Fallout 76 - The Bear and Badger

trippy

Fallout 2 has a special place in my memory. I remember the long bus journey to buy it and excitedly reading the manual on the way home. I'd played and completed the first but 2 really got its hooks into me.

It was a happy time for me, with little need for escapism but nonetheless I lived inside that world for months. It felt so deep and nuanced, a proper exploration game with so many things you could try. For years afterwards it was the one big-box game I didn't give to charity. It was something worth keeping hold of and it was dizzying to think of the progress two decades might bring...

Seventy four sequels later we're left with this radioactive turd of a game. Tonight I'm building a fire and Fallout 2 will become a tear-stained pile of melted plastic and ashes.

Speedhaak

Fairly damning video from Skillup

ChopperByrne

Apparently there's a bug in the Beta that deletes the game.

Not your save.

The entire fucking 50GB game.

Bob

Not sure I can trust someone who pronounces Beta Bayta...

Speedhaak

ChopperByrne wrote:

Apparently there's a bug in the Beta that deletes the game. Not your save. The entire fucking 50GB game.

That's some achievement, even for Bethesda

AJ

It's not a bug; it's a time-saving feature.

digi

AJ wrote:

It's not a bug; it's a time-saving feature.

Hahahahahahaha.
Class!

Skerret

Fallout of the body
Fallout of the mind
A ho on South Street hired for tricks
Little girls pickin' up sticks
Fallout of '76

Blocks100

Will probably start downloading this tonight, in preparation for playing a bit of the beta on Sunday. That youtuber chap seemed to be upset by the useless UI and low textures on the PC version, as if that was some new failure for a Bethesda game. These always tend to get modded out. Drawback of course for '76 is that there will be no mods (at least, not till private servers arrive a year or so later)

I expect nothing more than a Fallout4 new game+ for this. Although they have been a tad disingenuous with their early promotion, lauding new models and art assets. All the beta footage I've watched so far though shows a disturbingly high amount of asset recycling from the last game.

I do take his point though about the 'discovered recordings' bit - what's the point of tracking down npcs referred to in a holotape when you know they're all dead anyway?

Roujin

He also had valid points about this being a full rrp game in the context of his complaints and I think his concerns about the gameplay being compromised to the point that players looking for PVP will be annoyed by the compromises made to accommodate PVE players and the PVE players well be annoyed by the concessions made to enable PVP are decent observations. This game is trying to have its cake and eat it.

I think the complaints about recovered logs and the empty world is bang on for a game like this, this ain't Bioshock.

I think expecting Fallout 4 NG+ after everything that's been seen so far seems like the height of blind faith to me. This is out in just under 2 weeks and it looks like a total dumpster fire.

AJ

Everybody seems to think this is actually a proper game and not just an R&D project. Weird.

Roujin

AJ wrote:

Everybody seems to think this is actually a proper game and not just a shameless shareholder driven attempt to grab a slice of that lucrative competitive multiplayer game as a service pie that's so hot right now project. Weird.

Ftfy.

Bob

Roujin wrote:

He also had valid points about this being a full rrp game in the context of his complaints and I think his concerns about the gameplay being compromised to the point that players looking for PVP will be annoyed by the compromises made to accommodate PVE players and the PVE players well be annoyed by the concessions made to enable PVP are decent observations. This game is trying to have its cake and eat it.

I think the complaints about recovered logs and the empty world is bang on for a game like this, this ain't Bioshock.

I think expecting Fallout 4 NG+ after everything that's been seen so far seems like the height of blind faith to me. This is out in just under 2 weeks and it looks like a total dumpster fire.

The non-vats combat in fallout has always been atrocious and so the fact that this has no proper vats means that he’s probably right about how unsatisfying the combat will be.

Roujin

Deffo Bob. Sucks to watch but hopefully after this turd gets flushed Bethesda will come to their senses, dich their aged, crumbling engine and take a proper look at how they are going to go forward with the next main instalment in the series and presumably Elder Scrolls 6, although that's well into development now I think?

AJ

Roujin wrote:

AJ wrote:

Everybody seems to think this is actually a proper game and not just a shameless shareholder driven attempt to grab a slice of that lucrative competitive multiplayer game as a service pie that's so hot right now project. Weird.

