Fallout 76 - online Fallout spinoff from Bethesda - now on Steam with Wastelanders NPC expansion

[Myobi]

Yeah Rick and Morty fans can be like that. Example:

Lil info on that: It's staged, the guy made it to make fun of the fan base, there is a interview with him about it.

 

[Modron]

Lil info on that: It's staged, the guy made it to make fun of the fan base, there is a interview with him about it.

What wasn't fake was the lady who traded a packet of szechuan sauce for a ford focus.

 

[LizardWizard]

But there is no actual solo mode right? I refuse to play a game where I have to interact with people. Or even just see retards bunnyhopping and emoting around the place.

You can sort of play it like a STALKER game if you're an explore fag (take the night perks imo). Just avoid/block people and try not to abuse fast travel too much.

The endgame nuke stuff is retarded though, you're not missing anything. It's basically MMO damage sponge popamole

 

[Astral Rag]

Still no reviews from ign and the like, what gives? Beth's shipment of Doritos and Mountain Dew running late?

 

[Turjan]

Guy claims that he was told by employees that the game had no sales targets set.

Now you know why it was called a "Break it. Early. Test. Application.". Test application for their future game models that is.

 

[Astral Rag]

Fallout 76's first major patch is a whopping 47GB on console

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-11-19-fallout-76s-first-major-patch-is-a-whopping-47gb

 

[AwesomeButton]

Guy claims that he was told by employees that the game had no sales targets set.

Now you know why it was called a "Break it. Early. Test. Application.". Test application for their future game models that is.

Idk, his story sounds pretty convenient.

Fallout 4 was the same shit, and we have no indication of it having lacked Todd's magic touch.

 

[TheImplodingVoice]

Fallout 76's first major patch is a whopping 47GB on console

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-11-19-fallout-76s-first-major-patch-is-a-whopping-47gb

So basically you're re-downloading the game again.

 

[Turjan]

Guy claims that he was told by employees that the game had no sales targets set.

Now you know why it was called a "Break it. Early. Test. Application.". Test application for their future game models that is.

Idk, his story sounds pretty convenient.

Fallout 4 was the same shit, and we have no indication of it having lacked Todd's magic touch.

Oh, I have no idea what Todd's input to those developments are, and I don't really care at this point.

However, the Creation Club came to Fallout 4 only in August 2017 (with Horse Armor, no less). That was their second test, after the paid mod debacle. I'd say it was a failed test, at least on PC. Not sure whether enough whales bought the stuff on there. They have been giving lots of stuff away for free over time.

The next change came this September. They released the "Settlement Ambush Kit", a completely new game mode, on the Creation Club for $9. This looks like a concerted change in marketing with the release of Fallout 76, and it smells like testing. Those $9 were high for the Fallout 4 Creation Club, but it's nothing compared to a power armor skin for $18 in Fallout 76, given what you get for the price. By the way, on the day of Fallout 76's release, they gave away 12 power armor skins for free on the Fallout 4 Creation Club. I'm not even sure that makes sense from a marketing standpoint, but they seem to experiment a lot at the moment.

 

[Sinder Velvin]

Both breaks immersion, so that is always something that a multiplayer variant has much less than a singleplayer one.
But making at least important (quest-related) NPCs unattackable would make it clear why some NPCs cannot be attacked.

Perhaps I should simply have multiple options that server owners can choose between: respawning NPCs, unkillable NPCs or unattackable NPCs. I've always enjoyed giving people choices and letting them figure out what they like the most.

I agree that some immersion will always be lost compared to the original singleplayer game in that regard... but perhaps there are ways of making up for it in other regards, such as by adding NPC schedules in the serverside scripts.

There is no game that ever truly prevented players from stealing by making them chase down the players. Especially in a game like Morrowind, the players have so many tools at their disposal to not be caught...
Making it harder would make it more interesting, so that's a good thing, but you'll always have a broken economy due to thieving if you do not have a full economy simulation.

Making it impossible to sell stolen items would work gameplay wise, but it would also render stealing almost entirely useless and would be immersion breaking to the extreme.

