Fallout 76 - tricentennial edition

I suppose the nature of online gaming means that Vats won't slow down time. This makes me approve of Vats.

Top thread here:

gonna roleplay in Fallout 76 as a new york times journalist trying to take the pulse of forgotten america

— Low-Level Yankee Luminary (@bombsfall) November 15, 2018

sprinting after a killer robot yelling DO YOU FEEL THE WHITE WORKING CLASS HAS BEEN LEFT BEHIND

— Low-Level Yankee Luminary (@bombsfall) November 15, 2018

Etc

lol, extremely good

a high level event in Fallout 76 is JD Vance rolls down to WV from OH on a militarized segway and you have to fight him and Peter Thiel who is there to harvest the blood of vault survivors. JD mostly just points at the blasted wasteland and decries the culture of helplessness

— Low-Level Yankee Luminary (@bombsfall) November 15, 2018

this might be the only entertainment value this game offers

Basic question, but what's the appeal of Fallout?

I mean, I understand the appeal of Mad Max-style dystopia, or Neuromancer, or the Paranoia RPG, etc, but these games just look super fucking depressing. There's a version of "too soon!" that's "too likely".

perky 50s sci-fi optimism crashing into postapocalyptic nightmare is kind of a unique milieu, and it's fascinating to explore when it's done right, new vegas being the high point for me (fallout 1&2 diehards don't @ me)

how was fallout 4? i was thinking of getting it but i'm on the fence

like fallout 3 but bigger and with more tedious base-building

In fallout 4 you’re forced to roleplay as the dumbest, worst parent on the entire earth

i'll save my kid ffs i just need to get a cocktail recipe for this robot first

i've never played any of the fall outs

(fallout 1&2 diehards don't @ me)

@@@@@@

New Vegas is the closest Bethesda's gotten to the right mood. I think the problem is that they somehow thought the tone was "perky 50s sci-fi optimism" when the original games (and to an extent, NV) were at their most cynical when using those elements! every indication was that the past actually sucked and the cheery retro junk was very much in the vein of retro-50s diners being a thing in the 1980s.

the backstory does riff on every "your nuclear future" advertisement and public service announcement from the 1950s coming true (nuclear cars! robots maids to do your housework!) but the nuclear war that sets the stage for humanity living in vaults doesn't happen until *2077*

the cheery crap is all propaganda that existed to pacify a world that was circling the drain

fallout 3 and new vegas are great, fallout 4 was not good - they didn't really improve the graphics or gameplay or world, and the stuff they added (building, the supersuits, etc) was tedious

imo the one thing fallout 3 dropped that was essential to the earlier games (and NV) was the song and dance of cultivating alliances with different factions

nothing like running into a heavily armed group in the middle of nowhere only to realize they're on your side

i started with 3 and still haven't really played 1 or 2 even though i have them on my computer, so idc about that

I liked Fallout 3! I feel like I've avoided mentioning that it was a lot of fun and, overall, actually less glitchy than 1 & 2

Fallout 4 sidetracks you to mundane tasks that you could skip but gabnabbit you already built one settlement... time to lose 24 hours doing the exact same thing all over the wasteland. The world becomes chore city at that point....

I started with 2, went back to one, then beat both a few years before 3 debuted. New Vegas is the series highlight, tho I dove in deep to 4 that I burned out at the end and never went back to play the DLC.

I’d guess of ilx gamers you’re one of the people to dive the deepest on the games and I appreciate your perspective

I will play absolute garbage to death sometimes and I’m afraid if I got around to fo4 or 76 I would just be grooming a shack in a miserable wasteland for years

yeah, i put like 40 hours into fallout 4 and i didn't really enjoy any of it :(

sounds like a bad work week

I think F76 has potential, it just might take a year or more to get there. IDGAF about MMO’s generally but I know Elder Scrolls Online was kind of a dud on first release but is supposedly really solid now.

sounds like a bad work week

rest assured i've learned my lesson and now spend my work week posting full-time instead

The series helped spark my interest in Googie and midcentury design/commercial illustration

But without NPCs or narrative, I can’t see the point of playing until the game gets built up after a year or so

I think there’s a game experience that companies have yet to really sell, because the return isn’t guaranteed: the evolving world. Bethesda is trying this, possibly more honestly than others have, by giving a limited experience that isn’t open-ended as far as gameplay, but as far as the game experience itself. It’s unplanned space: the things added to the game world will be reactive based on player actions and feedback, and the price early adopters pay is not for a product but for the reactive addition of gameplay elements. It’s an interesting feedback loop because without additional cost to the consumers, the entire incentive on the developer is the continued improvement that spurns further adoption.

