New Fallout game

[Owain Taggart]

That may be what's been missing from the modern Fallout games stories is a sense of belonging in the context of a wider world. Instead the world just feels like a wacky theme park where no "consequences" seem to matter all that much because they made it very hard to care about the NPCs.

Hmm, good point. Although personally, the first two felt too distanced. I suspect Bethesda decided to go with personal stories to give players a more personal stake and attachment to the world. Ironically, I think the first two stories could easily become sidequests now.

 

[Reverend]

Hmm, good point. Although personally, the first two felt too distanced. I suspect Bethesda decided to go with personal stories to give players a more personal stake and attachment to the world.

Honestly I think the original did a better job with this by giving us a greater latitude to define who our character was within the context of the world. With FO3 & FO4 we're given some very narrow parameters right up-front.
Another consideration is that you don't get the cognitive dissonance from your character unconcernedly mucking about with side quests and building settlements when logically they should be very focused on finding their father/son. The G.E.C.K. and the Water Chip are more tangible goals that both get you exploring the world AND necessitates that you engage with it. It enhances the experience of exploration rather than conflicts with it.

Ironically, I think the first two stories could easily become sidequests now.

Well, really speaking the only difference between a side quest and a main quest is just the volume of content and how the crucial points are gated. Hell, the Project Purity stuff in FO3 certainly felt rather side-questy at times and that was supposedly the whole point of the story.

 

[Owain Taggart]

I guess it all depends what one wants in a game. I was feeling far less involved in F1 to the point of not feeling motivated enough to finish it. And the thing is, with the exploration, they kind of negated that right from the start by initially giving the player a time limit to get the water chip, which they eventually patched out. It gave the effect of the game being at odds with itself and its huge world. So, thankfully they patched it out.

 

[SPCTRE]

 

[Jeyl]

Hmm, good point. Although personally, the first two felt too distanced. I suspect Bethesda decided to go with personal stories to give players a more personal stake and attachment to the world.

Problem with personal stories is that they may be more personal for the writer than they are of the player. Take the original Fallout for example. Your motivation is to help the vault with it's water chip problem, but solving the problem isn't set in stone. You can expose the vault to the Super Mutant army, join the Master or just let the Vault die. Or when you beat the game, you can kill the overseer or let him go on his merry way. So while the game gives you a quest, it doesn't tell you how you should feel personally about that quest and instead allows you to invest in the world in your own personal way.

Bethesda's Fallout games aren't like that. They want you to become personally invested in things I have little to no care about. For example, Fallout 3 is all about you carrying on your father's legacy. It's not about you, it's about him and his work. Fallout 4 is made even worse when the game forces you to play a character who is looking for their missing child. Personally, I don't want to play a Fallout game where I have to find my missing child. I never wanted a child in this game. I didn't even wanted to be married to a guy in the game! Yet the game constantly tries to remind me that what I want out of the game is not as important compared to trying to find my missing child. And despite four dialogue options, each one always made my character come off like Bale Batman demanding where my Kid is instead of being given the option of not giving a crap.

Here's another comparison for you.

Benny and Kellog

Both of these characters play an important role in the opening segments of their respected games. Now compare how much player freedom the player has in how they are able to deal with these two.

 

[Owain Taggart]

Ultimately, they're two different styles and I prefer the more modern approach, honestly. I find the original way too abstract for me to get invested in. But I get it, that for some, they might like to have more freedom on how to approach things.

 

[Jeyl]

Ultimately, they're two different styles and I prefer the more modern approach, honestly. I find the original way too abstract for me to get invested in. But I get it, that for some, they might like to have more freedom on how to approach things.

How would you categorize Fallout 76? I find it's whole method of storytelling worrisome given how the whole thing feels more like a creation club add-on where the developer didn't have the money or resources to hire actors, create new character models or do much research into the actual lore. You have notes, terminal entries and robots filling you in on what's happening which is usually how creation club handles it's content. Another unfortunate example is how both handle named NPCs. If you come across one of these characters, they're either a corpse that you loot or a generic bad guy NPC that you have to kill. That method plagues the Creation Club add-ons that have story to them and it looks like it's the standard of storytelling here.

