Fallout 76

[OrangeRKN]

If you're not bothered about the lore/reading notes/listening to holotapes, then it's great in multiplayer. I prefer singleplayer because it let me thoroughly explore and find those things at my own pace.

[Whiskey_chaser]

18 hours ago, OrangeRKN said:

If you're not bothered about the lore/reading notes/listening to holotapes, then it's great in multiplayer. I prefer singleplayer because it let me thoroughly explore and find those things at my own pace.

 

I've been doing a bit of both. The lore/notes have been pretty great so far, with some pretty dark side quests (did one last night about a kidnapped child that got pretty creepy). But yeah, it's a lot of fun. I've even got stuck into the building aspect and now have a nice three story house with turret defences.

It's got it's share of bugs, but it's no worse than any of the previous ES/Fallout games and so far they've just made us laugh. It's just a fantastic world to get lost in with loads of environmental story telling on the go. I'm now really looking forward to the expansion.

 

I'd say that if anyone enjoyed any of the last few Fallout games and you can get two or three people together to play this with, it's well worth picking up cheap.

[Maf]

I’m still fascinated with this and want to get back in to it at some point. 

[Whiskey_chaser]

More Fallout shenanigans with my online buddies. We've absolutely fallen in love with this game. It's just such a good playground to dick around in as a group, with so many cool things to discover. A lot of people have bemoaned the lack of NPCs but it hasn't affected my enjoyment of it at all. For me, the recent Fallout games have all been about the visual story telling in the world itself. The lone skeleton sitting in a bath in a burnt out hut with a bottle of whisky. The recently dead survivor with their head in a gas oven. And this game has it in droves. The pic below with me posing next to the bed, there was an angry letter on the bedside table next to it about a concerns over a man's obsession with a store mannequin he'd started to call 'Suzie'. There's also some a narrative being played out in pieces found throughout the world about a corruption charge against a person who's name is exactly the same as one of the people i'm playing with.

So yeah, roll on the Wastelanders expansion. Can't wait to find me a bow to start shooting scorched with.

 

 

Edited: Pictures 

 

 

 

[OrangeRKN]

2 hours ago, Whiskey_chaser said:

For me, the recent Fallout games have all been about the visual story telling in the world itself. The lone skeleton sitting in a bath in a burnt out hut with a bottle of whisky. The recently dead survivor with their head in a gas oven. And this game has it in droves.

 

Exactly! Bethesda aren't very good at writing branching quests with player agency, that was a problem in Skyrim and Fallout 4 especially. Fallout 76 avoids that and instead provides more of what they are good at - environmental storytelling of people and events from the past. As you mention, a lot of them are very interconnected in 76, which makes the world as a whole more interesting to explore and discover the history of.

 

It's why I'm actually a little worried about wastelanders.

[DisturbedSwan]

Glad to hear you're enjoying it @Whiskey_chaser it's an absolute blast with mates!

[Whiskey_chaser]

Still having a right laugh with this. It's my favourite Fallout game. There - I said it. Easily the best Fallout world to explore, still stumbling over so many cool places, like the town that got lifted out of the ground by a massive rad tree that we found last night.

[OrangeRKN]

Absolutely agree on it being the most interesting map/world they've done. It's huge, with impressive verticality (that tree being one great example), and it has genuinely different biomes/areas.

[Whiskey_chaser]

Boom - the Wastelanders update is now out, and best of all it's free. Now people can stop moaning about the lack of NPCs! Seriously though, I've played a fuck ton of this game with friends and its nice how the update shakes things up a bit. I'm not sure how the factions are going to warm to my 'stab everything in the face without prejudice' approach to wasteland living, but it's fun. We've already discovered a load of new enemy types (not that it was lacking before that) and i'm now the proud owner of a flaming chainsaw.

The best 1st person Fallout now got better.

 

[Maf]

I’m about 6 hours in, hit level 11, and think I’m finally starting to find some fun with this game.

 

I was having fun with it before as I was learning the basics. But then I learned them and the game just dried up for a while. Fallout 76 doesn’t give away anything for free. Unlike Fallout 3 and 4 those games are good at getting the player rolling via quests and heavily suggested direction. Also through quick progression. The level ups are fast, meaningful and advantageous in the early portions of those games. 

 

76 doesn’t have any of that. 6 hours in I’m still using the same weapons I was using 4 hours ago. It won’t let me make any new ones. I don’t know where I’m going or what I should do. Just push myself from one searched area to the next. The level up system is just stacking largely unhelpful perks on top each other so I don’t feel empowered or like I’m getting stronger at all. 
 