Strangely enough, ESO possibly did it the best by forcing you to sell stolen goods to fences, which nets very little reward (but at least something).
So you still have stealing, but it doesn't break the game that much.

The gold economy does seem challenging to fix, so what do you think of special tokens that you'd receive for doing quests? I know a few servers have already experimented with that. The tokens would be used to buy player houses, followers, special items, etc.

Actually, I could reply to all of your suggestions like that.
"Yes, it can be made to work, but it would be at the cost of interesting gameplay, immersion, freedom,..."

I'm definitely interested in seeing how much the sacrifices made can be minimized, as an intellectual exercise.

It's possible to add stringent limitations to the spellcrafting. It will kill some of the fun, but it makes sense for balancing.

This is kind of the core of the problem.
Many problems can be solved with limitations, but then you have a great base game, being extremely hampered by limitations all-around lessening the experience, with the only added benefit of having other players running around (which at least to me, is actually another detriment, except for pure co-op games).
So yeah, you can make it work somehow - but the real question is: Why would you?

I don't want to devalue your work, especially as a dev myself, I can see the technical challenge alone being interesting.
But from a gameplay perspective, I just don't see the value - and gameplay kinda is what games should be about.

Allowing for MMO-like gameplay was never one of my motivations for doing the project. I mostly wanted to teach myself how to add playable cooperative multiplayer to an open world game so it would help me with making a vaguely similar game from scratch later on, and I've pretty much gotten everything I've wanted from that.

However, now that I have most of the technical elements in place, I don't see a lot of effort in providing some optional MMO-like adjustments as a game design exercise. (After all, I'm going to need some game design practice too.)

Beyond that, there could be special value in experimenting with ideas that were hinted at by the oldest MMO games but never properly realized, such as player-run factions and quests created by players on the fly on roleplaying-oriented servers, with a large number of pre-existing landmasses available to provide the backdrop. (After all, you can use every Morrowind total conversion in multiplayer.)

Actually, I could reply to all of your suggestions like that.
"Yes, it can be made to work, but it would be at the cost of interesting gameplay, immersion, freedom,..."

You summed up my argument perfectly and in all fairness most Bethesda fans wouldn't accept those compromises, which is why Fallout 76 has been received as it has. You cannot make Bethesda's formula work without in essence ripping the guts out of the very things that people buy their games for.

I'd argue that Fallout 76 has extra compromises, such as the lack of NPCs and story, that aren't present in TES3MP.

TES3MP is also an open source project with an increasingly flexible scripting system, so you have a lot of control over which compromises you want to include on your server, with the ability to find your own sweet spot between cooperative gameplay and MMO-minded limitations. Enough experimentation could, at least in theory, lead to sufficiently elegant compromises in several areas.

Essentially, I'm saying we only have a sample size of 2 for the Bethesda formula as an MMO-like, but one of the two projects has never even officially aimed to be an MMO-like at all, so – instead of already drawing conclusions – I'm still curious to see what happens once it actually tries that. (Although I'm probably overly hopeful because of my involvement with it.)

And rest assured on my closing comments of that criticism of OpenMW, I think OpenMW is fantastic, I'm really impressed with the multiplayer but the game itself is what lets down the experience for the above mentioned. It'd work better if you were co-oping with friends and could trust them to RP, but if they wanted to be dicks they could start breaking the game which isn't good. A good designed game should work how Divinity 2's co-op work. A mix between Elder Scrolls and Divinity would be the ideal

Thank you for the kind words. I also think Divinity 2's coop is great, but coop is always easier to do in an immersive way.

 

[Seethe]

Fallout 76 - an online multiplayer take on the franchise - was not expected to sell as strongly as Fallout 4. Of course, any new game from Bethesda Game Studios is still a major release, yet this title has got off to a slow start. Fallout 76 debuts at No.3, and sales are down 82.4 per cent compared with the previous game in the franchise - 2015's Fallout 4.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/artic...top-hyper-competitive-week-at-uk-games-retail

Who's laughing now?

 

[Hoaxmetal]

To be fair who cares about UK retail performance of all things, especially when comparing releases that have a few years between them?

 

[Agame]

Great news everyone, Bethesda finally made a good Fallout game, its just really buggy, but once its fixed everything will be fine!?