Also the idea that there are no NPC encounters that you can interact with and get to know the world a bit better just doesn't feel like a Fallout game to me. Sure, one could argue that this is doing things different with the Fallout franchise, but the only way I can describe this difference is that it's just 'less' of what we had before and what's less is what I usually look forward to the most in Fallout games.

Now Bethesda can brag all they want about how every person we meet in the game is being played by a real person, to which I say that I've already met people like that in a dozen other games and it's not what I would call a solid selling point. It's like saying that your new job will involve dealing with customers. Real people aren't a huge selling point for me.

And when it comes to the map being 4x bigger than Fallout 4's map, well, after playing the tech demo event in Virginia, one user said "Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle." That's my expectations coming from this game.

Also, why are the Brotherhood on the East Coast 20 years after the Bombs dropped?

 

[Owain Taggart]

How would you categorize Fallout 76?

A multiplayer persistent-world shooter with elements of the Fallout franchise? It's kind of interesting in the sense that Interplay had wanted to develop a multiplayer Fallout as early as when Bethesda first snapped up the rights to the franchise. But I agree, from what I've seen of it in previews, it worries me. Then again, it's not a main game in the franchise. I'd consider it a spinoff.

I'd actually much rather see some co-op gaming in the the main series of games, both Elder Scrolls and Fallout. Games in the past have shown that the technology is there to drop in and out of games such as Watchdogs, and I'd have it set so you can have friends tag along to complete missions together in place of your companion. Fallout 76 in comparison looks and feels so sterile, and you can bet it will be full of griefers.

 

[SPCTRE]

 

[Reverend]

And here I thought the game was just going to be a load of boring shite. I appear to have vastly underestimated what a colossal critical, commercial and PR mess it was really going to be!

 

[Haggis and tatties]

And here I thought the game was just going to be a load of boring shite. I appear to have vastly underestimated what a colossal critical, commercial and PR mess it was really going to be!

(•_•)You could say there has been ( •_•)>⌐■-■ a massive Fallout. (⌐■_■) Yeeeeaaaaahhhh


No....


...I'l get me coat.

 

[Owain Taggart]

So, Bethesda did a switcheroo on a $200 collector's edition where they were promising a canvas bag as and switched it with a nylon bag ( a thin looking one too at that) without telling anyone or changing the marketing and when complaining, fans are being told they had to switch to nylon due to unavailability of materials and that “we hope this doesn’t prevent you from enjoying what we feel is one of our best collector’s editions”.

I don't know about anyone else, but if I were paying $200 for a collector's edition, I'd be expecting to get what was advertised. $200 is a lot of money. They have a right to be angry.

https://kotaku.com/200-fallout-76-edition-promised-fancy-bag-delivers-ny-1830724582

 

[BillJ]

...fans are being told they had to switch to nylon due to unavailability of materials...

Who knew we were living through the great canvas shortage?!

 

[Owain Taggart]

Hah yes! That's exactly in line with some of the comments I've seen.

 

[Haggis and tatties]

So, Bethesda did a switcheroo on a $200 collector's edition where they were promising a canvas bag as and switched it with a nylon bag ( a thin looking one too at that) without telling anyone or changing the marketing and when complaining, fans are being told they had to switch to nylon due to unavailability of materials and that “we hope this doesn’t prevent you from enjoying what we feel is one of our best collector’s editions”.

I don't know about anyone else, but if I were paying $200 for a collector's edition, I'd be expecting to get what was advertised. $200 is a lot of money. They have a right to be angry.

https://kotaku.com/200-fallout-76-edition-promised-fancy-bag-delivers-ny-1830724582

I don't know about the US, but here in the UK it is classed as criminal consumer law to fradulently advertise and sell said product to consumers, so this is going to be very interesting to watch, and here the only offical seller of this item is Game.uk, for £180, and they are still advertising it with the canvas bag. lol

 

[Rincewiend]

So, Bethesda did a switcheroo on a $200 collector's edition where they were promising a canvas bag as and switched it with a nylon bag ( a thin looking one too at that) without telling anyone or changing the marketing and when complaining, fans are being told they had to switch to nylon due to unavailability of materials and that “we hope this doesn’t prevent you from enjoying what we feel is one of our best collector’s editions”.

