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

[Don Peste]

Spoiler

Very nice when the interviewer specifies "... For someone who knows Classic Fallout, Fallout 3 for example, onwards"...

Actually, it felt like he was scared that Mr. Todd could think that he doesn't acknowledge Bethesda Fallout as Classic Fallout, but then Todd mentions every title ("3, 4, New Vegas, the old ones"). Top Journalism.

BTW who is the Lead Writer on this? If they have one.

 

[Orma]

BTW who is the Lead Writer on this? If they have one.

Probably the same retard who's been the lead writer since fallout 3 (and who did the dark brohood questline in Oblivion), Emil Pagliuo-something

 

[Okagron]

The funny part is how some of the Bethesda shills said the dialogue in Fallout 4 worked fine *cough*MrMattyPlays*cough*. Then the company comes out and says the dialogue didn't worked "as well", just a perfect example how these shills will take any advantage to suck a company's dick.

 

[Oracsbox]

I don't even know why I bothered watching anything to do with this game,year on year bethesda games get more shit.

Why is this even called a fallout game they could have just made some crap up and called it "Nukefuture 3000" and nobody would care they'd still lap up any random shit bethesda make.

Everything about Fallout 76 says steal everything from any game we think is groovy with the kids and slap it in and see what sticks.

It's the whole appalling structure of the game that offends me,it looks utter balls,build a shitty little hut,emote like a twat,dress up like a fairy,wander an empty map shooting creatures we made up in the tea break,teabag randoms oh and for extra fun randomly nuke stuff

It's a game designed by manchildren.

Of course ultimate creepiness won't arrive until mod support becomes available and then God alone knows what will be occurring on private servers.

I find it bizarre that other companies seem to be making an effort to do something more interesting like Ubisoft turning assassins creed into a rpg and Techland doing the same with Dying Light they might not succeed but they're having a go and yet bethesda who are known for making rpg's (however badly) are shitting on it from a great height.

We all know it won't work bethesda can barely put out a working single player game,they never really fix them after release either so how will they suddenly turn out a working pvp environment regularly monitored and balanced with updates and patches on a shit game engine that should have been replaced years ago.

I hope this game burns along with Wolfenstein lesbian edition and any other half arsed shit like Blades the mobile walking wank simulator.

 

[LordWildMan]

I don't even know why I bothered watching anything to do with this game,year on year bethesda games get more shit.

Your first mistake.

 

[Wunderbar]

Games where you need to be online to play in single player are the future. Hate it. Loathe it. It's still a thing publishers are going to push more and more.

Expect all future Bioware games to be like that too.

there won't be any future bioware games

 

[PanteraNera]

Here have some leaked hunting scene from Fallout 76:

Also note this not a bug but a feature: real-time mutation happening right on your screen!
With million of possibilities and random outcomes!

 

[Cael]

That's the worst thing I've seen this week. THANKS.

And you know that any Bethesduh Fallout would be WORSE. I look forward to you throwing up all over Todd. Heh heh heh.

 

[moon knight]

How much time it will take for some troll to nuke the starting area?

won't happen, as a level 1 you probably won't see other players at level 50 with nuke codes, and by the time you are at level 50 you won't be at starting location

Cheat engine is the way

 

[Jick Magger]

This is the worst thing humanity has made since the AIDS virus.

 

[Makabb]

