Hi so here's a couple of things: ru-vid.com I played this game with Mandalore for a bit so I'm plugging his channel. He doesn't know I'm doing this but he knew he would be in the video a little bit. I think it's a good fit. Hopefully a few of you find some new content that you enjoy. Secondly here's a twitter link to the artist who made the thumbnail for this video. Marik also draws comics during streams that are usually a big hit. He made one when this video got delayed during the patch! twitter.com/MarikBentusi And lastly: I'm sorry. This video wasn't meant to be so long. I really did think I could get through 76 quickly and here we are. I will be more careful going forward. After these 76 videos there won't be another long video until The Witcher. I made a mistake here. Same goes for the "patch" in the video. I hope it's acceptable. It was the best I could do without pushing the video back even longer.
I think most of us are always willing to wait, always quality commentary, please take you're time to make sure your satisfied with the content. So excited for Witcher 3, theres so much right about that game while so much wrong hearing your thoughts will be fun
As long as I can watch your weeb streams, I’m happy with the wait, and you saying the video wasn’t supposed to be this long is kinda par for the course right? Love every video, thanks man!
Great, now I'm picturing someone modding this game to replace all the Mothmen with giant fucking owls and their projectile weapons turned into Titanfall love pillows.
You know they're not going to fix this game, it was never apart of the business model to fix this game. This game was a blatant, unapologetic cash grab to fund ES6.
Joe: Here's my unsolicited advice.. refund half the price to everyone who bought the game. Bethesda: We hear ya. We're sorry. Come get 500 free atoms at the Atomic shop.
The Lone Trash collector is the canon name of the hero of this episode. He is sent outside to collect random trash, and find dead bodies laying around. Sometime he shoots flying vermin, after incinerating the area.
@@LondonLock I still love how everybody tries to forget that Tactics existed. I liked that game more since i learned that the RPG was stripped thanks to Interplay and wasn´t 14 Degree East intention. "What fallout fan are you, that you don´t know your franchise story?"
The real plot of F76 is that your characters died in the war and you're all having a shared pre-death hallucination while all your neurons fire randomly, causing the ridiculous glitches you keep encountering.
Fallout 3 made me want to pull my hair out, and yet nobody seemed to agree. When New Vegas came and had everything 3 had but also had compelling writing and real dialogue checks (you know, it felt like a fucking Fallout game) people would still qualify 3 as being close enough and just as good if not better because 3's world is arguably better than NV. Then 4 came out, again I pull my hair out, and again people somehow qualify it as totally fine. So relieving to see 76 actually generate backlash. Maybe now Bethesda can stop sitting on their laurels.
@Lunova I'm unfortunately well aware. My comment was less about the games and more about their reception. Some people for instance claim 3 is great and almost as good as NV, or 3 and 4 are just as good as NV. Some even say that because NV had a pretty bland world that 3 and 4 are *better* And it just makes me wanna die. It's going to be interesting to see what the next lineup of Beth games brings. I hope there's some modicum of passion behind anything other than the setting but I don't exactly hold my breath after over a decade of this.
@@RyanKaufman fallout 3 was a good game dammit. one of the problems was that during development they changed the time it took place in. it was supposed to take part not long after the war, kind of like fallout 1, but then choose post fallout 2 instead, which is why everything is destroyed and very small civilisations exist.
@@zekun4741 I don't really mind the setting. It's a bit dumb but no more so than your average game's setting. My issue with Fallout 3 is that the writing is just lazy almost every chance it can be. Coming from Fallout 1 and 2 to 3, it's embarrassing to even call it the name "Fallout 3" from how uninterested Bethesda is with quality writing. People argue that it's hard to write properly in a modern RPG, but then Obsidian makes New Vegas which is so much closer to a real Fallout game that it hurts me how Bethesda squanders the IP. Again, most people who like the game more than me tend to have different priorities in gaming. My first priorities are writing and dialogue. That's why I loved Fallout so much. It's a perfect mesh of what I want, and then Bethesda hit it with an axe and made it Elder Scrolls but with mildly more player input. That's not Fallout damnit, that's just post-apoc Scrolls. Such is life I suppose, I mean I get over it and move on, but I'm still gonna whine about it.
I think the biggest plot hole in Fallout 76 is the fact that Vault 76 had 500 people who had lived with each other for 25 years yet they all seemed to forget each other the second the vault door closed behind them.
Not to mention PvP. You lived with all these people for 25 years but the moment they leave, they become bloodthirsty psychopaths. Also, the CAMP system is stupid on design alone. Okay, I'm out of the vault. Oh look, a small town with still-standing structures. Should I use my knowledge and ingenuity to upgrade the buildings? No, no. A small outhouse with holes in the middle of nowhere is way better.
