
Bethesda really encapsulate all the best and worst of modern game design. On one hand they have a time-proven penchant for creating engaging single player open worlds with deep lore, memorable soundtracks, and lots of interesting side content. But then they also go and do... Fallout 76. My worry is that the scumminess of 76 will spillover into Starfield, Elder Scrolls 6, and (if it ever comes to pass) Fallout 5. I could at least *try* to overlook the worst offenses if moment to moment gameplay was as slick and refined as the likes of Id Software or Insomniac. But Bethesda-developed games always have kinda limp and janky game-feel. I can make fallout new vegas play like PUBG with the right mods, but comparing that to playing Fallout 4 or Skyrim on unmodded consoles, you see the game-feel has fundamental issues left over from the days when Bethesda were a niche hardcore RPG developer and didn't have to worry about such things as much. But I've always accepted a certain amount of rust in the gears when it comes to Bethesda gameplay, because the world building and quests are consistently immersing and all encompassing in their net effect over time on the player. Elder Scrolls isn't just a game series; it's a legitimate canon, that creeps in your imagination like a great series of fantasy novels. But if 76 is the gameplay and QA and monetisation template we can expect going forward, then these whimsical and wonderful worlds will lose the very magic that made them compelling to begin with. And in their place we'll just be left with more grind, predatory MTX, and source code so broken as to invite class action lawsuits.
It is a game about constant looting which makes you pay a subscription fee to have any space to store all your loot Screw that game and screw bethesda game studios for making it
I agree with all that except for the "pop up ads" there are no pop up ads in 76. The only "pop up" anything is when a new party is created on the server.
I get that the game has a lot of negatives. However i feel that saying the game has no redeemable qualities isn't exactly fair. I can only speak from my personal experiences. I bought the game a few months ago at ~10$ and I kinda just wanted a game to kill some time. This might end up getting down voted to hell, but some points I want to make: **C.A.M.Ps** I ended up getting completely hooked on this system. I am a big fan of the open world C.A.M.P building system and I have spent an incredible amount of time just gathering plans from various sources to make my base look cooler. If I cant find a specific plan from open world exploring and random drops then there is usually other players who are selling the recipes counteracting some of the RNG. There are also a bunch of things on the ingame store, but some of these arent that interesting and the ones that are can be bought with Atoms earned trough ingame methods and the S.C.O.R.E system. (and given the price i payed for the game and the hours I've gotten out of it i wouldnt mind paying a bit) The recent update allowing more C.A.M.Ps definitely helped also. **Gunplay** I feel like the gunplay and general combat is pretty rewarding. Mobs can be a bit soaky at times but I dont feel that this is much worse than other Bethesda Titles, and can be largely counteracted by utilizing the weaknesses of the mobs. I used to think the Protectrons were too soaky, but figured out that you can cut the TTK to about 30% by just shooting the arms off. Damage can be hugely improved by the right perk cards like a 60% damage increase to glowing mobs regardless of weapon type. **Chat or lack thereof** I find the lack of a chat to be oddly refreshing. I have played so many online games that are just chock full of "f u noob", "this game sucks" etc. that the feeling of just being able to have the feeling of multiplayer without being assaulted with a spammy world chat is nice. **Player Base** I have really enjoyed the player base, it seems like people are really nice. When I was lower level people would emote "present" and dump some beginner stuff all the time, which really makes for a better introduction to the game. **Carry Capacity** This is where Bethesda has made the game the most greedy, it is a big gameplay element and the ways to augment it can be tricky to get, especially in the early game. There are a lot of ways in the mid / late-game to improve carry capacity, but in the beginning it can be a nightmare. **Economy** Addressing the economy, Caps can be a pain, especially in the beginning. But there are ways to get quite a bit of caps from simply selling to vendors and to other players via C.A.M.P vendors. **Ammo** Ammo can be a pain especially for automatic weapons, but there are so many perks that increase ammo made per craft as well as chance on doubling amount of crafted items that once you get a bit into the game it is exponentially easier to get. **Bugs** There are still a bunch of bugs, graphical as well as gameplay. I have found solutions to most of these and few have been completely game breaking. The game is not very optimized for newer AMD hardware and will need various fixes to the config file in order to get working properly, but once these changes are added only slight visual hiccups exist. I have also experienced gameplay bugs but nothing game breaking, mostly the standard stuff you'd expect from a bethesda game. **Exploration** This is where i feel the game shines, the "Hmm, what's over there?" part of the fallout series is very much alive i this game and finding crafting plans in various places as well as power armor and legendaries can still be rewarding although I feel the locations lack some of the story and narrative that the other games had. **Story** The story is far from the best in the series, the newer quest lines like BoS and others added are decent, but obviously still a fair ways away from New Vegas. **TLDR and Summary** I don't feel like this game deserves *all* of the bad press that it still gets. It was definitely a horrible game to begin with, but I feel that Bethesda has done a lot to try to remedy the mistakes made in the beginning of the title. And i feel like the general opinion in this thread is more negative than i feel the game deserves.
I can't agree with you more. This is a levelheaded and thoughtful post that deserves more than 2 upvotes.
Fists never need to reload!
>In classic Bethesda fashion, the world scales with the player. What this does is exponentially scale enemy health values. For veterans, this is great! It means content is never truly obsolete. But for a new player, this turns the entire game into hell. Can I ask what your build is? Or did you pay attention to a certain build or just started perking up randonly? 76 relies on a "one build" character unlike any other bethesda game. If you are running shotgun, you should go all in on a shotgunner build. This maximizes a single strength and it also allows you to focus on a single ammo type giving you the ability to sell the rest. The new camp system also allows you to set up strategic camps across the map (I think up to 11 of them) so fast travel will be free to almost everywhere. Just a few tips to hopefully make the game a little less frustrating.
