The vitriol surrounding Fallout 76 is very puzzling to me

I'm 15 hours in and really enjoying Fallout 76. I maintain that if you liked Fallout 4, you will like Fallout 76. If you didn't like Fallout 4, or are burned out on it, you won't like Fallout 76.

It's currently being review bombed on metacritic with a ratio of 330 positive / 807 negative.

It's frustrating because when you read the text of the user reviews a lot of people have not even played the game. At least with Steam reviews, you can see if someone has purchased the game and how much time in-game they have. They think that there are no NPCs (a robot isn't a non playable character?). And that no NPCs = No Story. It's simply not true.

It's just a shame that there are a lot of Fallout fans out there who will probably not try this game because of a puzzling vocal minority of hyperbole fueled internet rage-monsters.

As for me, I'm going to go back to building my cottage now. It has a downstairs crafting garage, with an upstairs living area, complete with deck and BBQ grill. It's a great place to chill when I'm done reclaiming West Virginia from the supermutants.

Useless user reviews aside it's not surprising that people would be jaded on this.. I feel like the reaction to Fallout 4 for a lot of people was "This is still okay but something has to give" and it doesn't appear that anything really has.

I don't think vocal minority is going to stop anyone from playing this game. I think a lot of people inherently didn't want an online fall out experience with almost no story or characters, but it's not going to stop a ton of people from buying it because "Bethesda".

As a Fallout fan who has no intention of ever playing this game, my reasons are mostly that it doesn't look in any way like a Fallout game; it looks more like No Man's Sky with a Fallout skin.

Fallout games have never been known for their sharp gunplay, or incredible graphics; in fact, going back to Fallout: New Vegas has reminded me how terrible those games look and feel sometimes. But Fallout is still my favorite franchise of all time because of its worldbuilding. The worlds of Fallout 3 and New Vegas are full of interesting, unusual locales, populated with equally interesting and unusual locals, and the stories that game tells are full personality and dark humor. Fallout 4 really fell flat for me because a lot of that personality was stripped down, and the game presented its world with a much straighter face than usual. The RPG and morality systems were pared down as to feel nonexistent, a lot of the side quests lacked charm, and ultimately the world you were walking around in didn't really hold up past the veneer of "post-apocalypse meets old-timey music." Based on everything I've seen about Fallout 76, including the extensive GB quick look, all those problems are still there, and some are actually worse due to the lack of player choice, and absence of NPCs other than generic quest-givers and merchants. The shooting looks satisfying enough (Fallout 4 definitely improved over predecessors in that respect), and if you're into base-building I think that system is pretty flexible, but Fallout 76 has not been pitched on its humor, its story, or its characters, and those are the things I think of when I think of Fallout games.

Is Fallout 76 a bad game? I have no idea, and it's definitely not right to trash the game without playing it. It even looks like a good "one of those," by which I mean a base-building survival game in a shared online world. But I doubt I'll ever play it, because nothing I've seen of that game has anything that I really like about Fallout in general, and I imagine similar feelings are what's driving all the hate towards the game.

The problem is that Bethesda seems to have taken this weird middle ground that pleases neither of their largest demographics for the game. You have the longterm Fallout fans that want story and npcs and quests and don't want their fun ruined by online jackasses, so there are things to prevent people from messing with them too badly. But the Rust players who want to mess with people and be jackasses are also catered to with pvp, but they can't do any actual damage on account of the first group. So the people just trying to get along and play the game can get killed by the Rust jackasses, but the killing folks and dying doesn't really affect anything in the world, so what's the point of even having PvP to begin with?

They're trying to mix two things that probably can't be mixed, add in their almost comically poor quality assurance, and you have lots of different groups that will be disappointed by this.

I think the really poor beta issues didn't help. Bethesda coming out ahead and giving a statement on "glorious array of issues" wasn't received as a funny "tongue-in-cheek" self-ribbing and came across more to people as Bethesda smugly celebrating their own poor history of bug-fixing.

Really didn't help that there really were some of the worst bugs in the beta launcher, namely the launcher deleting itself and also preventing players from uninstalling the beta if they didn't buy the game.

More power to you for enjoying it, but I'm a huge Fallout fan and after about 4 hours with the beta, I knew I wanted nothing more to do with the game.

