What is good about Fallout 76?

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There is a lot of negativity surrounding Fallout 76 at release. Eurogamer called it "a bizarre, boring, broken mess", the Metacritic numbers are remarkably low, and most discussions of the game include more people upset than satisfied. I'm being reminded of the release for Mass Effect: Andromeda. That game didn't deserve the reputation it quickly earned, and the same seems to be true for Fallout 76.

I'm finding that people who have played the game say things like, "I enjoyed playing it, but..." and that's a sentiment I understand. On the other hand, people I've talked with who haven't played the game are saying, "I've heard it's really buggy, so I'm not interested in playing it." I know that this isn’t a game everyone is going to like, and I do believe the game will get better with some time for bug-fixing, but I find that the discussion surrounding the game is so negative that it is turning many players away for good.

The thing is that I’m enjoying my time with Fallout 76 and, for all it’s flaws, I don’t want to discourage all players from giving it a try. All Bethesda RPGs of the last decade have been terribly buggy at launch. Bugs can be patched, and the game can be improved, but if the reputation is that the game is unplayable, none of that is going to matter.

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FO76 takes risks and tries something new

The fact is that it would be very easy to write a post about all the problems with the game, but I want to talk about Fallout 76 in a positive way because I do have a positive feeling about the game overall. In order to do that, I’ll need to overlook a lot of points. For integrity’s sake, I’ll make mention of them before I write down any conclusions, but please understand that I’m interested in discussing here only what is good about this game. Don’t expect this to be an even-handed review on its own—please look at what others are saying and weigh these positive points against those indubitably negative ones.

The first and most important positive point I want to make is that this game represents Bethesda taking a risk with one of their most beloved franchises. It would be easy to make and sell the same game again. I don't mean that it wouldn't take time, effort, and resources--I mean it would be easy from a "make something we know we can sell" perspective. That's working for the stockholders, and I would rather see Bethesda working for people who like to play games. The willingness to take on the risk of trying new things is vital to staying relevant in the gaming industry. Any developer doing otherwise is probably suffering at the hands of small minds wearing expensive suits. I'm making a soft point here, but it really is important to me that Bethesda made a Bethesda RPG that pushes the boundaries of  "The Bethesda RPG" without losing that identity. Through all the negative noise surrounding this game right now, it’s important that we as gamers take a moment to appreciate that.

The release of Fallout 76 reminds me of Mass Effect: Andromeda in a scary way. Andromeda wasn't perfect-- it suffered from myriad issues both technical and narratological--but it made an effort to expand and explore the Mass Effect franchise beyond the original trilogy. Now, the sequel to Andromeda has apparently been "shelved indefinitely". I'm not saying that Fallout is destined to die if Fallout 76 sees some bad press, but I am saying that the initial reception of a game creates a sentiment among gamers that can have real and lasting effects on a franchise. Andromeda was received in a similar way to Fallout 76--enjoyed by those who were playing it but critically panned for buggy gameplay and cutscenes.

Fallout 76 deserves more respect than its getting only if the next few patches do fix many of the bugs. If you're on the fence about this game, check out whether it's patched up by Christmas.

From "Fallout 76 multiplayer: How to unlock PvP and Wanted Bounties explained" at https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-11-15-fallout-76-multiplayer-pvp-5076

Proving the Multiplayer "Bethesda RPG"

Fallout 76 proves the hardware and the concept of a multiplayer Bethesda RPG. A Bethesda RPG can be explored without NPCs, and this frees the player from the quest-hub-centric gameplay of previous Bethesda RPGs. A world of FO76's size hosting over a dozen concurrent players is a promising prospect for the future of Bethesda's franchises. I'd like to see a hybridized version of the FO76 multiplayer and the Skyrim/FO4 single-player. In other words, the best of both worlds could be the next big Bethesda RPG.

With Elder Scrolls VI still distant on the horizon, I'm wishing to fulfill my dream from back in 2006 to play a game like Oblivion in a co-op capacity. I'd really prefer that future iterations forego the full-on "multiplayer" of FO76 in favor of a simplified co-operative gametype. All I want is to be able to play Skyrim with a group of friends. Is it possible to have multiple players share a persistent world that works for "drop-in/drop-out co-op"? If Bethesda keeps improving the systems they've proven in FO76, the next Elder Scrolls game could benefit tremendously.

From "Fallout 76 Best Perks - All Perks Cards, Perk Charts" at https://www.usgamer.net/articles/14-11-2018-fallout-76-perks-perks-list-perk-card-packs-special-mysterious-stranger-professional-drinker-lone-wanderer-everything-we-know

The Leveling System in FO76

Leveling up in Fallout 76 rewards the player in two ways. This works well because the first system serves the player as they level up, and the second serves the player who has reached a high level.