The game just won’t let me ‘progress’. It’s as boring and as much as a slog as it sounds. 
 

Then I interacted with people and it became fun. Firstly I joined an open team, and even though I wasn’t playing with them directly, I started to level up faster because of bonus Xp.

 

Then I accidentally cracked another players safe and stole something and was hunted down by two people. They were both over level 200. I was level 8. They started jumping around me and taunting me because they knew I couldn’t do anything. So I dropped a grenade on the floor for all of us and they, well, they killed me as it went off so I don’t know what I did to them. I like to think I at least burned them a little bit.
 

Then I accidentally started an event by clicking on buttons without reading what it does. And as the area I was trying to defend solo was going under 4 other people turned up with laser Gatling canons and wiped out all the pests. It was great. And gave me something to aim for. I want a laser Gatling canon. 
 

Basically I’m torn on the game. I like it, and think there could be fun here, I also get why it locks so many things you want behind systems. Because it’s trying to force interactions both with other players and mechanics you might avoid otherwise. But I just think for the beginning some of it is so slow. 6 hours in and only now just as I turned it off did I get the ability to craft level 1 guns, and still I need to find schematics for those guns first. 

[therealjaxon]

6 hours doesn't sound long for a Fallout game tbh, its usually around 10.

I was looking for this thread as I was curious whether F76 is still a dedicated MMORPG or can it be played single player now? (Properly played I mean)

[Maf]

I ended up over 20 hours in to F76 and will play more at some point (It's a good podcast game). I can't speak to the endgame of it, I assume there are missions/raids/events that you need other people for. But I've been playing it solo essentially. I see other people here and there. Almost have no contact with them. I join teams for the bonus' but don't actually go to where they are. 

 

The few times I've interacted with people I think it makes the game better. I would rather play this game in a group than solo. Fallout makes more sense when there are other people in it. 

 

But if you want to play it solo you can. There are a lot of differences from regular Fallout, I think overall the quality is lower in everyway (Technical, writing, missions, world design, etc), it's a much slower start and it doesn't hold your hand at all, but if you miss Fallout and want to get in and do some B-rate quality Fallout stuff then this is good for it. 

[Whiskey_chaser]

Yeah, there's pretty much a single player campaign in there now. It's a lot more fun with a group of players though.

Also, if playing on XBox, it now supports FPS boost which changes the game considerably.

Can't remember if I posted this on here, but a friend I was playing with made a book of all our online exploits in this game...

 

[Sly Reflex]

A quick bump because I'm gonna have a natter about this soon and I feel like it might be a long rambly one. I need to do it at some normal hour as well, maybe coming fresh of a session of the game.

[Sly Reflex]

Fallout 76 then. 16 hours sunk into it, maybe level 13 or 14. Something like that.

 

Now obviously I’m coming into this a few years into the release and things have been sorted. It’s probably a very different game from when it first launched. I can only give you impressions of where we are now and what I've seen personally.

 

Impressions are a mixed bag. For a start off, it’s nowhere as bad as a lot of people will have you believe. In fact, I feel that if this didn’t have the Fallout licence slapped on it and it was a completely new intellectual property, I feel it would have fared a lot better than it did on its initial drop.

 

On the flip side of that, it’s also not very good. What they’ve done is try to fold an experience that reflects what they thought Fallout should play like as a multiplayer game, but it’s not really what anyone wanted. Sort of like how Elder Scrolls Online isn’t what anyone that played the mainline series of games would be at a loss at how ESO plays, this is similar. I think the nature of FO76 fits more, but it has the MMO jank that is hard to remove because of the nature of those games work. There’s a weird disconnect of latency as you go through combat and it all feels a bit spongy.

I feel like for all the faults levelled at Fallout 4, it got one thing very right, and that’s how the combat played out. 3 and NV had pretty poor action and people tend to overlook that. 4 nailed it and made all the rigmarole of looting and stuff much easier. It allowed for quicker play with lots of QoL improvements that you’d expect from a more modern game. 76’s combat and moment to moment gameplay resembles this as close as it can within the constraint of the MMO lite framework it exists in. There’s no pausing, no slowing shit down, everything happens whether you want it to or not. VATS for all it’s worth might as well not be in the game, you can still use it but it’s not really a thing you can rely on to get you out of tight sports like the previous three games. It’s just sort of there.

