Fallout 76 - Multiplayer, online, BGS Austin

Man, talk about toxic fandom. You are wondering if Bethesda should die, leaving hundreds of people without jobs, because they dare create a game that you, personally, might not like.

Maybe ease up a bit, buddy.

I think Fallout 76 looks cool, but I wonder if it’s possible to play in a private coop game. I hate playing in a gankers paradise.

Didn’t you know that’s just your pvp phobia showing?

The “wen killed you spawn near” is word for word what sea of thieves did and was a problem. It allowed zerg rush strategies instead of actual tactics

Conan Exiles sold a million copies.

Humm… another interesting faction to roleplay in Rust 97 would be the Legion:

Hello,

Join the LEGION, help get the world rid of degenerates
And If you are a degenerate, we have a cross for you.

*dubs*

Microaggression!

Apples and Oranges here though. Conan allows solo play. You can make your own server and lock it, and only allow friends on. You can also play off-line truly solo. There are NPCs (bare-bones, but they tell the story).

F76 has shown that you can’t do any of the above, and it’s been stated that all other characters in your game are other players.

I personally don’t buy games that force me to play with (or against) strangers. So for example, I own Conan, and play it, but I do not own Sea of Thieves.

Has it really shown that?

There are no ‘humans’ other than other players, but there are robots and they’re the ones issuing the quests and telling the ‘story’.

‘Private’ play has been stated as something they’re planning on.

FO76 doesn’t really seem to be playing my tune, but from what I’ve read it seems a little less rigid than what you suggest.

*puts on troll hat*

Singleplayer: taking a bath

Multiplayer: swimming in a public pool where kids pee

I’m curious how they would handle “private” play. During the E3 announcement, Howard stated that you wouldn’t even see a server list. Maybe they’ll have servers set aside for people who wish to play solo. I certainly hope so. If there is solo play, and it’s meaningful, I’m much more interested.

I don’t think I’ve read anything about solo play, but they definitely mentioned a desire for ‘private’ play (whatever that means).

I’m also curious what ‘private’ means given the framework they’ve coarsely outlined. In an ideal world, that means a privately hosted server, but I highly doubt they’ll go that far.

That documentary cleared up a lot about the development process of the game, and bethesda in general. Right now in the final months the team is 100% playtesting and balancing and debugging the game. They sounded like they weren’t even 100% sure how much PVP there would be. It sounded like they were pitching a 4 person co-op PVE game where PVP could happen.

This does sound a lot more like Division, and more like the Dark Zone part. Though, they are promising 0 impact of player death, where in the dark zone you would loose loot.

One other thing mentioned offhand in the documentary is that weapon degradation is back. Also food will now rot, and you need to eat to survive.

Good, the mundane things people don’t like about survival games, and weapons that break. They also mentioned a “mutations” system where rad exposure can cause random mutations that can be made permanent? Cool!

I think if you are doubtful, you should watch the very excellent noclip documentary above. I was very skeptical, but that made me at least hope that there could be a game I would want to play in there. I think it will come down to how much they tune the multiplayer.

That documentary follows on from a companion 90’ noclip documentary that looks at the whole history of Bethesda pre-Fallout 76:

I just watched it and found it fascinating. It goes into quite a bit of detail on what the Bethesda development process is and how, 6 months before release, their games are always a mess of ideas still being developed and refined. The thing they have learned over time is to have confidence in their process and ability to bring things together in the final straight.

I’m off to watch the Fallout 76 one now. But if you want to learn how Bethesda has evolved since the Daggerfall days and how their dev philosophy has come about, I’d definitely recommend giving the longer documentary a watch.

Wendelius

That is definitely on my to-watch list, though it is a bit more of a time investment than 35 minutes.

I watched it earlier in the week, great work as always. Yes, weapons degrade, you need to hunt and cook food and build the cooking utensils and fire, all that survival game bullshit is in there as it is in fact a survival game, not Fallout 5.

If you don’t have the time for both Noclip docs, someone on Reddit summarized the Fallout 76 bits from them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fallout/comments/8qsx8s/complete_notes_from_the_noclip_documentary/

Here’s a new one for the thread:

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.

My kid is hyped for this…we’ve always wanted to play together as we play most games together and he is the biggest F4 geek…so we cant wait…we are not picky like lots of other fans so it’s a no brainer for us!

Why would I care whether hostile humans were players or AI? If they are hostile, it’s irrelevant.

Hostile AI are fenced in an area and act predictably. Hostile PCs will shoot you in the back while you’re AFK in an otherwise safe spot and call your mom a hooker.