@@GabrielWithoutWings What would have been interesting is the ability to make a copy of a normal building, and them build inside of it. Give other players the ability to enter either the normal building or worldspace, or enter into your version that's been built on, repaired, upgraded, and inhabited.
Tyler Lackey at least a few, sadly. Bethesda is wringing dry the fans with Stockholm Syndrome. Or they do it because of the Sunk Cost fallacy, that they have already spent so much time in it that they need to keep up with the other high level players. Also the subscription service didn’t even work on launch, which is hilarious to me.
I am from the future. Not only the game has not gone free to play, they now charge you 100$ a year for "premium" advantages like infinite storage to your base (like, you know, Fallout 4) *the absolute state of this company.*
To any blind fanboys in the future, they still haven't fixed issues like the god awful stuttering or the automatic re-entry of workbenches after leaving them. But keep telling yourself bethesda has your best interests in mind.
@@garretteckhardt6665 I'm still looking forward to ES6, but my expectations are extremely lowered. I'm honestly thinking of getting ESO since it's on sale and most say you can treat it like a singleplayer game, Zenimax seems to be more competent at multiplayer-ising Bethesda's game franchises than Bethesda is.
After 76 I heard someone say "This is gonna make Bethesda realize they cant afford to screw up ES6" I believed him. That was before the battle royale. Before Fallout 1st. Oh how wrong we were.
@@unregisteredassaultbutterk1185 Honestly as someone whos put something like 50-60 hours into ESO, I really disagree about treating it like a singleplayer game. It is very much an MMORPG. If you dont like WoW or Rune I dont recommend ESO. I wouldnt go in expecting an Elder Scrolls experience, youll probably be disappointed. That being said dont think im saying ESO is bad, I actually had a lot of fun with it. I love how they kept classes and weapon skills different so you can play around with weapon-class combinations. A melee sorcerer or a caster dragonknight are viable classes and i had a lot of fun experimenting with them. Its a good MMO, but its definitely an MMO.
The "skyrim dragon battles" in 76 are actually the dragon battles. They don't just feel like they are. Dataminers showed that the AI for the flying enemy is literally the dragon AI from Skyrim. The code was even called the same.
This footage straight up hurts to watch a lot of the time, it feels like an uncomfortable fever dream, like you're slipping in and out of reality, like you've been drugged and your brain is trying to make you throw it back up.
Thankfully I've been playing the game more than watching RU-vid videos and I've never seen any bugs as cringey as these edited compilations of bugs meant to specifically highlight bugs... Yes I've seen the occasional bug and stutter but I've had that with every Bethesda game. I feel like you about a fever dream but it's when I get on RU-vid. And see an alternate reality where the game is permanently broken in the worst ways because that's all that's been recorded haha
@@CoercedJab dude Joe is releasing another video soon that's a multi-hour long compilation of the bugs he's seen. it's insane how they put something out in this state
Yeah I'm here trying to destress since my life has been falling apart and my mental health has tanked during isolation, and then I just get hit out of the left field with that this game is about a world that's empty after humans were wiped out by the bat plague lmao
@@FraserSouris no it isn't, the theme of fallout, the whole war never changes is about humans always wanting more. Never being satisfied, so that no matter how much the world around you changes, the fact that humans exist will allow their greed to get the best of them. And that leads to wanting more. And inevitably a thesis will have an antithesis. Humanity and the Master. Brotherhood and the Enclave. NCR and the Legion. Mutants and humans Ghouls and humans Humans and humans Eventually someone will want more and encroach on another. And then war will happen. No matter how much the world around you changes, man will always want more. Man will always cause war. And war... War never changes. Bloodshed. Inequality. Grief. Poverty. All apart of every fallout theme. Well... The good ones at least. 4 and 76 really had no story writers. Lmao legit. It's actually funny. But also sucks af.
Also everyone from that vault starts with abysmal stats. I get that being in a vault for 25 years might do a number on one's srentgh, agility, and endurance, but perception? Intelligence? Charisma? Luck?
well it's pretty good now in terms of a multiplayer rpg. As long as you dont go in expecting a good story and u like other multiplayer rpg's u are gonna have a good time
joe, you cant use your game review voice for your sarcasm, cause i thought that mandalore joke was serious for about a half a second longer than i should have
@@cynicalgold9992 His literal las name is Avidan, but as part of his band Ninja Sex Party, he has a persona called Danny Sexbang (the other member is the SUPER gay ninja brian, we don't talk about him) :)
Yeah, Joe nails the game with the quote, “calling it broken would be dishonest, because calling something broken means that it has to have worked at some point.”
@Christopher Marlowe Garbage as in I'm making it up? Because a quick google search shows that I'm not. The part about ninja brian being super gay is a reference to their song "If We Were Gay".
