Fallout 76 - The Review (2018) - Part 1

 Recently on the Giantbomb podcast, Jeff Gerstmann said, you know someone asked me yesterday, like, "Hey, you know when you think your ratings are going to go up, and oh my god, nobody on the staff wants more of this video game like." Playing this one I'm not going to put myself through another 2030 hours of this [ __ ] mess, it's really specific, just to put a number on it, a number is [ __ ] don't play this game with 30 hours I've already put into Fallout 76 I've been striving to stop playing when I heard those words from Jeff, they were a revelation. I immediately closed the game and started writing this review scene you can literally have fun with a bag of fire [ __ ] especially if it's with friends whatever your personal opinion of this Fallout 76 is objectively a [ __ ] Game because it wasn't what was advertised to consumers, its technical condition would make the term alpha blush and there isn't a single new innovative or well-designed game system in the whole damn mess, Fallout 76 for short is morally technical and creatively bankrupt and in this review I want to show you why

Hospital lifted straight out of Fallout 4 can't boast of a visual leap when 95% of your artistic elements are dragged and dropped from a game released three years ago, all of which is even more disappointing considering that modders Fallout 4 got to watch Pretty stunning, when they were done with this Bethesda was so lazy they didn't even bother to copy and paste the work done by modders and incorporate it into their own game engine. Bethesda's second biggest lie about Fallout 76 was This one Fallout 76 is by far the biggest project we've ever done. It includes parts of the studio in Maryland Austin Montreal for Bethesda Game Studios and we get a lot of help from other parts of Bethesda some of the big guys at ed software are Kane ZeniMax online so it's really a huge undertaking, not just for us, but for all parts of the test. Many of you will not have played Fallout 76. I've been playing for about 30 hours t this buggy unfinished lifeless asset flip of a game was a bigger undertaking for these guys than skyrim was this suggestion enraged me it's such a blatant lie I don't even know where to start I'm not even going to bother deconstructing this [ __ ] Now just keep that in mind throughout the rest of this video and that will be the only proof you need to understand that this statement is utter nonsense . I think the much-discussed beta was also inherently Floyd-enabled and deceptively open only to pre-orders, this in and of itself isn't an uncommon practice, but almost every bit of marketing you see for Fallout 76 is selling access to the beta, as a key selling point for pre-ordering beta access shouldn't be a selling point for each product The fact that your progress from the beta carries over into the full release of the game reinforces the marketing value of this beta. Bethesda clearly wanted to retain avid Fallout fans

Eager to be the first to play the new Fallout adventure, fans who foolishly bet their money on this scam were thrilled to find that the beta was only available during very specific time slots, often when people were at work or otherwise unable to play this compounded by a PC bug that wiped out the Beader client on day one of the beta and the fact that our nearly 50 gigabyte patch to Half of the beta was released and almost nothing fixed that beta, however, was the fact that with two weeks to go it wasn't a beta at all and in the sheer amount of bugs, glitches, technical deficiencies and poor optimization prison it was dishonest of Bethesda, the Giving players hope of improvement Video criticizing the beta now has over 1.1 million views and its dislike rate and the thousands of comments that k are in large part because people were convinced that Bethesda would fix everything before the release date, given Bethesda's long and well-documented history of shipping buggy games, that was a very stupid thought, but Bethesda caved in anyway, if Fallout 76 achieves nothing else I hope it serves as undeniable proof that beaters released two weeks before our product ships are not betas, their demos or at best service stress tests separate from all that. I think the most misleading aspect of Fallout 76 is the ambiguous way it has been presented to people, whether this is a single player game or a multiplayer game, yes Fallout 76 is really new and different or is it something more familiar, yes, is this game for more traditional fallout fans, or are you trying to attract a new audience, yes, pvp is really the core of the experience, or is it more of a side activity, so they will always there is always pvp, like you can never really tell us first of all i would say we still choose we don't want it to be grief II but we want to have some drama okay so there's a way you go can decide to do PvP and we are currently balancing the inducements for someone who wants to be very aggressive towards humans and those who want to ignore it yes and that really depends you know that in games and inducements and then also h the social incentives

When Todd Howard first started talking about Fallout 76, I knew right away that he was speaking from both corners of his mouth. At one point the gang was familiar to Fallout fans, as a solo experience packed with great storytelling and laws we expect Todd to specifically say that 80% of that experience was the same as a regular Fallout game while Fallout 76 was sold as a franchise spin-off This bold experiment and a radical departure from the traditional formula Todd and the Bethesda marketing team tried to target all players at once without ever committing to a specific vision of what this game was and who four was seems like a distant memory now but just throw your mind back two months or so when we literally had no idea what the aftermath of 76 was we didn't know what game it was trying to be, because Bethesda was so unwilling to show us how we were trying to understand how, in hindsight, Fallout 76 felt like reading tea leaves It's clear that the reluctance to share any information served to cover up how little appeal this game had to anyone. It's rare that I would ever declare a game immoral, but I think the sum total of these deliberate tactics to deceive and mislead consumers marks a low point for Bethesda, and for games in general, this was a deliberate campaign to To lure you into buying this shoddy product and I am honestly pleased that it has been largely unsuccessful given that many games are released each year in a technical port state, most of them from small indie developers with limited resources who charge well under $60 for their products. Fallout 76 is a $60 game or a $200 game depending on which version you buy, minus the microtransactions on top of that, and it's made by Bethesda Game Studios and is the largest and most successful developer in video game history Published by Bethesda, one of the largest video game publishers in t The technical condition of Fallout 76 is so far beyond acceptable worldwide, as commented by Jim Sterling in his last gym question

