All the s.p.e.c.i.a.l.s are desirable, to unlock cool perks.
But STR / AGI / END are specially interesting, since they directly affect stats that matter.
My character is healed by radiation, can eat dead bodies, and is superlucky in a way that have a high odds to have his gear repair itself when somebody hit me, or I hit somebody. I happens to have high endurance, so I am pretty resistant to illness.
Just note that you are in the minority on this. Of the 66 Xbone, PS4 and PC reviews on Metacritic, only 4 have rated the game at or above 70%,. That is 6% of critics who would rate the game as highly as you.
I am glad you are enjoying it. I too have greatly enjoyed games that have less than stellar reputations. In this case, the consensus seems to be that this game is a bad step in the wrong direction. That should not impact your enjoyment of the game.
I do not believe this is accurate. People enjoy the Fallout series for a multitude of reasons and with no NPCs and a relatively lifeless world in 76 there a great many people who may have enjoyed FO4 who despise this game for lacking those elements. There are some people who enjoyed FO4 who also will enjoy 76 but that is a subset and not even a majority I think.
That is the real mystery of why this product even exists. FO76 is a more limited version of FO4 and thus it will not attract new fans to the series. Those who did not play FO4 are not likely to pick up 76 and only a subset of those who played FO4 would gravitate towards a no-NPC, online-only version of the game. Limiting your market in this way seems counterproductive.
Well my benchmark for a good Fallout game is still Fallout '97. Not Fallout fucking 4. Bethesda can’t make a good campaign (both campaigns in FO3 and FO4 were pretty shit) so saying fuck it and making an online exploration game seems like something they would do, but that is hardly a Fallout game anymore.
Fair. But in that case I don’t know why you would even be looking at Fallout '76 anyway.
The big drop on Thursday with so many absolutely crushing reviews has to have stirred up something within Bethesda. Heck, I’m guessing they were pretty surprised to see reviews from US-based sites drop on Thanksgiving. And I’m guessing that last night, today, and over the weekend there have been and will be many, many conference calls between Bethesda folks to try to game out next steps.
That’s what I’m fascinated to see next. They’ve put out this unmitigated disaster of a game, and the early reviews from professional critics and the gaming public word of mouth have been savage, and justifiably so. But there’s no way that Bethesda/Zeni can let this thing just die on the vine, either. Fallout 76 is their revenue engine for the next 3-6 quarters, and they’ve really got no choice but to come up with a strategy to fix this mess of a game they’ve created.
I want to see what they do, and how they do it. To me, it seems like they’re going to have to pay attention to everything that the No Mans Sky team did to resuscitate that game. It’s almost a perfect analog for the issues Fallout 76 has: a vaguely explained game concept shoved out the door in condition that was almost antagonistic to fans anticipating something else. Bethesda can try to save this disaster with surface changes, but I don’t think that’s going to cut it.
I think with a mess to this degree, they’re going to have to reconsider a lot of the core gameplay and almost start from the very framework of the existing game and rethink and rebuild almost everything.
This is me as well. I enjoy the rpg mechanics less and less with each new version of Bethout. I do believe I prefer the game and setting as a first person experience though, I will admit.
Because they called it Fallout, and up until very recently I had no idea what exactly '76 was. I will still play a Fallout game, but after reading some of this thread and elsewhere I now am convinced '76 isn’t really a Fallout game, or at least one I have any interest in playing, like say Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. So I guess I am done here now. :)
Agreed. Hello Games dug themselves out of a big nasty hole that few people expected they’d be able to accomplish with their disastrous launch but you can’t argue with the recent review data.I’m guessing Bethesda will do the same. Do they have a choice?
Sure. They could (and I suspect largely will) abandon the game and work on the next Elder Scrolls game, that dumb Rage sequel, Fallout 5, etc.
Hello Games didn’t really have anything to fall back on. Joe Danger 3 wasn’t going to cut it after NMS’s launch.
Those are years out, though. From what Trigger was saying, it sounds like they were wanting some recurring revenue from FO76 to fill the gap. Not sure if it’s in their best interest to abandon it. From my (minority, obviously) point of view, the game is already pretty good and far far better than NMS was at release and Bethesda has a lot more resources than Hello Games did.