"Calling this game broken would be a disservice because saying that something is broken implies that it was once functional." An excellent thesis for Fallout 76
So, I've got a weird personal experience that might help explain some of the issues with how 76 feels. In 2018, ZOS flew me out to Baltimore as part of a group to test the (then) upcoming expansion for Elder Scrolls Online. There were 12 of us, and part of the goal was to get some non-employees into the new raid, but also to audit the content. The thing about that experience that has stuck with me is how much better ESO feels on their own internal test server. If I had to guess, the server is in the same building, and latency is a fraction of what you encounter in the retail product. Keeping in mind that ZOS did assist Bethesda on 76's development, (and they must have been working on it while I was in the building), but I suspect that 76 was built to feel good on a LAN. That the developers never experienced the lag, and desyncs that the retail version showed, because they were experiencing the game on the office's internal network, and not over the internet. So, when the game launched with that network test, "beta," it was already too late. The architecture had been designed for an internet that simply doesn't exist in the US today. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of the weirder things that fundamentally break can be tracked back to that environment as well. Though a lot of the deliberate design decisions were, pretty clearly, driven by the idea that players would be engaging in PvP constantly. It's probably the entire reason why character advancement degenerates into optimization and side-grades after you've hit level 50.
Reminds me of that glitch on Fallout 4 VR at launch, where the game defaults to using your desktop resolution and appeared blurry on 1080p monitors but not a problem on the 4k monitors that Bethesda would use when playing their game.
You know some streamers have their chat super-imposed over the gameplay in some unique style and I wasn't sure whether or not that's what you were doing. 12 minutes I realized that giant wall of text was the quests, not chat comments.
@@joelrichardson5139 I would have said "It's Bethesda" but then I caught myself when I realized that somewhere along the line, Bethesda became a synonym for sadness and disappointment.
@@PutkisenSeta "That thing was too big to be called a [channel]. Too big, too thick, too heavy and too rough. It was more like a large hunk of [let's plays]."
It's the most interesting worldspace they've created, but the game itself feels like you're following in the footsteps of someone else's adventure. Because you are. The game opens with the message that YOU are special. YOU are one of the people who has to reclaim and rebuild Appalachia. And then it becomes immediately obvious that you aren't the main character, the Overseer is.
In that sense it does fall in line with the other Bethesda fallouts, especially fo3. You follow the father during most if it, after that you follow Sarah Lions and then you die. This is just the worse version of thaz
@@fabianbockel5700 yeah, and in 4 you chase after the people who took your son. It's honestly all in how it's done. I felt chasing dad was only slightly interesting in 3 because it had to do with restoring the wasteland in some way. In New Vegas, you're chasing after a chip to find out who you are and what role you play in everything. But in 4, you're just given a kid to care about and if you don't.. Tough luck. And then in 76, yeah, it's the worst version of it because you literally only have audio logs.
@@fabianbockel5700 Sarah's lion, my god I had forgotten the cringe. Going to that from fallout tactics was so perplexing, why the hell is BoS so lame despite being open to outsiders? Fallout Tactics did non-traditional BoS chapter perfectly.
I get the feeling the Bethesda uppers wanted their own multiplayer lifetime platform game, which has been a corporate fad with major developers over the past few years. After what happened to Battlefront 2, and the global reaction to MTX platforms, gambling boxes, etc, there was probably an internal effort to make as much money off the project as quickly as possible. They got when the getting was good, likely after some internal controversy over whether the engine can even continue to act as a base for development. I allege, anyway. Hopefully some employees are enjoying the catharsis of seeing a clearly outdated platform shoving the unwillingness to invest in a new future back in their management's faces. Although I doubt it will result in any change. If your bean counting owners are this totally disconnected and disaffected, the only positive direction is the one you were already going in before they arrived.
Agreed. Bean counters won't say _"Oh damn, we fucked up and our blatant ploy was called out."_ Instead: _"I guess people don't like Fallout anymore. Cancel any work on a sequel and work on another project. Damn, I'm so good at figuring out what's wrong, I should give myself a raise."_
Yeesh, comment replies here are not the best. As per usual, I think you're right on the money. I reckon that Zenimax was behind this particular push, though maybe it's foolish to keep placing the blame on the publisher instead of the developer. Either way, Bethesda's refusal to update their engine certainly hasn't helped. Also, I'm somehow not surprised you're in these comments; you and Mr. Anderson have a lot in common.