 

[Hellion]

English version of my review now available at https://ragequit.gr/reviews/item/fallout-76-pc-review-english/

 

[rusty_shackleford]

https://comicbook.com/gaming/2018/11/19/angry-customer-destroys-gamestop-couldnt-return-fallout-76/

 

[Mortmal]

https://comicbook.com/gaming/2018/11/19/angry-customer-destroys-gamestop-couldnt-return-fallout-76/

At 70 euros its probably justified tbh.

 

[Immortal]

And Now We Have Reached a New Chapter, The Cycle Has Come Full Circle...


All the normies balked and laughed when people hated Fallout 3 compared to Fallout 1..

"Haha Old man - games are changing, get with the times"

Now their precious Fallout 4 has been squeezed like a dirty dish rag, pinching the last few drops of cash out of a spent community making this online piece of shit.

And to all these young spry new gamers.. wondering what happened to their precious franchise..
All I have to say..

Spoiler

 

[Latelistener]

No one is laughing, because it's not funny anymore.

 

[Onholyservicebound]

Faggy Games Journalist Media Articles: AnGrY TrolLs ArE BoMBInG FalLouT 76's MeTaCrItiC UsEr ScoRe!!!
The gamer outrage maschine is at it again, leaving unfair negative reviews of our misunderstood game because they are all unreasonable entitled man babies!
What's that? The critic reviews are in? Todd be praised, the Dorito shills gave Fallout 3 and 4 a 9/10, surely they will deliver us from these ravenous hordes.

 

[Wunderbar]

Still no reviews from ign and the like, what gives? Beth's shipment of Doritos and Mountain Dew running late?

Fallout 76 IGN Review: too much water, Vault dweller is a great white savior.

 

[Immortal]

Can't wait to see how Pete Hines spins this as a win - or just selectively ignores it.

 

[The Dutch Ghost]

At this point he would be kind of like Saddam Hussein's Information minister "Everything is fine, Fallout 76 is a success, ignore the destruction behind me."

 

[Latelistener]

 

[ZeniBot]

David Cernat can I make a recommendation and ask that you don't treat my comments as if its something you should be doing with OpenMW. I never wanted you to interpret it like that. What I want you to do is ask your users what they want from that experience and cater it to that. It's not your job to prove to Bethesda that their broken ass tech and game design strategy can work and I'd prefer you didn't. Instead ask people what they want, I think you'll find that they don't want an MMO experience and it'd be too hard to do it. Instead focus your efforts on polishing the singleplayer experience and find a way to re-orientate that experience to co-op, most would prefer that.

OpenMW to me represents the fanbase taking back their community and thriving under their own terms, not some bullshit EULA that's designed to sign over creators rights to an evil megacorporation and it also proves that Bethesda cannot outproduce their own fanbase, the fanbase are better at it and they always will be. But I hate it when you guys do Bethesda's work for them, so please don't! because you'll just end up making this Fallout 76 shit even worse. Focus your efforts on an experience you know people want, don't try to beat bethesda don't try to prove anything to them, just focus on what you know people want. I don't want to see Bethesda look at what you guys are doing and think "hey these suckers will work for free! lets take their project by force" because you know that's what most people are afraid of with OpenMW is Zenimax just coming down and killing all your hard work, while you guys are just in that replication phase I don't think Zenimax cares, but once you guys get a hot feature that puts them to shame they'll get angry and consider you a competitor. That projects survival is so important because we cannot trust Zenimax to curate their game and keep it working for future OSes, we saw how badly they did it for Arena and Daggerfall (we're very lucky that Daggerfall Unity exists but its still ages away), we've seen that even Redguard doesn't work properly on modern OS. I don't want to see that bullshit happen to Morrowind.

Just focus on what you guys do right. Don't get sidetracked by all the bullshit in the industry, Bethesda chose the live service model because every other cheap ass worthless AAA studio is doing it to compete with Fortnite. MEH who gives a shit. Don't follow them. Just don't. Leave them to their bullshit and just let em burn. Don't try to save them because there's nothing there worth saving.

 

[markec]