Whether it ends up like a suburban development where people end up moving in and population demands result in more stores and schools or it becomes like one of those unpopulated cities built for a future workforce that fails to materialize before the buildings begin to fall into disrepair, is yet to be seen

that's an interesting idea, but how would it work in practice? the things that i immediately think of things like larger settlements/cities organically evolving from player decisions, or maybe things like players designating market areas for trading, and then developers adding tools or items to help players do things like that.

but those sounds more like things that could happen in a MMORPG, not so much a 24-player server. so do you mean things more like developers responding to players being frustrated with the poor aiming controls by implementing better auto-aim or something similar?

xp i remember reading about someone's idea that cloud game streaming would open up the possibilities of much more dynamic MMO worlds, as you could have the world change more frequently and/or more drastically without the burden of having to constantly push out massive clientside updates to make it work

figure out what unexpected players do and expand on it

like the corpse-humping in fps games? now we have horrible victory emotes

on second thought...

Marked down to $40 already on Xbox

Down to £30 here in the UK today.

The reviews have been pretty bad mind

granted they'll probably try and make a lot of dlc money on this but i can't remember the last time a game got this discounted this quickly. people who bought it on day 1 have barely had it a week?!

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/46959170_261663328037086_8640284648229830656_n.jpg?_nc_cat=110&_nc_ht=scontent-lga3-1.xx&oh=fcaaacb490039297dcbe2eed3a773763&oe=5C68AFA3

The boiling rage this has gotten from Gamers has been pretty amusing.

Nerds tryin to put together a class action lawsuit because the fucking tote bag included in the Ultra Deluxe edition was nylon instead of canvas. Todd Howard being burned in effigy in message boards across the land.

fallout 76 patched last night and the patch has broken guns. guns no longer kill enemies. only melee consistently works. good, great

— Waldorf Sixpence (@WaldorfSixpence) December 5, 2018

not often a game exceeds my expectations of how shitty it’s gonna be, hats off to Bethesda

I had a bunch of time over Thanksgiving and bought FO4 for PS4 for like $15 and played it.

I mean, on one hand I wasn't doing much and didn't feel like reading from the stack of books I've been holding back on during those couple days. On the other hand, if I had anything more pressing to do with my time and wasn't a masochist I would have done about anything else. So, this 76 thing is probably not anywhere on my radar for the foreseeable future.

FO4 had some interesting locations and like... a couple interesting characters? I feel like the things they're valuing in that game, and seemingly in this one, is just giving you junk to do without providing an interesting story about why you're doing it, or making any of the things you do unique in any way. I go to this area to set up a dongle on a building, and there'll be super mutants because it's in game quadrant X. I do the same elsewhere and it's game quadrant Y, so it's feral ghouls. And the only quests attached to over half the locations is these gruntwork things that never end.

bethesda games tend to be buggy and iffy on quality even when it's something they poured their hearts into now you get this cynical cash in

I started out expecting to hate it - because I don’t like online games that much. But now my inner contrarian (who I try to keep in line) wants to like this. Either way, I can’t afford it this close to Christmas.

ok I know ending montages are less of a thing these days but I really miss the old-style fallout endings where they talked about all the different factions and what happened according to your choices, and how settlements along the wasteland fared

just “finished” fo4 and it’s like “oh hey I guess you did stuff and life is different. we got things to do still and btw buy the dlc”

bethesda really just can't stop explosively shitting themselves huh

Some of the people submitting tickets to get their replacement Fallout 76 canvas bag have encountered a surprise: they’ve been given access to parts of Bethesda’s support system, including the ability to open and close tickets, as well as check out customer’s personal information.

The loophole has since been closed, but not before a number of users on Reddit and the company’s forums claim to have been shown all kinds of things they should not have been shown. Jessiepie, for example, says:

I am receiving every single one of your support tickets on my Bethesda account. Mostly it’s your receipts for you power armor set requesting a new bag. These receipts contain all your info. Your email and home address and the card you used to buy this extremely glitched game.

RadioactiveTrinket, meanwhile, says:

I went on the support website today, to update a ticket of mine, and surprisingly (or not...) I ended up being able to see all sorts of tickets, with people putting their personnal informations in them, like receipt screenshots, names, addresses and so on.

whoops

Ha

Am I the only person playing Outer Worlds?

no

Is it any good?

The one person I know who's got it said it's far too easy and all the missions are pretty similar.

it’s not without its charms but it’s not bringing much to the table either - i’m 15 hours or so in and wondering whether i should keep going

i haven’t found it particularly challenging but i’m a time-strapped gamer dad now so it’s not really been a problem cuz i can’t be arsed getting killed over and over again in a story-focused game nowadays

(this is a weird thread to be having this convo in btw since it’s not a fallout game and it’s not developed by the people who made fallout 76)

the one person I know with it aaid its the best RPG he's ever played

outer worlds is not very fun, the writing is bad (and there's SO MUCH of it) and the shooting is horrible (and there's SO SO MUCH of it)

I like it but I went in with low expectations. Color scheme is pleasing and I think those are truffala plants outside of Edgewater???