As someone who works in QA, the issues being reintroduced does not necessarily mean they patched the wrong version. In fact with standard version control that even bethesda would have in place, that's almost impossible. What it more likely means is that their fix changed something that reintroduced all those issues and they didn't have enough basic testing in place to re-test previous known issues before sending out a release. It suggests they don't even have a testing/QA team, who would definitely catch that Which is actually probably worse
"Scientist log, Day 3. We found the anomaly and there's no sign of anything changing, I don't know what's going on with this Mordor mountain but, there's something wrong with the shadows. Its like their forming some kind of body on their own, almost like a mind of their own. Wait, what's that sound. No..no..its the scorch!! ahhhh!!" - Dr.Mandalore
Re: your ending about “conspiracy,” I think burnout is far more likely. I’ve worked jobs where someone has handed me something and said “fix it” and when you explain to them “but if I fix that, it breaks other things” they don’t hear it - you can’t convince people what they want is impossible, and when you discover something you promised the hand that feeds you isn’t possible, you don’t want to tell them that, and the result is low quality “get-a-finished-product-out” work with little attention to detail. I think FO76 was being pressured by the powers that B, publisher and high level devs, to have features which are technologically impossible, and as the goals of the game kept getting shifted and the game changed from a game people were excited about making into something boring, something other than what the devs envisioned, something they didn’t really want to release because it wasn’t what they envisioned, devs got tired, and started to phone it in because of burnout/depression. But Idk, could be projecting here.
Rewatching this review for legit probably the fifth time and I think the reason people still say the game has no NPC’s is because of the “character” part of the term. The AI in this game aren’t really characters, they’re functions that serve a gameplay purpose like kill, buy from, sell to, get quest from, return quest to etc.
As for scorch beasts that feel like Skyrim dragons, they are Skyrim dragons, if I remember correctly they are actually called Skyrim dragons in the game’s code
@@joshg.8706 "Scorchbeast are literally skyrim dragon. Todd sold us Skyrim again, that mad man. " www.reddit.com/r/fo76/comments/8rys55/scorchbeasts_are_the_dragons_in_skyrim/
52:22 "Never attribute to malice what can just as easily be attributed to incompetence." is probably what you were thinking of. The stew quest adds 5 items to everyone's inventory. They clearly don't like items in your inventory. Hence, it was removed.
11:27 - "Mandalore is another youtuber you PROBABLY never heard of because his audience is much smaller than mine and content is terrible" - LOL! The best way to introduce your colleagues in the videos.
I only found this from the recommended videos list and I don't usually comment on RU-vid, even with my personal favorite content creators. Mostly cause when I type something out it ends up being really long and nobody has time for that. But when you said something along the lines of "I can't help but try to see the game this could have been", it really struck a chord with me. I was there for the beta. I was there for release. My friends and I took time off work. I tried to ignore the avalanche of negativity after release because I could see that shining possible future of what the game was meant to be beyond the unbelievable amounts of crashes, glitches, bugs and bad reviews. I had a similar experience in which I was alone on a server and the game ran as smoothly as Fallout 4, which gave me hope. By December I had put in 200+ hours and had to stop for my own sanity. Not because I was becoming addicted to the game itself... Because I was addicted to chasing what "could have been" with this game. The same exact thoughts you've wonderfully expressed in this video kept coming to mind: How did this game happen? How could an obviously incomplete experience be allowed to release from this team? Why is The Mire section so much more well crafted with clearly more love and care than other areas? Why has Bethesda made so many anti-consumer and terrible PR decisions with this game? Why is the Perk card system so woefully underdeveloped when it's a core part of the game? Why would they make the experience multiplayer when the game itself cannot handle multiple players? How could any of this have been allowed to happen? Too many questions and not enough answers. I doubt we'll ever really know. I've echoed your sentiments regarding their decisions to remove human NPCs and gutting other core features for server stability. And with the rumors that their upcoming "Nuclear Winter" game mode is a Battle Royale, it begs the question: Did the higher-ups really give a shit in the first place? Or halfway into development did they choose this game to sacrifice on the alter to make their following titles better? My conspiracy theory is that Fallout 76 is their prototype Creation Engine multiplayer game. They knew better than to fuck with their bread and butter of Elder Scrolls, and Starfield would need to have a powerful first showing as their new IP. So Fallout got the short end. Combined with unrealistic deadlines, a disjointed development team, and whatever drugs their marketing and PR team was taking 76 might have been doomed before it was even announced. I would similarly give this game a 2/10, but for some inexplicable reason I couldn't bring myself to quit playing it. But you've finally helped to answer the question of why I couldn't stop: I was chasing the light at the end of the tunnel of what could have been. Thank you, your video was incredibly well done. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to binge your channel.
I think we're closer to understanding now. Since Todd Howard attended that new interview, we now know that Bethesda as a whole knew Fallout 76 was going to be incomplete. They the game was going to harm their reputation, and they released it anyways. Yet, even after that, we still don't know why.