Leveling rewards the player with a S.P.E.C.I.A.L point to spend. Maxing out one or two stats first seems to be the way most players are going in order to gain certain skills that benefit their teammates. Leveling as a well-rounded character is reasonable, too, especially if you need to be a jack-of-all trades, but you'll miss out on extra information and/or loot. This serves the player as they level up because they can choose their path for progressing.

Leveling also rewards the player with access to Perk Cards. Perk cards are available for each S.P.E.C.I.A.L stat, each costs an amount of points depending on its level, and your ability to equip them is determined by how many points you have in the associated stat. This serves the player in the late game as they can spec (and re-spec) their character to have certain advantages.

These systems are introduced slowly so the player isn't overwhelmed with choices. At times some things aren't clear, but there is time to slow down and figure out what is going on. It's not terribly complex, but it is largely customizable--and those are both good things.

From "Fallout 76 Find Responder Caches Locations Guide" at https://www.gamerevolution.com/guides/456959-fallout-76-find-responder-supply-caches-locations-guide

Progress and Regress in FO76

Unless you're trying to grab all of the fast travel points right away, the game doesn't ramp up the difficulty too quickly. Staying near the early game areas is relatively safe, and journeying further away brings more challenging enemies. Staying around low level areas gives the opportunity to gather supplies in relative safety before continuing into higher level areas where those supplies are consumed more quickly. Games that scale enemy difficulty to player level don’t offer the player the opportunity to relax in lower level zones.

Progress is also guided by the main story quest. There is virtually no sense of urgency bestowed on the player, and so pursuing this part of the game is easy to put on the back burner for hours. By exploring the world, the player finds that they are near a quest objective and can grab that bit of progress while still pursuing other ends. Unlike other Bethesda RPGs, the multiplayer aspect can impart a different set of interests for the player and the emphasis on crafting and modifying gear means hunting for resources can provide more hours of distraction. As these varied interests develop, players might very well find that the negative, pessimistic things they thought they knew aren’t really true after all. For example, I hadn’t seen any Faction quests until I stumbled across a curious dead body in a dark alleyway. Only chance led me to it, but the ensuing quest led me to the pleasant realization that Factions were alive and well in Fallout 76.

I've had several up-and-down moments while playing Fallout 76. When I started making notes for this post I noticed that they were hot and cold. As I play more Fallout 76 and adjust to its shortcomings, I'm finding that there are more things to enjoy than I first thought. Still, those shortcomings are very real....

From "Fallout 76 Map Is Called Appalachia; New Sleeping, Trading Details Revealed" at https://wccftech.com/fallout-76-map/

The Negatives in FO76

Briefly and broadly, I need to point out some of the problems in Fallout 76. The single player experience is much worse  than playing with even one friend. The game is best experienced with a team, and that's a problem in a busy world. 

Leveling is more important than progressing, and progress gets locked away by level requirements more than any other game. In Skyrim, if you find a nice item you can have it. In Fallout 76, the coolest things you find have to be carried around until you can level up to their requirements. Currently, the game penalizes players for trying to hold onto items they aren't actively using (reportedly for technical reasons), so this is frustrating.

The world lacks the details of a full Bethesda RPG. It still shows touches, but there are more areas that feel empty and passionless. The size of the world in Fallout 76 was too much for the amount of development the game received. Bethesda can always fill a bigger and bigger world in their spectacular way, but that job grows exponentially with the world and Fallout 76 doesn't get there. The size of the world isn't a point that makes any impact on my interest in the game, and I think the only reason it still gets talked about is a competitive sense of one-upmanship driven by critics.

The PvP elements are haphazard and unsatisfying. They feel like they were an afterthought but there should have been a clear system in place from the beginning. I'd much rather not have these elements at all. They are neutered to avoid griefing, but there is so little point to having them at all that griefing is all they are good for. The game is meant to be played with a team of friends, and there isn't any place for a competitive element in a co-operative experience. Again, this is a feature that makes no impact on my interest in a Bethesda RPG, and Fallout 76 doesn't accomplish making this feature feel worthwhile.

From "Fallout 76 server crashes under triple nuke strike" at https://www.techspot.com/news/77496-fallout-76-server-crashes-under-triple-nuke-strike.html

              

Conclusion on FO76

Fallout 76 is a game that players will warm up to if they spend time with it and if they have the opportunity to play and make progress with friends. There are a few easy takeaways that I can share from my experience:

• Don't jump in yet, especially if you think you'll be playing solo. Wait until Christmas time and check in on this game again.
• Don't listen to the critics right now. By all means ask for someone's thoughts if they've played it, but withhold judgment on the game for a few weeks. Complainers are making a lot of noise because they are getting attention for it. That'll die down, and the game isn't what they're making it out to be.
• If you've got someone who wants to play the game with you, that's the best time to jump in. Whether that's now or later, the best version of Fallout 76 is the version you experience with friends. Don't expect the game to connect you with players that you want to play with.