On this subject, it's honestly forcing me to reconsider my opinion on previous Bethesda releases. It's like not throwing a frog in boiling water when you want to cook it because it just pops right out, which is what you do instead when you put it cold, which makes it feel like we're the frog in the water and Fallout 76 is the point where we finally realize that after two decades of flawed releases, we've all been boiled alive. Fallout 76 is technically bugs there are four levels the limitations of the outdated build engine the optimization and performance of this engine bugs and the UI design especially on the PC port Let's talk about the engine first the build engine is based on the old Gamebryo -Engine That Goes Back Decades That's not to say that Fallout 76's engine is two decades old, but it's fair to say that there are still bugs in this engine that have lasted two decades, which is undeniably the engine is old and outdated and can't work Since game speed and physics are linked to frame rate, a recent patch seemed to fix this, even if some people are still getting the physics errors, so take Bethesda's assurances that this issue will be resolved with a very large grain of salt The engine struggles with the adjustable field of view, does not support ultra-wide resolutions and can native 4k doesn't handle very well. The lighting engine is clearly the last generation. Their physics lead to countless situations where you just scratch your head and wonder what the heck is going on. I mentioned earlier that all of these problems were actually solved by models that came up with solutions over their time with the build engine for these things, but none of these improvements were incorporated here because Bethesda just couldn't care how you would think that was such a basic feature set and since the Creation Engine was almost a decade old it would at least be up modern PCs run smoothly. I mean, it's clearly not intrusive y visual limits like Red Dead or God of War, so I'm sure we can get this thing running at 60fps pretty smoothly, right wrong. The optimization and performance of this game has to be seen to believe I have a GTX 1080 TI and an i7 8 700k It can run pretty much any game on ultra at 144 hertz no problem I can't do that 76 on ultra run because

it takes my performance well below 60 fps. I run it on high settings and I don't run it at my usual 1440p because that's too taxing too. I'm sticking to pure 1080p, even with these settings I'll get huge frame drops very, very often Low like 20fps or so Popin' is complete, turn off the chart lighting and anything more than about 30ft in front of you will blurry as the engine tries to scale back the detail to maintain performance on every issue I listed above is worse on console I played the game on Xbox One X and it was also a train wreck. I often hear, hey, things are going well for me. I don't know what your problem is Goes well because most people don't trust me in the description. I left a link to the Digital Foundry analysis where they show how bad it is [ __ ] when an Xbox in particular drops to about 10 frames per second, these guys analyze graphics for a living and they are very good at it so just listen to what they have to say. Ok, let's talk about bugs. [ __ ] Not everything you've heard about bugs is true. I can't play this game for more than five minutes without encountering a visual physics AI UI or server bug, I don't feel like talking about it other than to say it's the worst thing I've ever heard from Bethesda and that really says something that I feel bad for the QA team being blamed for this when the real crooks are upper management who would have seen that list of bugs and said [ __ ] it will sent anyway, the UI needs a special mention in this game and immersive in Fallout games, but it was annoying to navigate at the best of times, at least you could pause the action in Fallout 3 & 4. So if it took you a while to do what you needed, this was fine in 76, you can't pause the action and navigate your menu at tense moments, which is extremely frustrating ating this is a Mod for Fallout 76 released three days after the game's release, offering a vastly improved UI experience

It's the perfect example of how little effort Bethesda has put into every part of this game, instead of updating their UI for a new always-online impossible experience they just drag and drop UI from Fallout 4, whether a modder in three days better than Bethesda, which the [ __ ] Bethesda have been doing for three years, that point about the UI feeds into the last point I'm going to make about the game's technical performance, and that's the PC port issue this is one of the worst PC ports I've seen from a triple-A studio, especially one backed by such a strong PC community, in addition to basic options like refresh rate, field of view and ultra wide angle and a bunch of others For things that are simply missing, the user interface is ripped right out of the console controller setup and crudely smuggled into the keyboard and mouse setup. You have to use so many unnecessary keys here to do simple things because Bethesda hasn't bothered to pr properly configure keyboard and mouse controls, it's terrible, Fallout 76's performance is in the toilet, but it are actually future Bethesda games that worries me. Recently Todd Howard confirmed that they would be using the build engine for Starfield and Elder Scrolls 6 - Gamestar back in June he said we changed a lot for Fallout 76. The game uses a new renderer, a new lining system and a new landscape generation system, for Starfield even more changes and for Elder Scrolls 6 out there on the rise and even more we like our editor, it allows us to create worlds very quickly , and the modders know it very well. There are some elementary ways we create our games and that's going to continue because we can be that efficient and we think it works best. I know graphics engines evolve and improve over time. I don't want to sound the alarmist drum here, but I will say that Todd thinks this engine that Bethesda is currently using lets them be efficient and thinks I'm working best for her. I disagree that you can't look at these results and see the efficiency. You can't look at these results and see that the results work best