The Fallout fans that want to play this will find it and play despite the reviews. The other fans who wanted something else won't. Fallout 76 is in a small way like Diablo Immortal - it is something that will probably be succesful in it's own right, and a good portion of fans will be into it, but it's probably not what a lot of fans were actually looking to get out of the franchise going forward.

It is interesting to see the second splintering of the fanbase. Along with Fallout 3 fans of the original games from the late 90's kinda fell off while a whole new contingent of folk found a new game to love. Now it seems like those new-age Fallout fans are starting to split up between those that want narrative driven gameplay and those that just want the open Bethesda sandbox experience.

Bethesda coming out and saying "it's going to be a buggy mess lol" and some of those bugs being things like "can't uninstall the game" and "deletes your entire directory" during the beta gave people ample ammunition to hate on the release. There's also issues with the way the game handles nukes that have some people feeling uncomfortable about it, and just a general sentiment that it looks... Not great as well. Of course the internet is going to take things to the extreme, but I do think there is a core of issues here that are at least understandable.

Obviously, the people posting reviews without playing it are being silly and disingenuous but there are obviously people who were really into the last Fallout, have played this new one, and don't like it. It's not possible to dictate to those people that they must actually like the game; they are being vocal that they don't and we have to incorporate that into our understanding of the audience reaction. As for the long-time Fallout fans out there, if they're interested in Fallout and following the series, I don't think their opinion on it is going to be defined by the Metacritic user score.

Certain people will always take things too far of course but it's not hard to see why this game has turned a lot of people off. Fallout 4 isn't exactly as fondly remembered as Skyrim and 76 seems to lean harder into the things people didn't like about that game. There's definitely something to be said about the fact that this is a different thing with different aims, but you put out a new Fallout game and you're going to have expectations.

Yeah, I disagree that if you liked Fallout 4 you'll like Fallout 76. They're entirely different games. I play Fallout for the character interactions and storylines involving people that I can interact with. 76 has none of that.

I'm going to say it's got more to do with the direction of Fallout under Bethesda than Fallout 76 specifically.

A large chunk of Fallout fans want a return to RPG Fallout rather than shooter Fallout. 4 and 76 are just taking the franchise further into shooter territory.

I don't get it either. I watched the live stream yesterday and was like... yeah, it looks like Fallout 4 with multiplayer. I guess people were really looking forward to getting another main line Fallout story? That's never really been the appeal of it to me. Game seems like fun, I don't know. And I imagine that they will be keeping up with adding content so the "empty" world will be much less empty in a few months.

I will say that it absolutely should not be a $60 game, though. $40 at most.

I have only watched about 30 minutes of the VOD, but I actually think it looked kind of neat. My concern (and the reason I cancelled my pre-order) is that it’s an online game and people are terrible, people online doubly so.

I spent enough time being murdered on early WoW pvp servers to realize I never need to play another game with mandatory pvp. If they ever patch in an option to remove pvp flagging, I’ll gladly buy it.

Fallout was always about the world, the characters and to a degree the isolation for me.

Now it's multiplayer and there literally are no characters in the world except other players. Also removing NPCs is the stupidest thing ever. That totally ruins Fallout, in my opinion this should just be a different game.

I'm surprised because to me it just sort of came from seemingly nowhere. A month ago nobody seemed bothered to even talk about the game. Now it's getting review bombed by people who are salty about it not being what they want.

@ltcolumbo: You don't really have to worry about it at all. I had a guy try to gank me and he spent like ten minutes following and shooting at me before he made a decent dent in my HP, and I just used a stim and he gave up. Unless the opponent reciprocates you're literally gonna run out of bullets before you kill someone.

I can't echo @ares42 enough here. The PvP aspects were, a billion percent, the reason why I wasn't even going to give this game a chance. But there is a system in place where you literally take a fraction of a percent of full damage from other players until you return fire, which is sort of the game's way of initiating a formal duel. If you turn on Pacifist Mode--which is just a setting in a menu you can flip on at any time--you will never be meaningfully affected by other players using conventional arms.

@inevpatoria: @ares42: well, holy shit, that sounds like an acceptable solution. I’m probably going to have to buy it then. Thanks to both of you!

Sadly I think this is just the last piece of evidence that Bethesda has no idea what makes Fallout good. Not to mention them having zero idea about existing lore. Its pedantic but you'd think whoever writes these things would maybe check to see if what they do contradicts anything else.

