Fallout 76

Last night was the opening of the Fallout 76 PC Beta and by Beta I mean…  last minute stress test?  I mean there are a bunch of periods between the letters of B.E.T.A. but it might as well have been “Beta”…  but my frustrations over people misusing these terms can be a post for another day.  The primary reason why I can tell these are Stress Tests and not necessarily bug squashing beta tests is the fact that all of the players have been funneled into a tight play window.  So last night for example the test ran from 7 pm EDT to 11 pm EDT…  and technically I managed to fire up the game a little bit before that because it seems like they went live a wee bit early.  Thursday they are extending the window a bit given the issues that folks ran into last night allowing play from 2 pm EDT to 11 pm EDT…  which honestly isn’t super useful to me given that is 1 pm my time and I will be very much at work.  However I appreciate the effort and that seems like completely reasonable times for the EU players.

I am not really sure what all I can actually say about this game that hasn’t already been revealed.  You need to set your expectations at “this is a Fallout 4 multiplayer mod without NPCs” and if you can sufficiently do that you will probably not be disappointed.  The character creator is effectively the same one we are used to with Fallout 4 and I managed to cobble together a reasonable facsimile of Belghast fairly quickly before venturing forth into the world.  There is a lot of weirdness going on with the game because at times… it feels like a much higher fidelity version of the Fallout 4 engine, then at other times the world feels like a nonsensical blurry mess even on “ultra” preset.  I have a feeling there is some sort of a dynamic scaling functionality going on that I am hoping is something we can eventually disable completely.  I would honestly rather have my frame rates dip below 60 occasionally than have the world freak out every so often.

The biggest thing to keep in mind is you are playing with a lot of other players… and this can be a bit of a rude awakening given some design choices they made.  Namely when you first log into the game your microphone is completely open by default…  and so is literally everyone else’s.  At first I thought maybe I accidentally had a window open playing a video or something…  because upon arriving at the character creator I had some dude keep saying “PRESS X FOR SEX!” and I could not figure out if this was some sort of edgy tutorial or what.  Moments later I had a streamer ask the server to please not say anything racist because she was about to go live.  It was around this time that I went to the menus and figured out how to turn off voice chat completely.  Additionally I turned on the radio station…  both of which are things that greatly improve your experience.

One of the things you have to realize about me and Fallout is just how much time I spent being a murder hobo roaming the countryside.  So in truth the lack of NPCs really wasn’t that big of a thing for me personally…  the game provides tons of feedback about what events happened before in an area in the form of found notes, journals, holo tapes that thankfully occasionally just start playing on their own without having to fiddle with the interface…  and in the scattered computer terminals.  Basically Fallout 76 is a game that wants you to read the story, and by doing so…  gives us lore hounds something to chew on without getting in the way of the folks who just want to run amok in large packs.  Occasionally you will encounter a robot that offers quests, but they largely serve as the only thing that would equate to the traditional fallout  dialog options.

The game will put you through a sequence of tutorial steps that are designed to introduce you to how Fallout 4 worked…  but if you are like me you will have probably already done those things the moment you find your first crafting machine.  Sadly the game does not give you credit for already doing these things.  So for example the Second Helpings quest…  shows to Cook a Ribeye Steak and to optionally get a piece of Brahmin Meat.  At this point I had killed a half dozen Brahmin and had at least ten cooked steaks sitting in my inventory.  This is made more awkward in part because various folks will be doing various stages of the quest at the same time… and while it does not appear that you are actually competing with them for any resources…  Bethesda made the poor choice to make it so that if another player is using a machine that they lock you out of also using that machine.

The long and short is… it was a fun game and I didn’t really have much in the way of actual interaction with other players.  There were to the best of my knowledge no gankers roaming around, in part because the deck is stacked heavily against them in the game.  That said I still probably will not get super serious about Fallout 76 until the custom server options are available and I can rent one for my friends to play on.  If I had the option to play this single player… I probably would… which I realize completely defeats the point of the game.  That said I do think it would be fun to run around with a group of friends and share resources in an environment where you can do things like dump stuff into a crate and not expect someone to come along behind you and take it all.

Death seems to largely be meaningless apart from the fact that you drop some crafting resources when you die.  At first I thought you could simply go back to the place of your death and pick these up without issue…  however it seems like ANY player can pick up your sack of loot because I got a note saying someone looted mine while I was running back to the corpse.  It wasn’t a big deal because I didn’t really have any rare resources like circuit boards, but if I did… that would have been maddening.  I’ve not really tried the crafting system out in part because I didn’t want to try building anything in a region where so many random players were roaming around.  The positive is basically any town serves as a warp point, and all of them so far have had most of the crafting machines needed, so I didn’t necessarily find the need to build a base as of yet.  I enjoyed myself and look forward to playing it legitimately, but like I said… probably won’t play super heavily until I can get my own server or join the server of someone else that I trust.

If you have been completely disconnected from gaming media then you may not have known there was a pretty significant announcement yesterday from Bethesda, or at least a very tantalizing teaser.  The truth is this started several days ago when they began a live stream that simply focused on a color test pattern with a vault boy bobble head beside it.  During the stream various weird things happened and you can see a run down of these clips over on Polygon.  There were apparently over 2 million people who at least watched some of the stream and at the very end…  we were treated with a teaser for a new game called Fallout 76.