In my opinion, Fallout 76 is the worst Bethesda RPG you could play right now. That being said, it's still a Bethesda RPG and if that's a style of game you enjoy, Fallout 76 is worth playing if you have a friend to play it with.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The "Bethesda RPG"

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"Bethesda RPG" is a term which describes Fallout 4, Fallout: New Vegas,  Fallout 3, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.

The term conglomerates the work of Bethesda Softworks on these particular games. Though Bethesda makes many other games, these are grouped together by their high degree of similarity. The term is useful when talking about RPGs or when looking for games to play. I'll focus on the three most important aspects that make up every Bethesda RPG: transcendent soundtracks, expansive worlds, and player-driven narratives.

I'd like to talk more about Bethesda games and sandbox RPGs in the future, so this post gives me a basis for those discussions.

1. The Transcendent Soundtracks

The sound design in Bethesda RPGs is second to none. Particularly outstanding is the music composed by Jeremy Soule for the Elder Scrolls franchise. Along with those exemplary entries, the soundtracks in all Bethesda RPGs are a mark of their quality. The attention to this detail demonstrates passion for their art and an understanding that success in the genre relies on a players immersion within their fantasy. The Bethesda RPG is able to connect emotionally with the player because the sound design transcends the medium.

Consistently, music from Bethesda RPGs makes its way from the game to other parts of life. The soundtracks offer such a strong emotional connection that they bleed their influence into the quiet and reflective hours outside of the game. The music has its place among the most iconic of movie soundtracks as it engages the listener's senses of wonder, wanderlust, and nostalgia.

If Elder Scrolls games can offer you nothing else, at least take their music with you.



The Fallout franchise offers solid original soundtracks, but the real treats come across the Wasteland through your Pip-Boy over the radio waves. Fallout games have repeatedly found golden oldies and forgotten hits that create the games' sensational aural repertoires.These weren't written for the Fallout franchise, but in another sense they absolutely were.

This playlist is far from comprehensive, but it includes a few of my favorites from throughout the franchise:



2. The Expansive Worlds

Taking place in huge sandbox-style worlds,  Bethesda RPGs are open to exploration and encourage non-linear progression. The player is allowed the agency to decide where they want to go and what they want to do. This has long been a selling point for these RPGs, as so many others offer more linear experiences.

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It's a two-edged sword: it gives the player unrivaled freedom for exploration and creates insurmountable design problems. Bethesda RPGs try to maximize the positives and minimize the negatives, but the issue is intrinsic to the design. Neither the impertinent, lackadaisical wanderer nor the pedantic, focused uber-gamer are left completely satisfied. For the significant swathe of consumers between those types, there's a lot to enjoy. Considering what Bethesda RPGs accomplish, there aren't other games to prove this can be done better.

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Even with flaws, the expansive worlds in Bethesda RPGs are in a class of their own.

3. The Player-Driven Narratives

The story changes in each Bethesda RPG, but they follow "the hero's journey". This core component of the story makes them comparable to many similar RPGs. There's still more to a"Bethesda RPG" game in terms of it's storytelling, but this trait is essential to making useful comparisons.

The story aspect of a "Bethesda RPG" can still be defined more closely than a single narratological term. "Bethesda RPGs" tell stories that expand the world in which they take place I'll call them "ambient stories", and they are one of my favorite aspects. . The environments themselves have stories to tell and these are some of the most artful and subtle touches I've ever experienced in games. For example, a player might find a rotten note on a desk--does it's message lead the player to treasure or ambush? It's up to the player whether they find out, but in a Bethesda RPG you can expect that there is something to find. None of this is followed as a "quest" and there's no game progress tied to whether or not you care to find out--it's just a small part of the world's story.

A "Bethesda RPG" can touch on your sense of imagination because it shows you in many ways that the game designers  care enough (and are clever enough) to understand the player experience in the moment. A "Bethesda RPG" proves to you that it can surprise you, and from there you begin to seek out those surprises. A hidden path leads to treasure, a trash can holds a letter of unrequited love--these are the ambient stories that the player might only find upon replaying the game multiple times. These special kinds of stories engage the "Bethesda RPG's" narrative with it's world in a way that many other games lack.

The player is also connected to the world by Karma systems that exist in each Bethesda RPG. This assigns meaning to the player's actions. The amount of fame or infamy you possess will determine how non-player characters interact with you and can make certain parts of the game more or less accessible. While Karma plays a role in every Bethesda RPG, Bethesda chooses to inoculate it in favor of keeping player choice less restrictive to the player experience.