Bring back Obsidian.

@hayt When you say Fallout, which one do you mean? Are you talking about Bethesda's take since 3, the original games or both? Because, to me, there's a hard break between pre and post Bethesda Fallout.

This is insane to me. It's a game with a permanent PvP mode but a player attacking you is just a mild inconvenience. Are there any mechanics in this game that aren't just half finished half measures?

I think I would be bothered more by this game if the main team at Bethesda werent working on a new IP which conceptually sounds cool. (I dont care whether it's still using the Creation/Gamebyro engine) Much like EA and Bioware giving Mass Effect to their C team I think Bethesda doing the same for Fallout was a bad idea.

I'm not surprised by the hate mob and review bombing, I mean Shadow of the Tomb Raider got review bombed for going on fucking sale. It was hard for me to find an articulate breakdown of the systems and an actual even tempered analysis of the game. Everyone needs to be angry to get them clicks I guess.

Maybe it's because I've never been able to get invested in any of Fallout's story stuff in the past, but watching the quick look, I thought it looked like fun. Jeff essentially said it's a Fallout game that has the shallow charms, but none of the narrative substance. As someone who never found myself caring about any of the characters or plot points of Fallout 3/4, that doesn't sound like the end of the world to me. Seems some of the narrative stuff has just been replaced with other systems that people will either appreciate, or not.

As with the vast majority of internet backlash, I can't fully understand it.

I've been kinda shitty about 76 in stream chats in the past so I should apologize and say if people enjoy it thats pretty much all that matters.

I understand taking umbrage with the design decision, but I don't see how their solution to PvP is something "half finished."

No problem! I hope you enjoy it!

We're 3 years away from Fallout 4 and this is in many regards a worse game but offers a multiplayer experience. Now i get that Fallout + Multiplayer sounds like a dream to some and you might not care about the aspects that have become straight up worse in those 3 years but when there's not much to really sink your teeth in, it all feels kinda pointless. Even the positive accounts i read are mostly about how the exploration & quests are sort of fun but the whole multiplayer is a non-factor (not enough players on the map, pvp not worthwhile) or straight up bad (VATS is pointless, people getting booted from the server, losing minutes of progression, securing workshops for caps that you lose if you drop from the server)

Even the big 'gather all the nuke codes & nuke a part of the map' part sounds kinda lame when all you achieve is making that spot spawn higher level enemies that drop better loot. Why do i want to be the one to gather all those codes & do all the busiwork when i can just let others do that and go to the high level area when the nuke has been dropped by others? The decryption part has already been solved by a modding tool to cut out the busiwork of visiting an enclave bunker. It sounds like a public event that just requires some people to trigger it instead of the server having those events on a timer. That's the big hook of this game, having to trigger a public event yourself?

If you're buying into this for the PVP aspect, you buy into a series that has never been great at gunplay. Gunplay that once was supported by a working VATS system. Why would you want to put your skills to the test against another human when there are dozens of games out there that make the act of shooting a gun against other humans a way better experience? Why do you want to jump into a map where it might take you an hour before you see another human and then have to hope that they have toggled their PVP slider on? It just seems like a game that has made huge concessions to the singleplayer to facilitate multiplayer, and is now doing both badly. If they wanted to go big on multiplayer, the PVP aspect just has to be waaaayyy better. Possibly make this a way harsher game where nukes can straight up wipe everything away & you can be shot at every corner and have to enter uneasy alliances to increase your chance of survival with the chance that your coop partners backstab you and take all your stuff.

The backend of this thing being so busted that all kind of game information is stored clientside, asking to be manipulated, and people can disconnect you & extract your IP address through Wireshark doesn't make it any more enticing to get in on this. Elder Scrolls Online just seems like a way better experience if you want to play a bethesda game together with others.

The vitriol surrounding almost anything games-related - from Fallout 76's core gameplay to Alex, Dan and Vinny telling a two-hour joke about The Quiet Man with Civilization as the scapegoat - is completely puzzling to me, so welcome to the club.

this is the first fallout game im not interested in. 4 was fairly weak and this looks like 4 with less story and more wandering around picking up useless loot in an even less populated world. PVP is a joke and meaningless and the world is extemely bland looking. Not to mention how hackable this game is on PC.