This morning I am going to dig into some of the details of the trailer.  It opens on an old pipboy setting off an alarm that plays Take Me Home Country Roads which gives us I believe the location of the vault…  as 76 was rumored to be a “control” vault in Virginia.  The song itself says West Virginia… but the majority of the topography that it describes is actually in Western Virginia.  As the image continues to slide into frame we can see a clock denoting that it is October 27th of 2102…  6:34 in the morning if that matters.  This is significant because this places Fallout 76 is the earliest fallout game to date.  Here are some important dates in the fallout universe…

• The Great War – Saturday October 23rd 2077
• Fallout 76 Trailer – Monday October 27th 2102
• Fallout 1 – 2161
• Fallout 2 – 2241
• Fallout 3 – 2277
• Fallout New Vegas – 2281
• Fallout 4 – 2287

Basically Fallout 76 is taking place 25 years after The Great War that started and ended the same day as the bombs fell.  In theory Vault 76 was supposed to open 20 years after the destruction of the world so that folks could go reclaim the wastes.  So we are left with a conundrum…  because if you see the scene with the Reclamation Day celebration, it does not look like those are leftovers from 5 years ago.  If you look at the balloons there are some with air and some without…  so unless  balloons work vastly different in the post apocalyptic world that would lead me to believe this is a few days after the Reclamation Day party…. which would make a sort of sense given that it would be 5 days after the 25th anniversary of the Great War.

There is a poster on the wall showing that Vault 76 was created to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the founding of the United States, which syncs up with the Mothership Zeta references from Fallout 3.  Past that I am not sure what else can be gleaned about it other than I just think its cool to see all of the things we have found from other games still in a relatively new state.  Granted 25 years have passed but I think in the most part we are seeing a vault before the systems start to break down.  In truth probably the same Overseer is in place that was put there the moment the folks went into the vault, and most of the administration is likely all the same.  Sure there might have been some children of the vault in that time frame but for the most part the people who are exiting are the ones who entered in the first place.  According to the Citadel records there were supposedly 500 individuals in the control vault giving you a nice big number of potential people to go out exploring the wastes as.

In this shot you see Jangles the Moon Monkey and on the bed is a fedora and a fully loaded backpack, which tells me that we are seeing the player character just about to embark out of the vault, gathering up their stuff.  This syncs up with the final shot in the trailer of a person in a Vault 76 jumpsuit slapping on a pipboy…  likely the one from the table and preparing to leave.  Again most of these establishing shots seem to exist for fan service, so we can see what the vault looks like before things start going to hell.  All of the things we regularly pick up as junk are shown…  from an Abraxo box to some Sugar Bombs…  and of course the ever present Nuka-Cola.

There is a trophy case that is way too blurry to read at 1080 p or lower resolution, but I was able to crank the video up to 4k and capture a decent shot of what at least one of the awards says.

Outstanding Achievement Award

In appreciation for your commitment and dedication to our isolation program.  Sacrificing many so some can live.

The Excellence in Bravery award is a little harder to read but it seems very similar… and you can notice at the top of the shot an award for the “Annual Vault Halloween Costume Contest” which I guess might explain why there is the head of what looks to be some sort of a gopher mascot character on the top of the bookcase in the image with the 1776-2076 poster.

So ultimately what does all of this mean?  This is a new Fallout setting that is far enough out of band with the rest of the games…  as to give it some legs to stand on its own.  This is set 59 years before Fallout 1 the earliest entry in the franchise and 185 years earlier than Fallout 4 the latest incarnation.  Jason Schreier the Game Developer Whisperer mentioned yesterday that the game would have some sort of an online component, and that this is what the Battlecry team in Austin has been working on.

From what I've heard, Fallout: 76 is an online game of some sort. Developed by BGS in both Maryland and Austin (formerly Battlecry) https://t.co/gUmNYtDXDS

— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) May 30, 2018

A follow up tweet provides some additional details…

FWIW, as someone who really digs Fallout games, I'm optimistic about Fallout 76 (and stoked to see more). Might be multiplayer, but it's still gonna be a BGS game https://t.co/zv69B26xrI pic.twitter.com/gb0c9ACQLC

— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) May 31, 2018

To make things even weirder…  there is an Anonymous redditor on December 28th of 2017 posted “Fallout 76, a fallout themed rust clone coming soon”.  This was largely ignored by the community however because who the hell trusts an anonymous poster on reddit?  There have been so many things supposedly leaked there that turned out to be complete bullshit.  However in hindsight…  the person got the title right and if you combine that with the various comments from Schreier it has a little more weight to it.  I guess the ultimately question is… is that a game I really want to play?  I have never been a huge fan of the Rust/Ark/H1Z1 competitive survival game genre, so I think ultimately for me… it will depend on how much forced player versus player interaction is in the game.  If there are straight PVE servers (or the ability to roll custom servers)… then yeah I will probably be happy as a clam to play this game.

Unfortunately I think I would have rather had just a straight MMORPG conversion of the Fallout universe ala Elder Scrolls Online than some sort of a survival building game.  If I was putting on my wishing hat and going for broke…  I would have loved for Fallout 76 to be a small scale group/solo game along the lines of Destiny/The Division set in the Fallout universe, where you roam around a big open world wasteland with MMO style player progression but a more drop in/drop out sort of ethic and seamless 10-20 player instanced pockets.  Sure base building would have been probably a big part of that given they have really amazing tech to let us have essentially “player housing” but the focus would be on exploration and completing of story content rather than on killing other players.  I really hope the progression is not based on killing other players.

I’ve devoted entirely too much time this morning to tearing into this…  so what are your thoughts?  Are you excited for the June 10th pre-E3 Bethesda press conference?  Are you excited about the prospects of Fallout 76?  Are you afraid this is going to be another fucking Battle Royale game?  I have some mixed thoughts after more additional information has come out about it, but that said… I will still be watching on twitch as the official announcements are being made.