Fallout 76 - The Review (2018) - Part 2

 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

and to see absolute failure, so to see Todd praising that engine and championing it for the next few decades of Bethesda releases when we still have bugs in Fallout 76 going back almost two decades. I'm sorry, but I think that's just as [ __ ] because the way 76 has been marketed primarily to the players, you know we are, it's extremely ambitious. I'm a bit of a softie about most things and generally I'm willing to give a developer some leniency as long as they try new things big themes ambitious things etc like No Man Sky which was a crappy game at launch , but it was also done by about 6 people and they were trying something extremely ambitious. Shawn Marie oversold the game, but they really went for an inspirational never-before seen ideal, so I was never really mad that no man's sky sucked you in, you miss 100% of the shots you don't, Wayne Gretzky said, she made a recording, they failed. I respect them for trying Fallout 76, no shots it's aimed at, not even if it's remotely interesting or ambitious, it's the video game equivalent of the Bunt, and the little they can do here attempting to reach fails in categorically imagining yourself in a room with a group of people, and it's your job to design the perfect online fallout gameplay big and intricate quest lines where you can do them with your friends you think of build variety that allows for interesting team compositions, think of building new cities together or pursuing life as a raider or playing as a super mutant, think of all the possibilities Fallout offers with friends in 2018 and let yours Now really let your mind wander and witness Fallout 76 with its shriveled, uninspired vision of what online Fallout could be. A game with no NPCs, no narrative, no meaningful RPG, no hub areas, no real gameplay loop, it reduces the franchise to a boring looter shooter where the loot is literally garbage and the shooting is absolutely awful, it is the slightest amount of effort or design work you put into this and I'll call it that beyond the lack of ambition in this gameplay formula is that each game system is hopelessly contradictory and compromised. This is best demonstrated by looking

The main elements of the game, its narrative, quest design, combat, crafting, and PvP storyline. First, the game has no story. There are people in the comments section jumping to Bethesda's defense, saying that Fallout 76 is brimming with a rich, compelling story that you simply need to listen to the holotapes and read all the scraps of paper and all the notes on the computer terminals. This is not history, this is law. Calling his story is like saying destiny, a head story because there were grimoire cards. No, there is no story in Fallout 76 and the only way you're going to enjoy the narrative or the law in this game is if you're that 5% of gamers who like to pull their story from computer terminals when If you're one of those awesome people, you'll probably fall for this 76, but if you're not then Fallout 76 doesn't have a story, the decision to deliver the law, or the narrative centered around sacred tapes and terminals is directly at odds with co-op -Focus of this game it's better with friends is the mantra it's better with friends If you're trying to listen to a hollow tape and your friends won't shut up on voice chat, it's better if one of them want to sit and read every line of every entry on any computer terminal when you just want to go outside and keep killing [ __ ] it's better with other people when there's no push to talk and a guy starts running at you and yelling at you and this dog is barking, his kids are crying and you're trying to immerse yourself in this law of fallout and experience, if you just have all this [ __ ] in the background, no, it's not that you can't design a co-op experience and deliver its narrative through things that don't work in a co-op setting Exactly what Bethesda has done here is due to a lack of engaging narrative or NPCs to connect you with the quest structure hopelessly compromised without having to worry about missions or dialogue options or NPCs that invariably join you on every single quest thing goes here click it button go here kill that thing every quest feels like an MMO fetch Quest or one of those side quests that you collect from the bulletin board in the middle

of the city in an open world game Fighter ok Combat in Fallout 3 and 4 is aided by barrels. The shooting isn't good and the enemies are very poorly designed so you need barrels to be able to hit things regularly in 76 you can't pause the fight so traditional vats won't work. It's been turned into a glorified aimbot that looks as ridiculous as it sounds, to be clear, the core issue here is enemy fallouts. Enemies are not designed to be shot down without vats. Most enemies will run up to you and crowd around you, blocking your view, forcing you to endlessly backtrack while reloading your weapon. Many of them scurry across your feet, forcing you to look down, meaning you have no peripheral vision. Many of them just move way too fast to get shot. Many of them burrow underground so you can't shoot them. Enemies in well-designed shooters present themselves as targets, so you could attack them and feel good about that engagement. Bethesda didn't feel like developing a suite o With enemies functioning without a traditional Vats model and as a result the entire combat loop falling apart, this comes on top of the extremely confusing decisions they make about what tier enemies are where these enemies are located at any given time and how much HP each of these enemies could let you go in an area and there can be level 6 enemies right next to level 25 enemies and the level 6 enemies die in one hit and the enemies level 25 full bullet sponges even though you are level 25 yourself and you should deal normal damage to them and the northern part of the map the southern pattern which doesn't matter where you go. It's a totally random potluck chance which level enemy you'll encounter at any point, it's ridiculously ok now let's talk crafting, the goal of Fallout 76 is in large part to allow for as much junk as possible collect it so you can scrap it and build stuff with it. That means the core non-combat game loop is collecting chunk buildin g A game with such a stupid gameplay loop might seem confusing, but don't worry, it gets worse. The carry limit you have is so absurdly low that you basically can't loot

or collect everything you will spend all your time playing this game to exceed your carry limit because it doesn't allow you to just go out and collect stuff like you just go out with a full leather armor and some basic supplies 2 or 3 weapons, just the bare minimum, takes up about 60-70% of your carry capacity right away, and you have to leave large amounts of valuable materials and weapons and armor on the ground because you just can't carry them when you get them back to base You find that your stash is at the absurdly low limit of £400. That means that with the few materials you have, it's basically impossible to store weapons and armor and all that stuff in the long run. Crafting is a massive task for you You have to unlock weapon and armor recipes by dismantling weapons and armor, but since your carry limit is so low you can't carry back many weapons and armor to craft, which means that unlocking recipes painfully slows down the Cr Setting up your camp takes frustrations to a new level. Terrain difficulties make dropping items extremely annoying. Your turrets just don't do anything, as enemies can literally pop out of the concrete foundations you've laid when you log out of your camp, if it can be removed someone is randomly building near your existing camp, so you'll have to rebuild the whole thing , when you log back in you can design a camp, but more often than not the terrain issues I mentioned mean you can't put it back down PvP is the best example of how the whole game is compromised and afraid of the dreaded grief, that so many people fear that Bethesda has completely neutered the PvP experience. It requires an awkward handshake that no one wants to partake in as there is no reward structure with PvP and there is absolutely no reason to do it so people just pretend

that the whole PvP system isn't even there and they're going about their business, that there aren't any good gameplay systems at work in Fallout 76, not one is interesting or innovative, and not one isn't so badly compromised that the system just has no value, it's a complete failure from a design and implementation perspective. Last November, the internet exploded in response to EAS's attempt to monetize Star Wars Battlefront - by being stuffed with loot crates tied to in-game progression, and there was a violent uprising from consumers who finally got fed up with it ever more insidious and exploitative microtransactions. It prompted immediate change as numerous publishers removed loot boxes from games or offered the no loot box guarantee as part of their core marketing to see the reaction to the Fallout 76 I think a similar reaction is occurring here I think people have finally enough of triple-A publishers releasing broken, unfinished games and then asking you to pay for the 76 improved over time, it feels like the straw that broke the camel's back, and out of this one Reason and for that reason alone I am glad that Fallout 76 is an unfinished, unimaginative and unacceptable product that Bethesda should be ashamed of and after seeing how bad this is makes me feel stupid Bethesda in the past to have let it off the hook so many times. I've no longer gone from giddy with excitement for Elder Scrolls 6 to active hostility when they're willing to sell the Fallout franchise so far down the river, stopping them from doing the same with Elder Scrolls