@onemanarmyy: People saying VATS is pointless don't know what they're talking about. Most likely they just tried it out a bit early on, didn't find it very helpful and then just wrote it off. The big difference in this game is that you start with all your SPECIALs at 1, so you can't come out of the vault with a decent base to make it functional. But even in Fallout 4 you needed to get a good few perks before it was really good. Once you get it going it's basically like running around with aimbot. Sure, you don't get the "free" shots, but you can still just snipe everything with ease from far far away, and you also get the benefits from crits and crit perks to play with. I'm 99% sure that if there ever was to emerge some sort of PvP community from this thing it would be riddled with VATS builds.

@ares42: I haven't played it myself so i'll take your word for it. All i saw was a bunch of % numbers shifting wildly while using VATS. To the point where it was better to just not use it.

But if VATS is amazing for PVP later on isn't that just as big as a problem? They took this mechanic that was used to make you aim at different bodyparts depending on your chance to hit it, took away the slowmo & killcam and repurposed it as an autoaim system for PVP combat. It just doesn't sound very fun to me.

FO76 seemed old-fashioned and playing it too safe instead of experimental and new.
Also the full price tag, like, come on.

@onemanarmyy: I'm not gonna say it would be good, but if everyone was using VATS in pvp then it would just be a completely different game. Like it wouldn't be a competitive twitch shooter, it would be all about positioning and tactics instead. Maybe some people will find fun in that ? I can't see it going anywhere without either being all about VATS or VATS being banned though.

@shindig: I mean that Bethesda's take on Fallout (3, 4 and 76) doesn't really get what made Fallout 1 and 2 (and the setting as a whole) good . While I feel that New Vegas totally did. I can totally see why you treat it as a hard break because Bethesda sure as hell doesn't give a shit about anything other than the ones they've directly made.

Here's the funny thing about metacritic user reviews it's a 2 points scale 10/10 or 0/10. They don't make that much sense, and with what i played of the game (around 24 hours of it including the beta) I am having a lot off fun playing this thing solo. O yeah and i would consider myself as a "fallout" fan (played most of them to completion except for the the original first fallout and II and new vegas are probably my favorite ones.)

@onemanarmyy: "If they wanted to go big on multiplayer, the PVP aspect just has to be waaaayyy better. Possibly make this a way harsher game where nukes can straight up wipe everything away & you can be shot at every corner and have to enter uneasy alliances to increase your chance of survival with the chance that your coop partners backstab you and take all your stuff."

This sounds like a system that would A. pull me away form this game B. Makes it worse for the regular fallout player aka (people got work and other things to do then guarding your base 24/7 ARK or RUST style fucking hate that system).

"extract your IP address through Wireshark doesn't make it any more enticing to get in on this."

this claim was a false as it used a encrypted version of UDP.

source

This game looks just god awful for a late 2018 release - read the Kotaku article where Schreier argued the graphic engine might not be the root cause. I beg to differ.

At the end of the day it doesn't matter if some parts of the engine get updated or completely replaced over the years if outdated looks and frequent glitches are a reoccurring theme despite these changes.

Looking at all Bethesda releases starting off Oblivion there is an distinct visual style and physics engine present in all of those and both have passed the point of being appropriate for a high caliber release 5 years ago.

To argue this might not be caused by the engine (as in engine being a single piece of tech) is arguing semantics not the valid critique of the flaws caused by technology way past its prime.

@brackstone: The PvP mechanics prevent griefing by online jackasses.

I would love to know who these people are that think they want multiplayer in their Bethesda games, because lord knows I don't. If TESVI has any multiplayer in it I will be drastically disappointed.

I mean you clearly didn't understand the article even if you did read it if you are still blaming the engine for the bugs. The bugs are inevitable when you try to create a game of this scale (or any game really) on a timescale (that isn't infinity). Besides, there are far greater flaws in the design and gameplay of Fallout 76 than its bugs.

I look forward to playing this in 1/2 years time when it shows up in a Humble Monthly bundle, play it for a few hours, realise its not for me, then uninstall it.

@bollard: I don't think he's talking about bugs, this game clearly both looks and performs worse than Fallout 4. As I said in the impressions thread, I suspect it's due to the extra networking on top. It's most likely not exactly the smoothest running part of their engine which probably lead to them running out of resources to allocate on the consoles. Maybe it's better on PC, I dunno, but this game has issues that goes far beyond just being bugs.