I think they have maybe a little less choice than that. More than Hello had perhaps, but I don’t think they can walk away from this too easily, either. We may be 24 months away from either the new Elder Scrolls or Fallout 5. I’m not sure revenues from Fallout 4/VR, Skyrim/VR, and Elder Scrolls Online is going tide them over.
The financials at Bethesda/Zeni are strong, but even so.
I guess the choice here is: “Patch up the most major issues the game has, so that enough people who are enjoying the game stay with it”, basically trying to compromise without spending too much on continuing development/fixes, or…
…or “Really go after it with major fixes and systems rethinking.” Which would be more expensive from a labor and marketing standpoint, but might recoup that investment better in the long term.
Zenimax is huge and gets plenty of recurring revenue from the long tail of Skyrim, Doom, Wolfenstein etc, not to mention Elder Scrolls Online. Sure this game’s apparent performance will hurt, but not so much that they have no choice but to throw good money after bad. And I don’t really think of them as a company that does a lot of post-release (unpaid) support, though I could be wrong, as I’m not very plugged into the communities of their games. They seem to rely on community mods and paid DLC.
Leaving aside the (totally justified) criticisms of this game, I am somewhat bemused to still see, lo these many years later, so many people lamenting the latest Fallout game as “not really Fallout.” I mean, yeah, the original (I think I reviewed it when it came out, but I may have just played the hell out of it, can’t recall) was a great RPG, despite the time limit thing (eventually removed I think), and Fallout 2 was MOTS but better. And yes, the shift in FO 3 to a first-person, more action-y experience was jarring, even for those who really ended up loving it.
I’m guessing the folks who have been grumpy about the franchise since FO 3’s launch are really invested in the traditional RPG aspects of the series? I love me some turn-based tactical combat in RPGs, and loot and progression and stats are always welcome, but I also love FPS mechanics, first-person world exploration, and all that. For me, Fallout was always mostly about the neat conceit they had, the retro-futuristic post-apocalyptic setting that made no real sense but was somehow wicked cool. I loved the turn-based mechanics and traditional RPG elements of the first two games, but they were not, to me, central to the idea of Fallout. And the storylines and even the basic setting, in terms of specific lore and such, were always wonky and ultimately kind of disposable.
So when I’m still, in 2018, seeing people say “I like Fallout but isn’t Fallout,” it makes me think that people are wanting a game that, to be blunt, is never going to be made, period. I get that, once having established a “standard” or meta for a particular game setting, one can reasonably expect each successive game to have some strong ties to that standard, but it also seems to me that standards and metas will evolve. I certainly agree that FO 4 and '76 moved far from the original system framework of the original games, and even from FO 3 (NV, hmm, I’m on the fence there). By now, though, I would have thought folks would have realized that you can’t go home again, and if there’s no there, there, with the new games, that isn’t going to change.
I really don’t think Zenimax will walk away from F76. I expect the game will be substantially better a year from today.
There is no chance they walk away. There’s nobody who works there who would argue that it’s better to leave however many buyers they have in the dust and set a precedent that if things don’t go well at launch they will bail.
100% guaranteed they will continue to update and improve the game for at least 12 months. It may be very difficult to overcome first impressions, but they will most certainly try.
I’m sure they’ll continue to update it, but I’d be very surprised if evolved anything like as much as NMS has (with free updates, anyway - who knows what they’ll put in paid DLC).
Aside from fixing the most glaring bugs, they should try to make private servers and modding available much sooner than initially planned (1 year from now). Let the community fix the game, a lot of people actually enjoy doing this.
You can’t get people to buy DLC for a crappy game. Zenimax needs to get players excited to play before they’ll open their pockets.
I doubt private servers and modding will ever come to F76 in the way that people expect. It won’t be like previous games where you can install mods from the Nexus. They’ll have a mod store, curated by Zenimax. Private servers, if they come at all, will follow the path of exile model where Zenimax rents you a server they host, and you choose who can join it.
They can’t abandon it. They chose to make FO76 an online game and now they’re committed to it at least until they allow private servers and modding and then pull the plug.
To be clear, by (largely) abandon, I don’t mean pulling the plug, I mean providing token updates and fixes, but no material content/mechanics updates that aren’t already deep in development, outside of paid DLC. No NMS/Elemental style “we have to save this game” FO76 style 2.0 effort.
And it’s just my gut feel, maybe they will. But it’s not an imperative for them in the way it was for Hello or Stardock.