Fallout 76 - Multiplayer, online, BGS Austin

The Blood and Wine comparison has never been fair to any DLC. Honestly, it was probably underpriced for the amount of content that came with it.

That said, $18 for a white paint job skin is nuts.

I dunno. I played Fallout 4 about 3 days ago and headshots with VATS never get old. The blood splash and the sound is perfect. Is just satisfying to remove heads with a railgun. Then the game have a wide variety of weapons, and the sparse ammo kind of push you to use different weapons for different enemies. Is not a arena shooter, but is competent this way. I don’t know what people want. Borderlands?.

The shooting in Fallout games is not up to pure shooter standards, not surprisingly. It’s pretty damn good for an RPG/Shooter hybrid, though, IMO. The problem is that the hubridization is tricky, and all too often the games end up being not shooter-y enough for shooter fans, and not RPG-y enough for RPG fans.

Can I ask a dumb question? What makes a game more shootery? I play mostly FPS/RPG hybrids, not really many pure FPS games. So maybe I don’t know what I am missing, but what am I missing?

I mean in Deus Ex or Fallout 4 or Bioshock or Metro or Far Cry I point a gun and pull the trigger and the target dies. If any of those is better at FPS than the others I can’t tell. Then again those are all hybrids so maybe there isn’t a good comparison there.

So what makes a game a better shooter?

That’s a great question. Ultimately it comes down to feel, but we can quantify that a bit.

  • Player skill should matter. Shooting in RPG hybrids like Alpha Protocol doesn’t feel good, when you shoot a dude in the head and it says you missed, or glanced, or did very low damage because of an invisible dice roll.
  • Action/twitchy games require solid framerates to feel good.
  • Online action/twitchy games require low latency and fast server responses to feel good.
  • Guns should be satisfying to shoot, in an audio/visual sense. Shotguns should go BOOM, rifles CRACK. Animations, reloading, etc, should delight the senses.
  • Movement should be smooth, without the player getting caught up on tiny ridges on the ground. Poor shooters mess that up. If it’s a cover shooter, it should be easy to get into, move out of, and switch between cover areas, and they should be clearly designated.
  • Most enemies should stay at a distance, because it’s annoying to shoot monsters trying to rip your face off, particularly on console.

Any others?

To take that a step further, I would like to know some games that get a lot of those right. I also tend to stick more to games that are hybrids and maybe haven’t had a chance to experience a really good shooter.

I did really enjoy Borderlands and using a sniper rifle, but no idea where that would fit in the spectrum. And yes, hated that game when many armored monsters would rush, although sniping them with a rifle was really satisfying when you could pull it off.

(maybe good for another thread…)

Try Destiny 2, it’s a hybrid but the actual shooting feels really great.

Actually, pretty much every shooter is a hybrid these days, your Battlefields, your Calls of Duty, they all have RPG elements. Nobody takes it as far as Alpha Protocol, though.

We dropped a missile on Whitehaven or whatever the starter town is last night. Most fun I have had yet and netter 5 levels.

Shooting is about the only thing good in this GaaS.

But the shooting is, admittedly, pretty fuckin’ good.

Actually, I’d like to know the answer for this as well. In fact, is there any game with an in-game lore explanation for microtransactions or cash shops or pay-to-win nonsense?

-Tom

In most cases I can think of, the very idea of a shop outside the game leads the idea of the player as a player of a game, and hence undercuts the suspension of disbelief, etc. Adding in some lore tie would be fundamentally, if not impossible, really tortuous. Destiny 2 does it perhaps the only way it can be done, with the Engram shops that are in-game with items that have in-game backstories. Only the transaction method/medium is different, and that’s compartmentalized outside of the game experience somewhat (and even integrated within it to a degree).

There are automated military item drops in Fallout 76. Maybe it’s “ROBOTS!”

I’d add that enemy movement and animations should be smooth, need to visually communicate the model’s speed and directional changes, and make sense. Fallout 3/NV/4/76 are terrible at this. Enemies juke around with very little consistency, and their limbs sometimes do not match the velocity or even direction of movement. That’s even with a high framerate.

Hitboxes are also important. If I aim at the head of an enemy peeking over cover, I should hit the head.

The biggest exploits right now lay in the utterly broken trade system, where an adversarial actor (i.e., another player) can steal stuff right off from you.

Not to mention the continuing drama of the broken anti-cheat damage system, which, in cases where your weapon does too much damage (explosive rounds in particular), enemies become unkillable until you log.

Or the crash on exit introduced in the latest PC patch.

None of which Bethsoft has acknowledged.

This game sucks.

Got the game free from the Blizzard launcher. Is the DLC worth buying for solo players who will never group up in a billion years?

If you like an extremely shallow experience with cringe inducing writing then D2 just might be the game you’re looking for.

What I can’t understand is how they could roll this out with the totally horrible, broken, unintuitive, and functionally useless trade system they have. Above and beyond any cheating, or thieving, the basic system blows syphilitic goats.

My wife and I were trying to trade some stuff, and the trade system made two long-time veterans of MMOs going back to the pay-per-hour days, both with advanced degrees, feel like total putzes. Nothing about it is intuitive, logical, or efficient, and even a simple act like giving someone a weapon you’ve made requires all sorts of hoop jumping and even then it’s hit or miss whether you’ll actually end up transferring the right thing.

And the lock-up on exiting to desktop (mine doesn’t crash the PC at least) is baffling and annoying.

Worst of all, as you note, there has been like zero communication about anything from Bethesda. Like, nothing. No mea culpas, no serious roadmaps for a path forward, nothing, just announcements of more Atomic Shop crap and the occasional notice about maintenance time. Really horrible.

It’s doubly bad because I really like the moment to moment experience, most of the time. Maybe it’s because this sort of game is made for people like me, who can spend hours simply wandering the countryside, fully engaged in the minutia of traversing the landscape and shooting the occasional bloatfly or Wendigo. It’s a game for us spectrum folks, Fallout: Aspie Edition.