@bollard said:

So you don't see any reoccurring technical limitations present throughout the Bethesda releases which can directly be addressed to the tech in use? I'm not talking about bugs as errors but limitations both in terms of visuals and physics caused by the tech.

The scope argument is not a valid one - there have been plenty of open world/RPG releases throughout the past years that have a similar size and scale but don't look like we are in 2005 still or have the physics engine break constantly when you interact with the world.

A few minor gripes but otherwise I'm loving it.

Daily Events like Fertile Soil always going off. I did it 4 times now, enough is enough

400 lbs of stash space. I am constantly worrying about how to manage my last 30 lbs. At least I don't have to scavenge anymore.

The framerate drop when multiple enemies are on screen. This needs to be fixed ASAP.

A few random thoughts.

I'm playing with a friend. Meeting new people is tense. So far met mostly helpful players. Last night we got ambushed by a team of four working in tandem. They killed us but it was cool

Air drops are key to getting some cool stuff. I got a laser pistol and a awesome meat hook last night. The meat hook makes me look like Captain Hook

Adhesive is the new gold standard in 76. Man that shit is valuable and needy. Gather up the duct tape boys.

All in all

Together my friends we can rebuild society.

For me, I'm just not interested in always online fallout (or always online anything for that matter) these days. If I won't be able to play it in 20 years time, I ain't buying it.

Some of my friends are playing and loving it, think I'm a little burnt out on Bethesda Game Studio games, haven't even got close to finishing Fallout 4 and I doubt I ever will.

I mean, visually I thought Skyrim looked incredible at the time and with mods still holds up today, so there clearly isn't a tech limitation on visuals. For me the Fallout games have always looked like shit because apocalyptic wastelands are boring from an art perspective. Although I do concede that somehow Fallout 76 looks even worse than Fallout 4 did, presumably to support that higher player count at decent framerates.

I see now your argument focusses more on the visual fidelity of the game rather than its scope and content, so I understand your complaints more now. That said, I think in the same way Fallout New Vegas didn't really improve on the visuals of Fallout 3, I didn't expect anything more from Fallout 76 than what we got from 4. I imagine whichever comes first out of Starfield and Elder Scrolls VI will look drastically improved and I don't think you'll be having the same discussion then (and I don't see their tech holding that back).

Everything gets review bombed by some contingency of folks riled-up over some bullshit.

From my sideline view, I’d like a Fallout built for coop, but this seems to be too much. Currencies, premium currencies, talk of future monitization, missions recycling, random players emoting...it seems like they took out the story and VATS and added a lot of shit I find obnoxious about modern gaming.

@soulcake:Oh i'd agree with you. I wouldn't like playing this harsher multiplayer Ark / Rust type of game neither. But the popularity of Ark & Rust shows that those kind of players are out there. If you're making a survival based multiplayer fallout game that requires you to change up the formula that regular fallout players enjoyed, wouldn't you want to market the game to the people who already play survival based multiplayer games?

Personally, as someone that enjoyed my time with Elder Scrolls & Fallout games & played the first fallout games back in the day, everything they sacrificed in favor of this multiplayer world has already pushed me away hard. I feel like i am not alone in that feeling. Now the game is in this weird halfspace where PVP players don't get a game that's built for PVP & regular Fallout fans get a game that has made substantial concessions from the previous games that they liked. It just feels like it makes a lot of people grumpy. If i walk around for 30 minutes and see a person, i want to be able to shoot them down. I don't want to learn that they have their PVP slider off . If i'm the kind of player that wants to explore this world and learn it's stories, i don't want to interact with computers & audio logs all the time. I want that to support the narrative instead. I guess when the sales numbers show up, we'll see how well received this game really is, but it feels like it starts on the backfoot. I can see it eventually turning into quite a neat game though, but there is a lot of work to be done. Elder Scrolls Online had it's rocky past as well.

My bad on not seeing the update on the encryption.

I'm having a good time with it. I'm mainly playing solo, and it feels a lot like Fallout 4. If anything, the base building is forced on you less than in 4.

The frame rate drops on my regular PS4, and today's 47GB patch, have not been ideal though.