Fallout 76 Underperforming

[Dave]

In what may come as a shock to some, Fallout 76 is really underperforming. Bethesda has been on a roll in the past, their games being favoured amongst audiences and selling at lightning pace. This time, however, it seems as though Bethesda has gotten it all wrong.

The game peaked at number 3 in physical sales in the UK behind RDR2 and Let's Go Pikachu. What's more, most review sites are slating it - reviews of 2/10 are not uncommon. The game is apparently very unstable and just not very good.

The real question is whether it deserves the criticism or not. I haven't played it so can't say much but fr what I've seen on Twitch etc, the game is just littered with Flaws.

Has anyone played it and got anything nice to say?

 

[Lee]

Of course it's underperforming last week was stacked and anyone I know that's played it has said it's shite. Game companies need to stop resting on laurels.

 

[Richard Blonoff]

The engine is the same used in FO4, which isn't a mortal sin, but look at the graphics for new releases like BF5, BLOPS4, or RDR2 and compare them to FO76 and they look like FO76 came out years ago.

The idea of a multiplayer Fallout is great, but I don't want only multiplayer, which is essentially what the game is. No real NPCs, just quest robots. The game also doesn't have dedicated servers, so most of the stuff that happens in game doesn't carry to your next play session. You can also only have one camp site at a time, so if you decide you want to start a new camp in a new location, you lose everything you already build and from what I hear you aren't refunded the cost.

Bugs litter the game. I've had friends send me screen shots and clips of glitches that render the game unplayable. Plus there are the small bugs that aren't game breaking but break the immersion and just annoy you. I've lost track of how many times I've seen guys trying to sit down and glitch through the chair. Or put on power armor and glitch outside of it.

Not to mention that Bethesda promised that the game would be a long term time investment for players, yet people were completing end game content, like launching nukes, in the limited time beta. They did allow beta progress to carry over to full release, which is cool. What they failed to mention until post release is that any missions you completed in beta that were tied to achievements can't be repeated and need a new character to complete.

Bethesda has been this way for a while. They have ported Skyrim to every available machine they can, came out with mobile games no one asked for, and just recently turned Elder Scrolls Online into something worthwhile, despite it being about five years old. Like Lee said, companies can't rest on their laurels.

 

[enviousdominous]

I haven't bought this game, and I thank whatever misshapen deity made me in his (or her?) image that I didn't.

I'm a huge Fallout fanatic, and I have friends who put me to shame in terms of their obsession with the Fallout universe. I've played all the Fallout games, my friends can name all the programmers and tell you hodgepodge facts about the Fallout games. They're super-dee-duper-fans, and now they fucking hate themselves because they desperately tried to make Fallout 76 work for them.

I watched them play, and after laughing hysterically at watching enemies get frozen in place by faulty obstruction code, I gave up after the server crashed three times in an hour and went home. It was mentioned to me that you can start the game solo, but that doing so would just be sad because then the game is basically like (in their super-fan words) "playing an open-world version of Doom where the demons have all given up due to chronic epilepsy" and that if you're playing with people then you at least get to be miserable with company.

One friend was unfortunate enough to splurge for the canvas bag bundle that cost him around $200, and he received a cheap nylon bag. Bethesda said that they were sorry, and (without asking if it would be sufficient) compensated him with $5 worth of in game currency. He cried, I'm dead serious. I watched a full grown, 250 pound, bull-dog of a man, cry his eyes out because he sank so much money into what amounted to be a nothing-game. This same dude played Morrowind for over 300 hours, he basically surveyed the entirety of the map just because he felt like it. He has sworn off of anything Bethesda related because of Fallout 76.

The idea that I saw with this game is "Fallout with friends is going to be more fun". That's fine, except Fallout 76 is hardly an actual Fallout game. From what I've seen, it's more like a shell of a Fallout game where the players are expected to mindlessly rummage through interactive containers. The story apparently involves running through tasks that a deceased overseer had intended to run though, at no point was it made clear what reward (storyline or otherwise) would come of completing these tasks.

The lack of NPCs seems to be an experiment gone awry. It's fun to test out a Fallout world where you will only encounter actual people playing the in-game characters, but it doesn't amount to anything worthwhile in the long run. It turns out that there's almost nothing meaningful to running into a different person who plays, apparently the PvP area of the game still requires a mutual agreement between players before anyone can damage anyone else. You could share thoughts with that person if you both have a Ventrilo server or something like that, but then you could just stop playing the game and go talk to someone in real life. I loved that Fallout 4 was immersive, because of how my actions affected the NPCs. Apparently in Fallout 76, the players that you run into are supposed to fill that void and it just doesn't work.

One friend said that he wanted to play simply so that he could just run around and kill things for fun, and he hates this game. Watching him play, he was noting that he never realized just how intricate certain first person shooters are in terms of enemy placement and difficulty. He said that running in circles for ten minutes to kill one thing because the game starts you out with shitty weaponry was what killed it for him.

When this game was coming out, I was hearing all these ideas regarding types of gamers that this game was designed for and reasons for which one could have fun while playing this game. I can assure anybody reading that my friends fill the spectrum of gamer types completely, and the ones who were supposed to love this game and -- to their credit -- desperately tried to love this game found themselves hating the game and hating themselves even more for having faith in in. The reasons for which someone might want to play the game are invalidated by the game itself. It's a buggy mess that's devoid of meaningful interactivity, that for even the type of gamer who enjoys turning their mind off and just exploring a virtual landscape, ends up being an exercise in futility.

I think that Bethesda has made a lot of people into Rockstar fans with this one.