I don't know about anyone else, but if I were paying $200 for a collector's edition, I'd be expecting to get what was advertised. $200 is a lot of money. They have a right to be angry.

https://kotaku.com/200-fallout-76-edition-promised-fancy-bag-delivers-ny-1830724582

It gets worse though:

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[Owain Taggart]

I don't know about the US, but here in the UK it is classed as criminal consumer law to fradulently advertise and sell said product to consumers, so this is going to be very interesting to watch, and here the only offical seller of this item is Game.uk, for £180, and they are still advertising it with the canvas bag. lol

Yeah, this is exactly the kind of thing that a class action suit would make sense for, and consumers would very likely win. It's Bethesda's lack of communication that's at fault for misrepresentation. They likely did so as a means to make more money on unsuspecting customers, and I don't believe the shortage one bit. I think it's all about cutting corners to save money. I don't buy CE's, never have as I don't need the extra junk. But if I did and paid over $200, I'd be furious. I think customers who put down that cash deserve a bit more respect than what Bethesda have given them. It's awful. You can't just blow off customers like that as if it were peanuts. The response from them that they won't change a thing is ridiculous. This is a kind of thing where the company should really be doing more to make it up to them, even if they receive a canvas bag a bit later on. To top it off, all they're getting as some form of compensation is $5 worth of atoms. That's shitty. Bethesda had a chance to make good on their promises and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, but they did exactly the opposite. They've already been getting terrible feedback from this game, and their actions only further drag them into stinky mud. I suspect this will be a very costly mistake for them.

It gets worse though:

Ugh wow. Now what I wonder is, seeing as they already had these bags made, why couldn't they, you know, use these instead of the nylon bags?

 

[BillJ]

Ugh wow. Now what I wonder is, seeing as they already had these bags made, why couldn't they, you know, use these instead of the nylon bags?

More expensive to produce.

I don't think I can ever remember a game launch that has been botched as badly as Fallout '76. For all the shit EA pulls, their shit at least mostly seems to work.

I also don't think they're doing themselves any favors building the next Elder Scrolls game on the same engine.

 

[Owain Taggart]

I also don't think they're doing themselves any favors building the next Elder Scrolls game on the same engine.

Well, to be fair, I don't think it's their engine that is the issue. The issue is the framework that their engine is built upon, and the practices behind it. Engines get upgraded over time all the time, from Epic to Id, and they all get new features and improvements over time. I really can't blame Bethesda for wanting to stick to the same engine with the same framework. They know their tools and are comfortable using them. That said, It's become increasingly obvious over time that the framework is becoming less and less suited to what they want to do with it and the problem is that there's so much aging kludge built up over each game's release and has only gotten worse. All that kludge has made things clunky. And that is painfully obvious when adding netcode to the engine, even while they apparently had help from Id in helping them make 76 happen. The result looks like a slapdash effort of trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole. I think the netcode must be interacting with older code that was never meant to be interacted with in such a fashion. And honestly, I don't think the game should have ever been released. Certainly not in this state anyway. I've watched youtube videos of people playing it and it's a horror show. If I were Bethesda, I would be very very embarrassed.


I think the bigger question would be, why aren't they using Id's engine? Given that the two of them are now connected at the hip, it would be far easier for them to adopt Id's engine while gaining a whole new set of benefits while also getting a lot of expertise and help from Id.

 

[SPCTRE]

Jason Schreyer did a passable job of explaining why blaming the "engine" with Bethesda's games is not quite getting at the underlying problems

https://kotaku.com/the-controversy-over-bethesdas-game-engine-is-misguided-1830435351