info dump

-----General-----

• BGS Austin are the main guys behind this game. The Maryland (Rockville) studio is involved, but they have been putting in tons of work into Starfield as well, and 76 is mostly Austin's baby after the initial design phase. They started working on 76 when they were still Battlecry studios, and began development during a time when Rockville was still working on Fallout 4 (and later beginning production on Fallout 4 DLC and Starfield). Rockville's role is largely creative.
• The two Fallout 76 leads worked on Star Wars Galaxies, The Old Republic, and Ultima Online between them both. The lead programmer for 76 was the client lead for SWG. They're experts when it comes to building multiplayer, and painstakingly rebuilt the engine from the ground up to support multiplayer.
• BGS Austin was absolutely crucial in the development of this game. Rockville doesn't have the experience required to pull something like this off because they are a singleplayer-focused studio.
• From the beginning, the map was planned to be four times bigger than Fallout 4. This is in part due to new tech that enabled them to render longer distances; they wanted lots of open space to explore.
• West Virginia was chosen because A) it was still East Coast, and B) it was a place that would be almost completely untouched by nukes. This would give them the opportunity to have living forests, tons of different types of wildlife, and more diversity than normal when it comes to different regions on the map.
• It was also chosen because as they dug deeper into local stories and folklore of West Virginia, they found out there were so many cool conspiracy theories, monsters, and creatures that have been part of the state's history. They felt this was a perfect match for Fallout 76. The Grafton Monster, Flatwood Monster, the Snallygaster, Mothman -- the list goes on.
• The Mothman specifically is a unique creature that they don't want to spoil other than saying there will be stages to him. "Maybe at the beginning, he's just stalking you". Creepy!
• There are way more creatures in 76 than all other Fallout games. Giant sloths, two-headed possums, and intelligent plants were all mentioned.
• The mutated creatures are more dramatic because it's so soon after the bombs fell, and the radiation is at its most powerful. They like to think that not all of these creatures were able to survive into the time period when the other Fallout games are set.
• Raiders are out. The important reason for this is that they found with raiders, players would spend a lot of time just trying to discern whether or not a hostile human was a player or AI. They didn't want this, so they created a faction of half-feral ghouls called the Scorched, who are hostile, but still sane enough to use weapons and armor. These will be the main gun combat with AI in the game, which is described as a "central pillar" of the Fallout experience.
• The map is huge, but there are six distinct regions to the game that are each a different difficulty/level, for a natural progression. "They mentioned: A hollowed-out mountain top, soggy floodlands, a festering toxic wasteland, swampy woods, and a colossal mountain range that bisects the entire map."
• The new weather system can encourage or deter you from entering a specific area. Maybe you want to head to the mountains, but a major rad storm is sweeping through the area right now, making it much more dangerous to do so.
• There is a lot of open space in this map. This means that when you find something, they want it to feel like you're finding something that's been hidden from the world for a long time. There are tons of different places to find. Some of the ones they mentioned were everything from quiet cabins, abandoned wood mills, treetop watchtowers, flooded mines, and abandoned barbecue joints.
• ^This is IN ADDITION to the fact that you will find whole abandoned cities and towns like previous Fallout games. There are also the missile silos, and a crashed space station (Van Buren!).
• The world is larger and more detailed than any previous game. This is due to massive engine improvements. New systems for propagating forests, a vastly improved dynamic lighting model, subsurface scattering, and far more complex animations for creatures (who need to react to being attacked by multiple players at once).
• You'll start the game in a relatively nice, green area. Another more hostile area they showed is a region full of factories that's covered in a nasty white powder, from the chemicals that the factories were full of being released.
• Lots of vertical landmarks. The giant excavator shown in the trailer was here. They let you orient yourself easily. More verticality than previous games, since Fallout 3 and 4 were both very flat lands.
• They have their version of the Greenbrier Hotel, which housed a real-life nuclear bunker. Their version has a large golf course connected to it, and has its own story which they don't want to spoil.
• More clothing than ever, and you have to discover a lot of it in specific spot. An example they give is that there's a real-life town called Helvetia, which is home to a festival where they make paper mache masks. They made ten of them for you to find when you visit the town in Fallout 76.
• A lot of stories and quests you'll find will be the locational stories that we see as unmarked quests in previous Fallout games. An example given is a firehouse in Charleston, and if you go there you can find firefighter gear, and take a firefighter training course. They want you to explore and discover these things yourself with your friends.

 

[Makabb]