Here's why they have bugs: First let's look at the harpoon gun glitch. This was a bug that caused any enemy you kill with harpoon guns to drop harpoon guns equal to amount of retrievable ammunition that would be present on the dead body. If they should have one harpoon on their body they will have one harpoon and one harpoon gun. Interestingly, this wouldn't happen with crossbows nor would it happen with thrown melee weapons. Each of these are weapons with retrievable ammo. This means that the code that manages retrievable ammo is not shared between these item classes. Now I'm not sure how comfortable you are with computer science as a field. But I assure you that this is not only inexcusable, it's actually harder to do it this way than having a shared retrievable ammo type that you can apply to ammunition. You could easily give ammo, or the weapon depending on the code, a retrievable tag, then all rounds fired would have those rules. But in this case we can see that they didn't apply that. This bug made it into production. Which means that nobody ever fired a harpoon gun. Now in programming you can code things without manually testing them. In fact it's done all the time. But if you're going to do this you'd write an automated test. You'd fire a harpoon gun at a virtual target in code and verify that the ammo was added to the inventory. Perhaps they wrote a test like this. And for other things. But, upon launch, daily quests did not reset. So there was no test for daily quests. The dispenser for the "clean up the shooting range" didn't work. Many other things didn't work. So it's safe to say that they didn't write many, if any, automated tests. Further, we know nobody manually tested these things either. From this we have established these things. 1. Bethesda developers are not using standard CS practices in terms of scalable, reusable, code. Instead they are manually programming many individual cases. 2. Bethesda developers don't write automated tests, therefore they can't verify if something works, or if a change caused something else to break. 3. Bethesda doesn't have a QA department. People like to point at the engine. They like to point at managerial or design decisions. Instead if you look at just these things, it's clear. Bethesda can't make a stable game. They can't even know if they have a stable game. Each update will always break things. These breaks won't be caught by QA. And the lack of reusable code will slow development time and fixes. The game will become increasingly expensive to maintain. The proof is in the pudding. The best Bethesda games are behind us. Anyways. Just some insight as a developer.
This is one of the best responses to their games I've ever seen. I do still feel a big problem is how horrible their outdated engine is, but I've thought about how incompetent they are at programming too. Thanks for putting it into great detail. :)
To add to the points of manually coding everything, not testing anything, and ripping stuff straight from F4: The Lever Action Rifle in F4 was bugged, so that no matter how many shots you fired, it would always reload 5 individual bullets instead of the actual number fired, and not counting up individually, but jumping from whatever number to five when the five bullets were loaded. That bug was still present in F76 until a recent patch fixed that, but F76 also had the pump-action shotgun, which actually manages to reload per-shell, since the very beginning. So they actually had a working system for per-shell/bullet reloads, but didn't apply that to the LAR, which they instead ripped straight from F76.
This comment reads like you've just started your first year in a CS programme. Don't assume things you don't know about a codebase. Saying 'it would be easier to program it like this' is nonsensical when you have no idea what their code looks like. Also, just because they likely did not write tests for something does not mean they never write tests. Best practices fly out the window nearing a deadline.
One of the primary advantages of using the engines they've used is that they are incredibly easy to mod. You can override most assets and code in the game with remarkable ease. Utilizing that as an advantage does not to me seem to be so crazy, and you're making a large assumption about their development based on one bug where you're assuming you know what caused the bug without having ever seen the code. It could be a bug with harpoon rounds and how they are added to the instanced loot pool of enemies before death, since perhaps they are considered a special type of item placed in the ammo category, due to them not being standard hit scan ammunition. I don't know. That's just a guess. But I'm willing to admit I don't know without jumping to unverified conclusions. Criticize the game, but don't take a single bug out of context as representative of the "fall of Bethesda". Shit on 76 like everyone else, for legitimate reasons.
"I wanted to apologize to my computer after running it" had me cackling. This game is truly mind boggling. Would have made just as much sense to make it only first person camera and 115$ on steam only.
It's legitimately insane how many of these glitches still exist to this day, like major ones, like to this very day you can shoot enemies and they won't show a visual affect from the attack for a full 2 seconds.
I love Fallout's aesthetic, and it makes me so mad that this game looks so pretty, it's like looking at pieces of a painting that are all beautiful but you're near suffering trying to put them back together
You can *see* what the painting is supposed to look like, and you *know* how to put the pieces together to make it whole again; but every time you try, the curator trying to sell the broken painting just slaps your hands away and demands that you pay him $100 for each piece you reconnect to the whole.
I can't speak for anyone else but I can say that going from Fallout 4 back to Fallout 3/NV (Tale of Two Wastelands) it was a breath of fresh air. Not having settlement building very quickly made me realize how much I missed not having to do that. In turn, not having to pick up every piece of garbage you see and only picking up what was needed for survival was far better.