Ftfy.

Obviously that too, but I'm fairly sure the main reason it's happening is because of Todd Howard's desire to make the tech needed for his ultimate vision of an Elder Scrolls game with fully dynamic factions that can literally build and destroy whole cities.

Blocks100

Ok I was up till 1am playing the beta of this last night. This was not due to an 'inability to put the pad down' as a result of the awesomeness of the gameplay, but more due to a wanton desperation to see if things would get better once I made it out of the starting area. They didn't.

Honestly, what kept me going was the forlorn hope that 'maybe if I just get beyond that ridge, the textures will stop popping-in and I'll be able be able to experience the game that "has 16 times the graphical detail of Fallout 4" '. Not my words, the words of Todd Howard ladies and gentleman. This is not entirely dissimilar to what I got:

Spoiler:

Not my screenshot, those of a PC user, but the constant object LOD issues were wretched too on Xbox. The much vaunted increased view distance was nowhere to been seen. Instead a filter has been placed on the camera that deliberately blurs everything that's far away. It's like playing the game within a goldfish bowl. Which has vaseline smeared all the way around it. It's that bad.

I can't see them fixing these critical failures in the engine in 9 days time, when it's due to be released. Currently the game looks worse than Fallout 3, a game that was released ten years ago.

Playing Fallout 76 makes my eyes hurt. Not just because of these graphical failings, but the lighting effects are chronically bad. Remember years ago when developers discovered Bloom and you couldn't move for all the Bloom? Well this is Bloom overload people. We're not talking a gentle dappling of light through the trees, but a full on Bloom attack. I can only guess this over-saturation is to hide the god damn awful textures (when they do finally manage to materialize) that exist on every object in the game

I could go on to lament on how the holotape stories you find are completely ineffectual at disguising the fact that a gameworld sans npcs just feels dead and hollow. How its implementation of VATS makes that iconic feature of the Fallout series feel utterly redundant and how random 'perk cards' make planned character builds impossible, but what would be the point? The game is just broken.

I feel utterly shafted at the moment. Always been an ardent supporter of Bethesda despite their obvious failings, due to the unparalleled open worlds they once created. But the world they have created here is a nightmarish vision of what happens when you refuse to jettison a game engine that can barely render a rock or an abandoned post-apocalyptic shack. War might never change. But if they don't change their development tools soon, they're going to loose fans by the droves.

Raiziel

Day one, then?

Skerret

I think the fans have been loosed

Kow

My fan is loose. I'm blaming Bethesda.

Blocks100

Announce a '2hrs gametime!' beta slot. Requires a 30GB patch to play. Proper quality trolling Bethesda.

AJ

Just a quick reminder, via Eurogamer, that this isn't nearly the worst thing to happen to Fallout.

AJ

Oh my god, the trailer is amazing.

Blocks100

I'd still rather play that than 76.

yourfavouriteuncle

Hahahaha

51gb day 1 patch.

That’s on top of the 45gb of the actual game so you’re gonna need to scrub that hd space clean.
Perhaps it means all the stuff from above will be fixed for launch?

g.man

Nah, Devs have apparently already stated that a tonne of the issues aren't going to be fixed at launch.

g.man

Speedhaak

Jesus Christ. And I bet there will still be people buy it. Sad times...

trippy

I feel for the people who worked hard trying to make this awful idea into something good, hampered by an ancient, always fairly terrible engine. All those hours wasted as it is rushed out of the door, utterly broken and unfinished and looking abysmal, hot on the heels of Red Dead 2, arguably the most amazing open-world we've so far seen. They were doomed to failure from the start, there was no need to shoot them in the kneecaps, bathe them in toxic waste and then thrown them off a cliff.

I mean, fuck.

Blocks100

I wouldn't mind if that day 1 patch amounted to 50GB worth of fixes. It doesn't. Because of their archaic tech, every time they update the game on consoles, users essentially have to re-download the entire game again..

Roujin

Dear Bethesda, please get the message and abandon this shitass cash grab and get back to work on an actual Fallout and Elder Scrolls 6.

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