-----Gameplay-----

• You can play solo, but at launch there will be no private maps. They fully believe in the idea of sharing a world with other players for Fallout 76.
• There is a main story, there are plenty of quests, but they want this game to be about what you want to do on any given day. Maybe you want to explore a new region, or maybe you want to go hunt down that last rare component for a crafting project. Maybe you want to kill a creature for its drops, or maybe you want to set up a new C.A.M.P.
• Events! An example given was a horde of super mutants attacking a farm. You get notified and can swoop in to save the day, and they want you to meet other players doing the same thing. You don't know what's going to happen, and they're okay with that. An example given was "maybe you see ten Yao Guai come in because somebody trained them in from across the map".
• In addition to the C.A.M.P.s you can build anywhere, there are also public workshops that must be claimed. These are specific locations that you have to clear out, and once you take them there could be events that spawn. But they can also contain useful crafting resources: An example is a mine that, once claimed, allows you to get a regular income of lead ore. Lead = bullets. Being able to make your own bullets is very valuable in Fallout, and potentially to other players.
• Your C.A.M.P is your portable, build-anywhere settlement. They're smaller than a full settlement, but can be placed anywhere on the map. If you join a new game, your C.A.M.P will automatically be where you left it. If by some miracle two people have their camps in the exact same spot (they stress this is very unlikely due to a player limit of 20-30 and an enormous map), it will be saved as a blueprint and you can put it down anywhere you want.
• There are certain restrictions on where you can place your C.A.M.P., but you can place them almost anywhere. One example given was that you can't place them right outside Vault 76, because they don't want anybody to grief brand new players.
• Crafting is a big part of the game. You'll be able to craft guns, mods, ammo, food, armor, power armor, etc. Everything that you could craft in Fallout 4, and way more. They want you hunting down rare materials to craft that next big item.
• Talking about how they want survival elements to be a big part of the game, but never tedious or boring: "I have to brush my teeth every day, or they'll rot out of my head. I do NOT want to do that in a video game. I just don't care!"
• You have to eat and drink to survive. Anecdote: Somebody stumbled into a herd of cats and said they'd never been happier to see cats because it meant they could eat!
• Food rots over time, and your gear degrades and must be repaired.
• Rads are different, and cause mutations. The higher your rad count, the greater the odds that you'll get a mutation. They're like traits from Fallout 2, where you get a buff to one thing, and a penalty to something else. They can be cured if you don't like them, and in the late-game you can become permanently mutated if there's one you really like. Most mutations are stat or gameplay changes, but some are visual.
• You will be able to sell items you craft to other players. Crafting is a big part of the game and they want crafting specialization to be worthwhile and powerful. You can spec into cooking and make valuable food that other players might be willing to pay for.
• Perk cards completely replace the perk chart from Fallout 4. Every single time you level up, you take a new perk card. Perk cards are divided among the primary SPECIAL attributes, and you can have a limited number active at one time. You can swap your active cards out whenever you want, and can share them with other players in your group. This incentivizes coordination in groups, where you can specialize to work well when grouped up.
• One person in your group might be focused on survival stuff like crafting and cooking, somebody might be geared up for combat, another might be specced into building great defenses for your settlement, and the last might be built as a medic to heal other players up.
• For crafting food, you find recipes all over the world to unlock new stuff to make. There are "orders of magnitude" more recipes in 76 than Fallout 4, and a lot of the items you craft are +/-. One food might make you more susceptible to disease, but give you a huge health buff.
• They are exploring the idea of letting you set up a robot vendor in some kind of a hub area, so you can sell items to other players who visit the hub. This is not confirmed, they're still exploring it, but he reiterates that it's a live game and that they're thinking long-term.
• There are anti-griefing measures in place, they don't want the game to be too chaotic. Aggressive players will get a wanted level, and the penalty for death is only respawning at a nearby location.
• There are different ways to communicate with other players, including voice chat, an emote wheel, and even a photo mode that came out of a game jam.
• They want to know when to control the player, but more importantly, when NOT to control the player. They want this to feel like a Fallout game. The other players in the game world are system they do not control, and they will not shy away from it. They embrace it. They said when players collide it might be messy for a bit, but they have levers in place to solve problems. They'd rather do that than play it safe. They want to try this, they can make adjustments later if they want to.
• 24-32 players at once. It was a challenge deciding on how many players would be in the game, and how frequently they wanted players to bump into each other. They want meeting another player to feel special, so they didn't want it to be too frequent.
• Players will be visible on the map at all times, in their words, for good or ill. They want you to be able to see other players doing an event or a quest, and then go along to help them, or maybe even to attack them (though again, there are anti-griefing measures in place that they will tune as the game goes on).
• You can trade with other players that you meet.
• You can immediately join your friends in their session or invite them to yours.
• Party size is currently 4, though that is easily adjustable. They're aiming for 4-person co-op gameplay, but they also want to have bigger conflicts like 12v12 deathmatch.
• They're always adding more content to the game. Right now they're working on the aforementioned team deathmatch mode for players who may complete every quest and want something to do.
• Nukes nukes nukes. Nukes are endgame content that require you to play through the game's story and complete repeatable quests to find the launch codes. The story there is that the Scorchbeasts (the giant bats) are crawling up out of the ground, and you can seal the fissures with nuclear strikes. They're hard to access and will not be used constantly by tons of players.
• Nukes are NOT A GRIEFING DEVICE. Their function is to create high-level areas wherever you want on the map, and you are actively incentivized to do this in non-populated areas, because you want to be the first one in there to plunder them. If you stay too long, you die!
• It is very challenging and time consuming to obtain the code to actually launch a nuke. It requires playing through most (if not all) of the main story, and then completing a repeatable quest until you have every part of the code. Because of the opportunity this presents and the time investment, players aren't going to be dropping nukes left and right on other players: by doing so, you will have effectively wasted your limited-time reward by dropping a high-level, loot rich area on or near somebody else.
• The Legendary item system returns, and places you nuke are excellent places to farm legendary items. Eventually, the nuked area will return to its pre-nuke state. Depending on where you nuke, you'll find different things inhabiting the area, because areas have different flora and fauna.
• You can nuke other players. Todd is very excited to see what people do with the nukes, because they just don't know what's going to happen.
• If your settlement is nuked, you can easily repair the damage. Again, nukes are NOT A GRIEFING DEVICE.