 

The other aspect of this game that might put some off is the fact you have to eat and drink. Stuff is split into a few categories. All the crap you find in the previous games that can heal you for fuck all are present and correct and can be consumed to relieve some hunger and give you buffs. Stuff like medicines can also alter your metabolism for the better or worse. One offs such as liquors or drugs that offer buffs and perks can also alter your needs. The other side of the foods spectrum is stuff that can spoil, generally things that you can cook and make fresh from kills in the game can stave off hunger, but need cooking lest you risk making yourself ill from eating unprepared food stuffs.

While it might seem a huge pain in the arse, I actually quite like that things can go bad. It means that you only loot what you plan to use and anything that goes over that is either sold for caps or shared with party members. It’s not something you need to worry about so much though, it’s really easy to keep fed and water, with perks to your overall abilities for keeping well maintained.

 

I’ve not spent much time building, I’d say less than 10 minutes, but it’s more or less the same as it was in 4. I will say this though, building on mouse and keys is a pain in the cock. Having to press keys all over the keyboard from the resting point is something they could have avoided, but chose not to. 

 

In fact the controls in this game are wild, and I think a lot of it comes down to the way the game is designed. They wanted a full colour map so having it on the Pip-boy wasn't doable. So they put that on escape but because they put that on escape all the things that would be on escape are now on the “z” key. But in the actual gameplay, z does nothing. M also brings the map up. The keys outside WASD also shortcut to parts on the Pip-boy. They’ve crammed so much shit into the Pip-boy that it’s time consuming to do anything, you have all this screen space but they’re so obsessed with making you look like you’re playing a Fallout game that it’s all wasted. There’s even another screen you can do away with the Pip-boy to try and make things a bit clearer to use, but it’s still a convoluted mess. It could be simplified so much but they fucked it. The inventory tab is really rammed with options. Why is the armour separated from the apparel? It’s extra shit I have to click through for no reason.

 

This whole system needs a rethink, there’s so much busy work needed to navigate the Pip-boy, a system that was already convoluted before, but is even worse now it has to be done in real time.

 

This mentality in design sort of exemplifies the 76 experience. I don't know when they did it, but they retrofit a season pass thing in that is a themed board game from the era where you level up by doing achievements that are part of this season pass. It's pretty novel because usually you level these things just by getting EXP, but they went and did something more involving and for that they need recognition. It’s not like they did the bare minimum. Where would you expect something that is constantly popping up on your screen each time you earn EXP? Because there’s no shortcut key to it, you have to go to the map, press “z” and then navigate to the “scoreboard”. It’s only because we’re tinkering with stuff all the time you manage to find this, it’s so hidden away that you could be forgiven if you miss it completely.

Some shit is just broken. Inviting people into the squad can be finicky. Using crafting tables can be hit or miss and again the UI and general usability of these are a pain in the arse. I see a lot of other stuff in game where I can’t actually use them yet, but I’m pretty unimpressed with their implementation. For instance, you have a bit of gear. It needs repairing. You think you’d find it, click repair and it’d be done, right? No. You have to find it, switch the crafting table to repair. Inspect the item, choose whether to repair it with repair points or by using the table itself using mats you’ve collected. So many hoops to be jumping through, it's kind of ridiculous.

 

There’s stuff that conflicts as well, and I think this comes down to them not having any NPCs in the game outside of robots. For instance in any other Fallout game to trade with someone you go up, press E to start talking to them, and then offer to open a trade. Here you press R to open a trade, but sometimes this just fucks up completely and you end up drawing and sheathing your weapon. I think this is partly down to server latency as well, but yeah. Not good. Especially when pressing E on these characters does nothing even though it says it does something. It’s bewildering.

NPC’s are in the game and act how you expect. Very Fallout. I’ve no complaints. I really like that you can do the NV thing of using your stats to affect the flow of the conversation. It’s how it should be. I think it might be a case of Hobsons Choice where you get funnelled down the same path regardless of your respond, but still, I like it.

 

Levelling has taken a massive deviation. SPECIAL starts at 1’s across the board and instead of putting points distributed off small guns and science or whatever, it’s massively simplified where each letter of SPECIAL fills a niche, and then depending on how many points you have in each letter denotes how many collectable cards you can put in. So for example the perk Strong Back from previous games appears, but you have to drop it by levelling up and getting a card for it and putting it in the S part of SPECIAL. You can also merge cards to make them more powerful. Is it better from the old way of doing it? No. Is it worse? Also no, it’s just different. I think, and I might be wrong here, that you can have lots of different SPECIAL builds. You can for sure swap the cards in and out to what you need at the moment, which is super nice. I really like this flexibility. Like I say, it’s different, takes a bit of time to get your head around.