Factions, on the other hand, are an aspect which the Bethesda RPG handles much better. Faction quests are independent from the main storyline, allowing the player to make progress in a variety of ways. Following a faction's questline can provide hours of game content without touching the core story of the game and allows for a variety of experiences between individual players and playthroughs.

The combination of these elements (the core story, the ambient stories, Karma, and Factions) is interpreted through the lens of the role-playing player. The games are renowned for their varied experiences, and serving this point is the character creation and development process. Beginning with an in-depth character creator, the player's play style guides their character's development. These processes vary between the individual entries in the series of Bethesda RPGs, but certain types of characters tend to recur.

posted on Reddit by u/lallapalalable https://i.imgur.com/6vXDTsz.png

Conclusively, the Bethesda RPG is a player-driven, sandbox-style role-playing game with an immersion-enhancing atmosphere. Many similar games exist, but those similarities always come with stark differences. The Bethesda RPG isn't the type of game most developers could make due to how expensive they are to develop. It is the type of game that appeals to a relatively wide audience in it's genre and the type of game that engenders proliferous story-telling across a variety of mediums. They happen to be some of my favorite games that I've ever played and I always look forward to new entries in their respective franchises.

The Future of the Bethesda RPG

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Looking forward, there are two important new entries coming to the series of Bethesda RPGs: Fallout 76 and The Elder Scrolls VI. The latter was announced just a few months ago and a discussion of it only brings on speculation.. The former, Fallout 76, is presently between a short beta testing phase and it's scheduled release on November 14th. I've had the privilege to play in that beta test and what I've experienced deserves it's own post, but let me briefly discuss this game as it relates to the Bethesda RPG.

World: Fallout 76 does a few interesting things in terms of its immersive world. In fact, this is probably the area where you can see the most fresh ideas coming up. The game revamps the "quest hub" issue by removing NPC quest-givers. In fact, the game is devoid of friendly NPC's altogether except for a few robot vendors. As players are asked to fill those vacancies as vendors and villagers, the bugs, glitches, and exploits inherent to the design of Bethesda RPGs are greater issues. There is greater competition for space and resources than in any other iteration and that makes cheating more of a hindrance to every player's experience. As the world grows and continues to develop, these new ideas will prove to be either clever or clumsy. I remember having a dream of a game much like this one in the Elder Scrolls universe when I played Oblivion. The Elder Scrolls universe would introduce another set of unique challenges for a game like Fallout 76, but it is true that I want to see Fallout 76 prove the verity of this concept.

Music:What I've heard in the beta so far is a lot of repeats. It seems that the music from Fallout 4 is being re-used in Fallout 76. The original soundtrack is good, but the original soundtracks in Fallout games have never been their greatest feature (unlike Elder Scrolls games). While the music isn't bad or wrong, I find myself hopeful that there will be more that I haven't heard on the radio when the game officially releases. If the soundtrack's only addition is "Country Roads Take Me Home", I'll be sorely disappointed. For now, I'll wait to know more.

Narrative: If the narrative of other Bethesda RPGs is player-driven, the narrative in Fallout 76 is player-centric. New quests  are found as the player explores Appalachia, but these seem to follow in the vein of the radiant quest system from Fallout 4 in that they aren't necessary or important to the story. I hope that the joy of exploration will not wear off in Fallout 76 as the stream of new quests relies on it. For the moment, I don't hold that opinion because I haven't had that experience. Some early criticism of the game has focused on this point and I concur that there is a certain listlessness in the quest progression which comes from feeling like "oh, this is a fetch quest" or "oh, this is an escort quest". The questlines should draw in your interest, but there isn't much to offer in the way of Factions in a world without NPCs and Karma isn't much of a system at all except by way of bounties placed on players who steal or murder (which you can totally do by accident, by the way). It's a world lacking the feeling of progress and the substitute is leveling to unlock Perks and stronger equipment. Fallout 76's greatest shortcomings will likely be in this area. The game might be taking too much influence from MMORPG style games and losing its connection to the role-playing roots of the franchise. I discussed above why it's important for the story to be tied to how the game world interacts with the player, and in an endless-endgame MMO-style RPG this just can't exist. It remains to be seen, but as of yet I have not been feeling like I'm only grinding to farm and farming to grind.

In summation, the world is a fresh idea, the soundtrack is a repeat, and the story is shallow. This sounds like the game is 1 for 3, but my experience in the beta was wholly positive despite these shortcomings. I'm concerned that this is a game many will miss because of the state of the game maraket right now and how easy it is to nitpick this game to death. I'm looking forward to an extended and even-handed review of this game following it's release.