 

[Makabb]

-----Post-Launch-----

• After Fallout 76 releases, the Rockville studio will remain creative leads, but most of their work is going toward Starfield, along with their Montreal studio. Austin will be in charge of supporting the game for years to come.
• Microtransactions are a thing. This is acknowledged as an unfortunate reality of supporting both dedicated servers and free post-launch content for everybody. They are purely cosmetic. Anything you can purchase with microtransactions will also be able to be obtained for free by playing the game.
• All DLC/updates will be free.
• The plan is for part of the Austin team to be working on regular content updates, and the other part of the team working on larger content drops. So you get frequent, smaller updates (new events, free items were some examples), and then major content updates every so often. That is the plan, and they will have to make adjustments based on what players like and don't like.
• If they make something they really like and the players don't, they will not double down on it. Instead, they'll embrace the stuff that players do like.

• You can quickly and easily repair damage if you are nuked, or join another session. This, in addition to nukes being very hard to acquire and potentially valuable with their rewards, makes them pretty much impossible to grief with.
• VATS makes a return, and it functions in real-time. You'll have to be snappier about lining up your shots, but you can still build your character to specialize in VATS, and it still is great for players who maybe don't have the twitch aim, and want to rely on their character's skill more than their own.
• Mods and private lobbies are confirmed, but post-launch. Since Fallout 3, there is always a delay between release and official mod support, and 76 is no different. Their main focus on launch is to have the base game running as well as it can, and then some time later they will add private lobbies that can be modded just like every other Bethesda game. They said they are 100% committed to this and that it is going to happen.
• Pete Hines has said that there are tons of quests scattered all over the world. I've also heard Todd say that they make use of robots a lot for quest givers.

 

[Makabb]

This is the worst thing humanity has made since the AIDS virus.

This would have been done sooner or later, even Interplay wanted to do this back in 2010 with the Project Vault 13, but Bethesda had the IP.

This game might be pretty good, because Bethesda no longer will try to do Elder Scrolls with guns, but an original take on the Fallout IP, something they should've done from the start.

 

[Makabb]

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

This is the worst thing humanity has made since the AIDS virus.

This would have been done sooner or later, even Interplay wanted to do this back in 2010 with the Project Vault 13, but Bethesda had the IP.

This game might be pretty good, because Bethesda no longer will try to do Elder Scrolls with guns, but an original take on the Fallout IP, something they should've done from the start.

An Interplay Fallout Online would’ve had NPCs.

‘76 will be bad because it’s neither fish nor fowl. You can’t make a fun multiplayer world with no NPCs that’s only populated with 24-32 people. All the interactions, all the conflict with sentient creatures, it will boil down to 23 other people. 23 people sharing a world four times the size of Fallout 4. You need to be massively multiplayer for something like this to work.

I’d also argue that Bethesda really isn’t breaking any new ground here. They’re doubling down on what they do best—walking simulator with environmental storytelling—and just cutting the shit they do poorly. What’s new about settlement building and scavenging for resources? They took the worst parts of Fallout 4 and just made them the whole game with extended co-op.