 

Map is fine. Enemies are fine from what I’ve seen. Weapon stuff levels up in blocks of 5 instead of blocks of 1 in the other games. Legendary perks are back from how they worked in 4, but also you can get multiple legendary perks on one thing. I don’t know how this plays out in the long run, I got a sledge hammer that has a perk on it and the thing one shots most enemies and I’m not even levelled up properly yet, so unless there’s some major scaling coming my way towards the end of the game I don’t know how essential these legendries are going to be.

 

There’s some other things like beds and musical instruments that you can use to get well rested bonuses and well tuned bonuses, as well as cooked meals that can provide benefits also. Stuff like that in conveyed under your AP bar.

One thing I really like is that your perks you have play animations whenever they fire off. So Whenever I paint over ammo, med or food containers I’ll often get a little animation signifying I got a little bit extra. Loot seems to be mostly instanced, but some items are not, which is pretty weird, you’d think it would all be instanced or not at all.

 

Despite all the shortcomings, it’s still kind of fun to play. Generally the community of the people we’ve seen have either ignored us or helped us with care packages out of their own pockets. It’s also really nice to see random buildings in places that are in places that make sense where you naturally run out of resources or have hard fights, so having a free bed to sleep in and some other trimmings to take away the aches of travels are super nice. Not all buildings can be entered, but it seems more often than not people leave their stuff open so you can get some rest and water and feed yourself should you need it.

 

The real star of the show here is the soundtrack though. The ambient music is beautiful and unobtrusive and the radio stations have all the hits you’d expect and more. Having Beach Boys and Johnny Cash unexpectedly pop up on the tunes was a welcome surprise. I sort of hope over time they add more and more appropriate classics.

Should you play Fallout 76? Debatable. If you’re going in alone then probably not, if you have a few people to play with, then I say go get it. It’s shitty, it’s janky. Barely anything is explained properly, but it has some short term charm and manages to do the action RPG in ways that games like Anthem failed. It can also be genuinely funny at points, not in a ha ha, look at this broken shit way (which also happens a lot), but in a witty macabre way that a lot of games struggle to achieve. 

[Whiskey_chaser]

Glad you're enjoying it @Sly Reflex, I had a blast with this at the start of lockdown (though I was gifted the premium bundle for free). You just have to embrace the jankiness. Playing with friends, I can't remember any game that's made me laugh so hard, both intentionally and unintentionally. 

 

This game will always have a special place in my heart due to the fact that it kept me and some friends relatively sane during a period where drinking red wine at 10:00am on a Saturday morning was deemed socially acceptable.

[Sly Reflex]

It is oddly good in a way I can't really describe. There's just something about it that's really hard placing my finger on, it's not like all the issues that's dead easy to pinpoint. There's a certain veneer of magic on there, it's just spunked over with a litany of small things that gum up the overall experience.

 

I really like the card system as well. I think now I've spent some time with it I'd like to see it come back in some shape or form in future Fallout games.

[one-armed dwarf]

Kind of Bethesda games in general. Looks like shit on the outside, when you get into it they're unlike anything else

[Sly Reflex]

The more I play this, the more I like it.

 

Throw it on the pile with Sea of Thieves and No Mans Sky (which I've not played, but will one day), the pile of maligned games that don't really deserve the release hate stench they have. It still has issues, sure, but yeah. It's not anywhere near as bad as people put out. UI is fucking messy, it feels like several teams all smashed their ideas of how something should work and decided they were all right. That's my main criticism. Everything else can be overlooked.

[Maf]

God dammit. I was attacked by a level 40 legendary irradiated mutant thing which I couldn't even get close to because it was sending my rads through the roof. So I doubled back and ran back to a place called White Orchard Hotel or something like that. It's essentially a village which was protected by a bunch of robots. So as planned everything there was attacking the legendary mutant, and I dunno what happened, but I guess in the cross fire I hit one of the NPC's or robots and now I can't go near the place because all the robots attack and kill me. 

 

I had a mission inside the hotel...I guess I just leave it until I find some way to fix my relationship with the place? If that's possible? 

 

My bad. I WAS JUST TRYING TO SURVIVE BUT FUCK ME FOR WANTING TO LIVE I GUESS