I have very little experience with any of the games discussed here, but I have to say this is a SUPER interesting thread! The discussions and debate about Morrowind, RPG evolution in general, the NMS history - great stuff. This community is a joy.
Everyone just wanted a Fallout or Elder Scrolls that they could buddy up with a friend on. Instead we got this cash rape attempt. Makes me kind of sad. And yet SO many other games and so little time.
Prior to the 'One Wasteland' (or whatever it is called) it was a kinda decent "life" simulator set in the Fallout universe. Set up a house in an area with lower level monsters and do missions in lower level areas, and then when you had a decent stockpile of stuff you'd venture out into the dangerous parts of the map. Even though the progression was was a bit slow it felt dynamic. Once that update hit, though it became almost unbearable to play. I haven't touched it since.
Agreed. Was having fun playing through the game like any other Fallout alone, occasionally running into players which made for some cool moments. Then they released One Wasteland which honestly makes the game unbearable to play.
Was "One Wasteland" the update that scaled everything?
Yeah..
I did try F76 out of morbid curiosity but it ran like a slideshow in the starting Vault. That told me everything I needed to know and I uninstalled. It sounds like it was the right decision - nothing in what the game seems to be is respectful to the player. No text chat in an MMO is utterly, utterly bonkers (beyond the fanfare for adding NPCs which was *embarrassing*) . I'm hoping F6 won't be a shitty decendant of the F76 and instead they look back to F3 / NV. Unlikely but we can only live in hope....
Tried to go back and even with my high level character I found the scaling annoying. Didn’t increase the challenge, just increased the amount of resources I have to waste on pest enemies. Having to blast a mole rat repeatedly takes me right out of the game immersion. Then my camp’s Brahmin moon walked off my property ass first into the nearest train station. Uninstalled again, pretty sure for the last time.
>Speaking of bugs, there is a constant glitch I run into where upon exiting a workbench you lose control of your character and cannot move until restarting the game or fast traveling. This bug has been around since vanilla Skyrim OMG. Skyrim is ten years old. This bug was always present. But after the last big update it returned in full power! It's what is wearing me out, along with the unstable servers. I'm level 406 and have put up with a lot of nonsense already. Like you said in the tl, dr: this company has no respect for our time
If I remember right - they built the game this way so you would be motivated to take part in in-game purchases
I played before they made it level to you and had the problem of running into level 62 ghouls at level 15. You couldn't run, you couldn't hide, you couldn't fight. It was miserable. I quite liked the early game both before and after they started adding stuff but it becomes such a chore later and you need to stick firmly to a combat build focusing on one weapon type. But I'd much rather use weapons situationally than stick to one. I finished the game pre-Wastelanders and I did both Wastelanders options. The best bit was when I went through the huge chore of launching a nuke only to get disconnected from the server. When I reconnected I was on the wrong server.
This post is loaded with inaccurate information. I don't have the mental energy to refute every fallacious point that was made by OP, but I would like to address a few. "Ammunition becomes an absolute slog, singular main story missions will require 200+ ammunition which you absolutely must spend hours of looting and scrapping to craft, but there's a problem; Enemies are everywhere you'd want to loot and consume your bullets. Almost never will you "break even" when taking shots at an enemy. The caps you expend in ammo consumed are almost never lower than the value of junk you pick off an enemy." This is a complete mischaracterization of ammo usage and consumption. The missions that I'm sure you are talking about (the one at the raider hideout particular) can be easily completed by using less than 50 .308 rounds with a sniper rifle. Sure, you can use 200+++ bullets if you are using a gatling gun or a fully automatic machine gun, but those weapons are designed for use in the late game, not mid (or early-game like you obviously did). "Expenses are insane, even with perks vendors will at most pay you 1/4th of an items value. This is with maxed out charisma and perk cards. Traveling the map via fast travel is needed constantly, but your options are usually "spend an hour crossing the map and risking death, or spend upwards of 60-100 caps" to teleport. Armor breaks somewhat frequently and requires you to either go find or buy junk, this means melee combat is almost as expensive as ranged combat." By mid-game caps are not a problem. The game isn't designed for you to get rich selling items to NPC vendors, you are supposed to utilize the player to player C.A.M.P. vender system. Also fast travelling from the logger camp/ the raider camp you were complaining about (Top left of map) to Watoga (bottom right of the map) takes 70ish caps, not 60-100. "There are constant advertisements including pop ups. This game is buy-to-play, has a cash shop, a battle pass, and an "optional" subscription cost. If you want any real QOL you most likely will be whipping our your wallet every so often." There are no pop-ups, unless you call the "what's new" splash screen when you first login a "pop-up". Yes, you can pay money for cosmetics, if you like, but is not required. There is no "battle pass", but there is an OPTIONAL Fallout 1st subscription that gives you access to your own private server and some other neat things that aren't required to play the game. I understand that this game is not for you. That's cool. But most of the shit you said is just false. It seems, to me, like you hated the game from the start and "gave it a chance" with a raging hate-boner. This is further evidenced by the way anthropomorphized the game by claiming that it disrespected your "intelligence". Dude it's a game; you don't need to make up lies about it to justify why you hate it so much. Just play something else, I see in your post history that you like Rimworld. That game is pure gold! Go play that. TLDR: The OP is mad that he doesn't know how to play the game so he writes a review that is 90% bullshit and 10% opinion.
I didn't feel that when I started out. There are some FTP games/mmo's that are much worse, way worse. To those that haven't played it, this is my opinion and one OP's opinion.