A Partial Defense

Earlier this week Bethesda announced the Fallout 1st Membership, and I feel like I had a vastly different take on it than the rest of the community. There are a good number of people up in arms about this, and I can’t say that they are entirely wrong. I myself have deeply mixed feelings about it, but at face value I didn’t balk at the $100 a year price tag. As such I am going to break down my line of thinking. For that $100 or $13 monthly you get the following items.
The part of this that I immediately honed in on was the Private Worlds functionality. See if you have followed my blog for awhile this was what I desperately wanted at launch. In fact there were a bunch of server hosting providers that were advertising having private worlds just ahead of launch. This was likely wild speculation, but the serving up of a private server is not at all a new thing. In fact games like Rust, Minecraft or ARK function heavily on the backs of private hosted worlds that allow you to tweak and mod until your heart is content. This is ultimately what I was expecting from Fallout 76, was the ability to run my own destination to hang out and explore the world with my friends. Now if you look at the price tag entirely based upon Private Worlds… it becomes honestly a bargain. If we just take a Rust or an Ark server, which I figure are pretty fair equivalents of what sort of horsepower that Fallout 76 would require. Getting a server up and running is going to cost you somewhere between $20 and $30 a month through one of the many hosting providers (though admittedly you can run your own for free if you want to go through that nonsense). The scalar variable there often is based on just how many slots are available for players to log in and join. Immediately it seems like the Private Worlds are capped at 8 players, but then again the normal worlds also appear to be capped at 8 players so I guess that makes sense.
What everyone else appears to have latched onto in the statement is that this is seemingly a package of cosmetics and some core functionality that isn’t available in any other fashion. The Scrapbox honestly reminds me a lot of the crafting inventory from ESO Plus… which did not phase me at all and is worth every penny of that subscription cost. The monthly allowance of Atoms also seemed nice because it would allow you to play with stuff on the item shop all part of your server subscription fee. Again I am looking at this as entirely a way of getting private worlds and getting a bunch of stuff as part of that package. Most people however are just seeing this as a cash grab for a bunch of stuff that should have been available in the base game. For most of the week I thought I had the right of it, and we were renting server space to play in our private worlds. However it is coming out that this concept is a little bankrupt as well. First the world only exist if the player who is a First Member is actually online. That is way more problematic than renting a server, because in theory so long as you have granted someone access to your server it is up and running 24/7. I was maybe willing to cough up the money for a server if it let me have a place to roam freely with a group of my friends. Strike two is the fact that apparently the controls for this server are set up based on your Bethesda friends list… and anyone on that friends list can pop in freely. So instead of being like I thought and granting permissions to individual players, seemingly anyone can join your game that you have friended. The other fault that is coming out is that often times the worlds you are going into are not unique to you. What I expected was something akin to Minecraft, where you get a default spawn and the game tracks every change made by you or your friends to that world. There are instead reports of players joining worlds where there are corpses everywhere, items looted and containers empty. So when they say “Private Worlds” they are seemingly talking about just a normal world that has a limited party list to your friends. So yeah… it turns out my line of thinking was the one that was completely wrong. $100 a year for a private server is completely reasonable, but this is seemingly no private server.
Instead of caring about Fallout 76 First subscriptions… I feel like their timing is perfect for pushing players into playing The Outer Worlds that came out apparently some time last night. It is currently available on Epic Games Store, Windows Store, and free as part of the PC Xbox Games Pass. Instead of playing a poorly implemented feature, you can instead explore a brand new IP from the makers of the best Fallout game… Fallout New Vegas. It seems pretty clear to me what the actual choice to make is, and it is what I will probably be spending my time doing this weekend apart from some ventures into Destiny 2.
I got in long enough to make a character and do some of the very early interactions and so far… I am more or less impressed. It has the same sort of feel as Fallout New Vegas did and does a better job of on-boarding you into the new destination than a game that either forces you to care about a father you don’t know or a child you never actually wanted. I am hoping it continues to be as good as it seems to be. This is what you should be spending your time doing instead of playing Fallout 76. So when I said a partial defense… really I mean not much of one at all.

AggroChat #251 – Release the Melon-Snake

Featuring:  Ammo, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

aggrochat251

After a week off you can effectively blame Belghast for filling the Trello full of partial topics, and the rest of the show for not replacing them with something meaningful.  As a result we have a fairly fragmented show. In importance news however Ammo is joining the team permanently. The most important thing discussed however is the fact that Tam gave us a new term…  that of the noble Melon-Snake.

Here is a quick rundown of the varied topics discussed:  Final Fantasy 7 Remake Trailer, Xur coming to Fallout 76, Monster Hunter World Iceborne and Bloodstained Ritual of the Night release dates, Unplayable Magic Decks, The madness of Arcade emulation, The sad state of Anthem.

Topics Discussed:

  • Neph’s Wedding
  • Final Fantasy 7 Remake Trailer
  • Bloodstained Ritual of the Night
  • Fallout 76 Purveyor NPC
  • Monster Hunter World Iceborne
    • Capcom Hates PC Gamers
  • Magic the Gathering Arena
    • Kodra has Teferi Problems
  • Madness and Arcade Emulation
    • The joys of finding full mamesets
    • Triggering a bandwidth usage warning
    • Abandoning GameEx Evolution
    • Moving to RetroArch
  • TitanQuest Releasing Expansions 13 Years after its launch
  • Anthem Removing Cosmetic Caches
    • Spaghetti Code Problems
  • Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers

AggroChat #233 – Games of the Year 2018

Featuring:  Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

aggrochat233

This evening we do our traditional Games of the Year show, and apparently we are way less verbose than we used to be.  These shows used to get chopped into two roughly hour and a half long shows… but this year we managed to do it in pretty much two hours straight.  What makes this even more interesting is the fact that we churned through nineteen games in the process. Ultimately we each pick roughly five games that were important to us during the calendar year, and some overlap always occurs.  This year less overlap happened than is normal.

Games Discussed

  • CrossCode
  • Destiny 2 Forsaken
  • Dragon Quest XI
  • Fallout 76
  • Subnautica
  • Gloomhaven
  • Heroes of Hammerwatch
  • Final Fantasy XIV Stormblood
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 2
  • Diablo 3 on Switch
  • Magic the Gathering Arena
  • Night in the Woods
  • Super Smash Bros Ultimate
  • Hitman 2
  • Return of the Obra Dinn
  • Spiderman
  • Hollow Knight
  • Dragalia Lost
  • Monster Hunter World

AggroChat #229 – Napoleon Tuxedomask

Featuring:  Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra and Tamrielo

aggrochat229

Tonight we talk about a bunch of differing topics… that sorta blend together into a mix of ideas.  We start off with some discussion of Thanksgiving Leftover abominations. From here Belghast talks a bit about his experiences with extremely Hardcore players on mobile phone games.  This sorta leads its way into discussions of MMO Design problems, which itself leads to talking about the FFXIV Shadowbringers expansion announcement. We discuss the problems with the Blue Mage and how the Limited Class construct is probably not the right way to do it.  This leads eventually into a discussion of the shenanigans that Tam and Kodra and crew have been up to in Fallout 76.

Topics Discussed:

  • Thanksgiving Leftover Abominations
  • Hardcore Mobile Players
  • MMO Design Problems
  • Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringer
  • Blue Mage Limited Job
  • Fallout 76