Fallout 76

[fragger]

I've read up a little on 76 and there is some kind of "solo" mode, but the devs stress that it ISN'T the same as thing as "single player". I'm not too clear on how that works, but I think that even if you elect for solo, you'll still see other players and they'll see you, but they won't be able to interact with or damage you, nor you them. Don't quote me on that though.

I dunno... No NPCs and no quests as such, at least not in the way we think of them in FO4. Doesn't appear to be anything much in the way of a story either. The graphics look good, but that won't mean a lot if the game is dull.

Unless there will be private sessions, it looks to me like the potential for infantile griefery may be high. Apparently if you die, you lose whatever you're carrying, so getting whacked by some toxic little squirt when you're trying to do something constructive would be infuriating. Also, due to the game being MP, there will be no pausing, not even when you're in your Pip-Boy, so you could get clobbered while you're accessing it, or while reading a note or message. It also means no slow-mo or zoom in V.A.T.S., so that basically becomes no more than a glorified aiming assist which stays in "real" time. I've seen a couple of other early-access clips and whenever anyone uses V.A.T.S., it doesn't appear to let the player select individual body parts, just the whole target. And it's hip-shooting only in V.A.T.S. - no ironsighting when using it. So what's the flipping point, really?

I'm also not sure about how building stuff will w0#k when you're with other players. There will be no settlements as such, naturally, since there are no NPCs to populate them. Settlement building is one of my favourite aspects of FO4, and just essentially building a base seems a poor substitute. I think I saw somewhere that you can plonk a base down anywhere, not just where existing Workbenches exist, so maybe that's something. But I hate the idea of planning out something I want to build in a particular place only for some other player to come along and start throwing up a monstrosity in the same spot. I don't know if you can scrap stuff that you've built, but if so I dearly hope that you can only scrap your own constructs, not other peoples'. Otherwise, that could be a supremely exasperating exercise.

If I don't sound terribly enthused, it's because I'm not. The more of 76 I see, the more I get turned off it.

[Art Blade]

yeah, it seems to be more like Day-Z, yet another MP survival game with zombies and the likes. Not my cup of tea, really.

[LowPolyOWG]

Oh and that URL can't w0#k because "w0#k" was censored while you posted it, replacing the word w0#k with the censored version. Now, even though I have disabled that censor feature for myself, I still see your censored version as a replacement in that URL. That simply doesn't "w0#k"

I haven't figured out a fix for that, thanks for the tip Even UBI*bleep**bleep* links are getting screwed up by the censor. And everything that have the word p0L!t!cs in it...

Disabled the censor and fixed the URL

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah, until I see real world video of what it looks like with other people on, I'll keep it in reserve. The video Art posted was a bunch of Bethesda devs and a couple of youtubers that were given early access by Bethesda so you know there's going to be very little to no griefing amongst them.

But watching that guy try to shoot, oh my freekin god, how horrible he is playing with a controller. I'm sure he shot other players at least a few times and it didn't seem to affect them, so either PvP was off or there's no friendly fire on your team mates. Since everyone he was near almost the entire time was on his team, there was no way to understand how PvP will w0#k. It was actually uncomfortable watching him try to navigate and do things that way. Either he's not good at using a controller in an FPS game or the control is really just bad. Watching him walk up stairs was painful, slide sideways because it's too difficult to actually turn and face the stairs, then get to the bottom, can't go up because he's not lined up right, then strafe back and forth holding forward trying to get the right spot to actually climb the stairs, just really bad. That takes dedication to a control scheme, that's for sure. I don't even know if he was using a console or just a PC with a controller, but seriously, there is a better way. It's called a mouse.

[Art Blade]

 

[Dweller_Benthos]

I haven't watched all this one yet, but the guy was also at the same event as the video Art posted, and he took his video and did post commentary on it to give a little more explanation to what is going on. Warning, there is a fair bit of cursing in this one.

[Art Blade]

that guy would be more than one reason for me to stay away from this game. Anyway, thanks for that vid, it was way more informative than what I watched before (I didn't make it to the end of the 3-hour-vid) and alright, it is not the version they're going to release. Which means, it may become better or worse, still.

All in all, this isn't Fallout anymore. It's a survival game with 4 player co-op in a PvP environment plus creatures and some base-building. I don't think that I'd buy this.