You don’t have to build settlements. There is one time in the game where you have to scrounge up materials and build 8 or so objects (molecular relay). You don’t even really have to pick up a ton of junk either, power armor is cheap to repair and enemies get progressively more modded guns you can pick up and use. Overall I think what he meant was Fallout 4 FELT *smoother* than 76, due to no network lag and presumably higher fps.
I actually modded in the Fallout 4 junk system into New Vegas and it's one of the few mods I keep on even for "vanilla" playthroughs. New Vegas might have 3 different currencies (5 if you count casino chips and pre-war money) but there's barely any way to actually salvage junk and turn it into useful stuff besides junk ammo, homemade explosives and obviously more money which is pretty underwhelming. The Gun Runners can start manufacturing new weapons with a single factory, half the wasteland is making new walls and buildings out of old scrap, but your character can barely salvage anything. Giving the player a way to look at every object in the game besides it's economic value and just see the raw materials themselves really makes it feel like a post-apocalypse where resources are scarce and everything is being used to rebuild
@@MegaDieseldriver They are friends, and he was indeed doing multiplayer with him ( ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-O4ALtyWy2Yg.html ). I have no idea where this thing came from about them hating each other, but they just rolled with it as meme
As someone who generally doesn't watch this channel I was confused why he was shit talking the other youtuber the whole time. Thought he was being an absolute jackass towards the guy and then plugs him in the comments? Wtf?
While I’m late to this party, I did finally pick up the game for practically free with game pass - and even a year later, with the Wastelanders expansion, you’ve still managed to hit the nail on the head. The game is suffering as you play it. The best example to describe how that statement works in practicality is that every enemy I’ve killed remains alive with one health for another half-second after my final hit, and then dies. This kind of lag - this interruption or stuttering - pervades the entire experience. Not to mention the countless bugs, glitches, or unbearably poor writing that defines the rest of the experience. And yet... the underlying systems are sound. The cycle is enjoyable. The enemy design (when you actually get to see them and not just another level 62 charred ghoul) is interesting and in some cases almost terrifying. The environments and some side-stories are excellent. In short, I could never shake the feeling that this game would be improved so much if it wasn’t online.
Bless you Joseph; to have a full family, build your schedule around Bethesda’s hot flashes of fixes, and still release this masterpiece. Thank you for bringing video game reviews to a higher standard, and upholding your personal goal of fairness.
A lonely, inquisitive fallout where you piece together the story of a region torn apart by infighting, panic and a hive mind out to end all life it finds. Ultimately avenging the people who couldn’t rally and end the great beasts invading their lands. I would have loved to see that original vision.
This feels like a good case study for why implementing network code should be taken seriously, as it is no small feat to introduce solid networking in a game, especially one of such scale. They decided to tack on a massive online system onto an ancient game engine, and I feel that the results speak for themselves. I've heard that this project was handed off to a less experienced team over at Bethesda, but this may aswell be just a rumor, but if this is the case, it might help to explain the poor state that the game is in.
The problem with Fallout 76 was never about NPCs missing. Not really. It was about the fact that they cut out 99 % of the REASON for NPCs to exist. Fallout 76s NPCs are there for two reasons: to give you a fetch quest or to be a vendor. That's it. That's all they really do. You can either trade with them or they'll give you a laughably simple and one-dimensional quest to fulfill. Now, I think we can all agree that Bethesda has worked long and hard on cutting more and more actual RPG systems out of the games as the series progressed along in an effort to draw a more casual audience (to good success, might I add), but even Fallout 4 still had SOME of the following: - Perks affecting your options in dialogues and quests, rewards and/or opened up entirely different ways to solve quests. - NPCs remarking on your character's SPECIAL characteristics. - NPCs reacting to your faction affiliation. - NPCs acting differently, moving or outright disappearing after certain quests in the game are finished (or finished in a certain way). - In effect, NPCs were the primary vehicle by which the world was brought alive and change brought about by the player was communicated to the player. If you were a dick, you'd be attacked by sheriffs. If you were a saint, NPCs would randomly come up to you and hand you a trinket or consumable to thank you. If you joined a faction and rose in rank, neutral NPCs would recognize you as belonging to the faction and faction NPCs would (in some cases) react respectfully when you were high enough in the requisite questline. If you dicked a faction over, it might lose outposts or even disappear. If you helped a faction, you might find patrols of that faction out and about in the game world to show you that, yes, the faction had gotten stronger and more influential thanks to you, gaining more of a presence. Fallout 76 has NOTHING. No NPC you ever meet will have a dialogue option that's not "trade" or leave. Quests are binary - do the quests, don't do the quests. Quests always get solved in the same way regardless of your faction affiliation, SPECIAL stats, equipped perks or quests you solved or neglected to solve in the past. NPCs won't turn hostile to you if you fail to do a quest, won't allow you to negotiate for better deals or allow for you to double-cross them. The main problem - at least for me and people I've talked with - boils down to the fact that the world of Fallout 76 is essentially dead. You arrive in the typical, vividly drawn, lovingly hand-crafted world of a Fallout game AFTER the game is done. All the NPCs are dead. Nobody you hear on a holotape will ever be alive for you to interact with. None of the quests (barring maybe the Watoga Mayor for a day quest) will actually change the landscape or how NPCs interact with you unless otherwise specified for the follow-up quest. It's Fallout but without any of the features Bethesda grudgingly adopted from the original two isometric Fallout titles. NPCs are there, but they might as well not have been. They do nothing a terminal or dispenser couldn't also have done just as plausibly. Maybe if they had replaced this missing agency with a functional faction system, buildable settlements and quests that actually change the landscape and allow you to, like, rebuild America, that'd have been fine. But they didn't. They left us with a sandbox that was already thoroughly played in with nothing to do but endlessly collect resources to fuel our need for repairs and reloading so we can then collect slightly rarer resources... Forever.