I don’t necessarily think a multiplayer Fallout would suck on principle, but this is not the way to do it. Todd keeps talking about drama between players but how the hell do you build drama when there aren’t enough people in the game to fill a school bus?

The fact is, this was a half assed project. They had an unsuitable engine and the fallout 4 multiplayer that got cut, so they just built on that to turn it into a new game with a big map containing very little content. Let players create their own content, they say! Okay, but you need a lot more players for that in a massive open world shooter.

 

[Makabb]

Its gamebryo alright lol

 

[Makabb]

‘76 will be bad because it’s neither fish nor fowl. You can’t make a fun multiplayer world with no NPCs that’s only populated with 24-32 people. All the interactions, all the conflict with sentient creatures, it will boil down to 23 other people. 23 people sharing a world four times the size of Fallout 4. You need to be massively multiplayer for something like this to work.
.

I guess you never played Rust or Ark ?

Todd keeps talking about drama between players but how the hell do you build drama when there aren’t enough people in the game to fill a school bus?

Theres enough people, in those 100+ multiplayer games it often gets too crowded and you can't do anything because either you die or other people take resources for you and in effect you cant play solo.

24-32 i think is the best number, maybe on the lower side, 50 might be ok, but 32 is still ok.

The fact is, this was a half assed project

Fallout 4 was the half assed project, this took 3 years of work of what Fallout 4 already was, cutting the bad things, so this should be much better than what was before, expanding on everything that was in Fallout 4.
So this is fallout 4.5 MP edition.

 

[Wunderbar]

expanding on everything that was in Fallout 4.

they expanded on dialogues from Fallout 4 by removing them?

 

[Makabb]

expanding on everything that was in Fallout 4.

they expanded on dialogues from Fallout 4 by removing them?

In a sense, if something doesn't work, remove it.
It's only logical, there are no dialogues in other multiplayer survival games.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

‘76 will be bad because it’s neither fish nor fowl. You can’t make a fun multiplayer world with no NPCs that’s only populated with 24-32 people. All the interactions, all the conflict with sentient creatures, it will boil down to 23 other people. 23 people sharing a world four times the size of Fallout 4. You need to be massively multiplayer for something like this to work.
.

I guess you never played Rust or Ark ?

Todd keeps talking about drama between players but how the hell do you build drama when there aren’t enough people in the game to fill a school bus?

Theres enough people, in those 100+ multiplayer games it often gets too crowded and you can't do anything because either you die or other people take resources for you and in effect you cant play solo.

24-32 i think is the best number, maybe on the lower side, 50 might be ok, but 32 is still ok.

This is going to be much bigger than a standard Rust map, with a fifth of the standard number of players. Keep in mind, there are no NPCs because players are supposed to take their place. I watched the documentary and BGS clearly wanted to support a lot more players on a server but they couldn’t make it work. The Austin guys implied that they had scaled back dramatically.

They know they can make some pretty environments, slap Fallout on the box and it will sell.

 

[Makabb]

This is going to be much bigger than a standard Rust map, with a fifth of the standard number of players.

Good, good, I hated in Rust how I constantly was meeting screeching 12 year old kids that would insta attack me and follow me through whole map and I couldn't do anything in peace, in Rust as a solo player you couldn't even start because you was getting insta gibbed by 24/7 no lifers.

Instead of meeting them every 5 minutes, now i will be seeing them once every 30 minutes, once every 30 minutes you can do something and prepare your guns/defenses

 

[Morgoth]

Well, this will likely be the last Fallout game for a long time since Beth's gonna have its hands full with Starfield and TESVI for the next >5 years.

Unless they wanna give Obsidian another shot...

 

[Yosharian]

Makabb That definitely won't happen in FO76...

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

This is going to be much bigger than a standard Rust map, with a fifth of the standard number of players.

Good, good, I hated in Rust how I constantly was meeting screeching 12 year old kids that would insta attack me and follow me through whole map and I couldn't do anything in peace.

The other players can track you in 76 so the lower number is no deterrent. Also, isn’t the above merely an argument against going multiplayer in the first place? They’ll have all the problems of playing with other people and few of the benefits.

An online fallout should let you build factions and go to war. You can’t really do that in a meaningful sense with 24 people.