[fragger]

Regarding D_B's comments on that guy's playing style, I couldn't watch more than about 20 minutes of the video because the way he was moving around was giving me motion sickness... I also don't know why so many of the people who record these things never seem to be able to aim. Looked like just one shot in about five was hitting any part of whatever he was trying to target, even when the enemy was just a stone's throw away. Maybe it was the controller, or maybe he was just rubbish at playing. Or a bit of both.

Art, you may have summed it up, it looks pretty blah at this stage. I don't even like how the Pip-Boy looks - not the screen itself, which looks basically unchanged, but the housing for it. That's a minor gripe, though. Actually, no, it isn't - if I'm playing, I'll have to look at that ugly thing every time I use the PB. I much prefer the fifties-ish retro-future look of the PB in #4.

We won't really know what the finished product will be like until the reviews and impressions are in, but I certainly won't be rushing out to buy this without reading plenty of reports first. At this stage, I don't hold out a lot of hope.

[Art Blade]

indeed. There is one game that offers a concept that might w0#k for FO, it is Space Engineers. There you may join friends in their worlds and either go admire all the stuff they built or help them building stuff. In the end, there's a host and a guest, and the host has got full control. I did that with TerrZor and vice versa. We visited each other and would hang out together, show off stuff and so on, it was nice. That might w0#k for FO as well. Either you play nicely or get kicked, simply put. No meddling with someone's constructions without getting noticed, and perhaps punished. Plus, the host can reload a previous savegame and undo unwanted changes. On that premise I'd like to invite or visit a friend.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah the more I see of how this is shaping up, the less inclined I am to get into it, though I really wanted it to be something I could enjoy, the added factor of other players just seems to not be controlled as well as I'd like. Again, maybe when private servers and mods are a thing next year. I'll look at it again.

[fragger]

Well, at least we can still look forward to more SP Fallout games in the future. Bethesda's Todd Howard said that the company still very much intends to continue making more FO games for SP, while 76 is a kind of interlude. So if 76 isn't to our liking, another SP game will come along eventually.

Anyway, there's still plenty of life left in FO4 for me My enthusiasm for it hasn't waned one whit.

[Art Blade]

FO4 has been the best so far, I'd say. And I hope that 76 isn't turning the tables in favour of online multiplayer.

[fragger]

I never played any other FO games, so I can't really say whether 4 is the best. From what I can gather though, FO3 and FO: New Vegas are more dedicated RPG affairs, are more linear, and the shooting isn't as refined as in 4 (just what I've heard). I don't think I'd be inclined to try 3 or NV since RPGs aren't really my thing. 4 is okay because it's not really an RPG, it just masquerades as one. The open-ended design, the sandbox environment, the shooting and the settlement building are the things which strongly draw me to 4 (is it correct that there is no settlement building in earlier FOs?)

I'm not fussed about RPGs because I don't really want to make moral choices in a game. I do enough of that in real life Sometimes I just want to cut loose and shoot stuff without worrying about where my moral compass is pointing

[Art Blade]

there were no build options prior to FO4, true.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Fragger, I played FO3 and quite enjoyed it. For the most part, I just ignored most of the RPG stuff and just played it like a shooter. I really didn't see much difference between it and FO4 really, it just looks a bit older, and the graphics are slightly dated, but that didn't hamper my enjoyment of it. The weapon and armor degradation was annoying at first, but I got used to it and eventually just carried around some spares and repaired on the go if I needed to. Sure, there are some "moral" choices, like do you destroy the town or not, stuff like that, but it wasn't in your face about it. The only problem I had with it, and it was slightly my own fault, was I loaded a mod that unlocked the level cap and essentially got so high level that enemies took a long time to kill. I posted a video a while back about it, trying to kill a feral ghoul or something and it took many rounds from a laser gatling gun to kill, and that's the most powerful weapon in the game. I played a little of NV but didn't get very far as something else distracted me, eventually I'll get back to it.

Back to Fallout 76, here's another video from a person in the same group as the one in the video Art posted, a honest commentary with clips from their session, and he has the same concerns as we do, mostly how to you tell another player to go away if they keep hounding you for PvP? That sort of thing isn't in the game yet I guess, so there's no telling how the system will w0#k.