Thing is people who like survival games (like Ark or DayZ) play games that are exactly like that. And all those survival games are basically just as broken as this is. I think Bethesda looked at other broken survival games and thought "yeah we could do that". The problem of course is that they forgot to use the "No Criticism Allowed" tag on it (which on steam is spelled "Early Access").
Underrated comment. I don't think a single game company is more disconnected from its core fanbase than Bethesda, to be honest. I managed to pick up a very cheap copy of 76, otherwise I was going to give it a pass because the multiplayer experience does not appeal to me. I liked the fact that I could customise my fallout 4 experience through mods, so I could experience the well-crafted world of the game with my preferred combat alterations, features, optimisations. None of that is possible with 76, so I'm already finding at a low level that enemies are becoming sponges, and the play cycle is finding and scrapping junk to make enough ammunition and keep my weapon condition to even be able to play and explore. I like the world, the world is interesting. I don't even mind everyone being dead, it creates a sense of loneliness and isolation. But I really wish it wasn't _everyone_. As you say, I want my actions to have a sense of meaning and weight on the world. The online factor hurts this as well, because any change I do make is temporary. I repair a terminal to call for supplies.. One save and quit later, and that terminal is broken again for the next player to fix. Nothing is permanent, nothing has impact. It's a shame, because as always with these games, the world and locations are crafted with care and are genuinely enjoyable to explore for me. I just wish I could mod the rest of it to make the combat enjoyable, less spongy and grindy, at the very least. An optional offline mod-compatible version would be a big step forward for me.
@@lollipophugo Yeah. I don't mind that Bethesda tried something that is (to them) new, I mind that they threw out so many things we knew they could do and did very little to make up for it. Maybe they'll manage to salvage it, but the first two DLCs they released were a PvP only server and brewable booze, so I'm skeptical.
Mm. That battle royale money is calling. I was also disappointed that a 20 gig patch amounted to a crafting station and a drunk robot, but some of the core launch issues have been corrected at least. It is infuriating to me that patching a game 5 months after launch to resemble the build that should have been provided up front hasn't stopped anyone from preordering, as it seems to now be the industry standard.
It still baffles me that the ultimate goal of 76 involves using nuclear weapons, like how hard can you possibly miss the entire point of the entire series
I think they put a good deal of thought and even more money into marketing. They invited youtubers from all over the world to play F76 in the White Spring Hotel in WV, each in teams of three with a fourth developer as a "guide". That probably took some good amount of planning and some hundredthousands of dollars, and they were smart enoug to have the devs as "guides" so that they could put their best foot forwards in the videos made about the event. Similiarly: They, to my knowledge, haven't made a single advertisement with gameplay in it. Just cinematic stuff and some live-action-spots. And why all the effort? Because the marketing team was probably in on how bad F76 was going to be, but no-one told them not to bother as much. And not knowing the business-plan was "Eh, it's just a cheap cash-grab anyways. We'll just throw out an asset-flip. Poeple will still buy it and praise us for menial bugfixing after memeing for a bit.", they actually tried to do their job.
47:58 - "I can't ignore the hypothetical version of this game that was fully finished because I think it would have been fucking great." Bethesda's tagline for all its games.
So what youre saying is... instead of an always online game they should have made a fallout game with a coop mode. Jesus, what a revelation. I wonder why they didnt *sees bethesda and their store prices* oh...
I wanted to address a small point you made when you spoke about the game being the most post-apocalyptic out of all of Fallout. Despite the subtitle placed alongside the first two Fallout games, I wouldn't classify either of them as being post-apocalyptic. They are post post-apocalyptic. The opening monologues and story of Fallout 1, 2, and New Vegas all focus on the civilizations that have risen from the ashes of the Old World. Bethesda used Fallout as an excuse to make shooting galleries set in a world that is far more cliche in its post-apocalypse than the better games made by the original creators were. They have highly misunderstood this franchise.
I have to say, it's absolutely malice. Fallout 76 was a cashgrab and was a bad cashgrab at that. Same assets, minimal time coding anything new or interesting. No hiring voice actors for the most part. It was cheap and efficient and it was another product to pump out to fund development for more games. The bug fixes that you see are fixes that are solely to gate the players from doing things that benefit them in a way that Bethesda did not intend. That's it. That's why they banned players for accessing DEV areas, rather than just not including them in the final build. Even with the debacle in sales and the price being slashed after a week, I can already assume and tell you that the money spent on this game has been recouped because of the shocking lack of detail and effort present throughout the entire game. The whole "Never attribute to malice that which you can attribute to stupidity" does not work in this case. It is the same thing Bioware did with The Old Republic. It is the same thing that Bethesda did and will continue to do moving forward with other such games. It is abhorrent and the worst part is that it's not even self-sabotage, it's completely intentional. I'm glad you had fun though. That Mandalore guy should learn his place though. Who does he even think he is, muscling in on such a youtube powerhouse's presence?
*"It is abhorrent and the worst part is that it's not even self-sabotage, it's completely intentional."* This is honestly the main takeaway I've had from this whole fiasco. As Joseph said, there are parts of this game that show genuine love and attention to detail on the part of their creators, so it goes without saying that there were numerous people competent enough to release this game to the public while at the same time knowing full well that it wasn't ready to see the light of day. This was a calculated risk on the part of Bethesda, who knew full well that the profits from 76 would outweigh the backlash the studio ultimately received. They know that by the time they release their next flashy E3 trailer for Starfield or TES 6, this will have mostly blown over, and many long-term fans will still line up to buy them. To think that releasing a reputation-damaging cash-grab can be seen as a net-positive is a business tactic that I find deeply concerning. That being said, I'd argue that the gaming community does share at least *some* of the blame for this, as we have an unhealthy habit of hoisting certain studios and/or franchises upon a golden pedestal simply based on past titles. It's what allows companies to sell half-finished games and sell the rest of it later as DLC, and it's what allowed Bethesda to do this. It's like receiving an undercooked steak at a restaurant and accepting it because the steak you had there last time was great. Blind devotion to a studio/franchise to the point of fanaticism sets the bar for quality incredibly low in the bigger scope of things, and companies know it. And don't get me wrong, there are still studios out there that receive this sort of unending praise and have not taken advantage of it (Naughty Dog and CD Project Red to name a few), but I still wouldn't automatically accept a new title from them as good just because their label is printed on the cover. I don't know, maybe I'm just jaded at this point, and you can certainly argue that even with the points I've mentioned above, the inherent content of any game with these business tactics in place are still enjoyable enough for certain people to not find issue with them, but in the past few years the industry has left such a sour taste in my mouth that I can't imagine pre-ordering *anything* based souly on devotion to past works.
Well that is what monetization does to games. And still People say "But it does not Change the Gameplay". Dude. The whole game changed around those monetizations as the new Focus. Not the Player anymore.
I've been a game developer for a decade, including at AAA studios. Blatant incompetence and laziness are so easy to fall into, it's amazing to find any large company that *doesn't* suffer from it. Todd Howard himself is probably a good example. I don't think anyone's going to be writing about how amazing his performance has been recently - he's basically a living "I'm blatantly lying about our horribly buggy product" meme at this point - but he's still essentially the guy in charge of development. This goes from the top all the way to the bottom: If management doesn't hold their team to a high standard, once you have a job at a big company, you have to mess up *incredibly* badly and/or consistently to actually lose that job. There are still going to be smart and hard working people there, don't get me wrong, but that patch that was so blatantly incompetent that it made you question if it was intentional? I'd bet money that no-one's getting fired, demoted, or even reprimanded over it. When that's the standard a company holds its employees to, that's the kind of work they'll produce.
If you think it's bad in the corporate world, think about the government system, where you legally *can't* fire or demote someone for poor performance.
So I'm writing this just a few days after Bethesda was bought by Microsoft, and I think this can explain a lot about what Fallout 76 is. Contrary to the (very well argued) idea that Fallout 76 was meant to be a single player game, I think the game was always designed to be online. The issue was that the company simply wasn't given enough time, that projects had to be well underway to look good to other companies seeking to buy Bethesda. Zenimax has been trying to sell the company for many months now, which meant they had to prepare for that sale many months before that (say, two years ago, hmm?). Fallout 76 is under construction, using their new studio that they bought that has experience in online games. Progress is...slow, but the bethesda team has already crafted a great looking world and is just trying to work out the kinks of looting, combat, and of course, people in a game that's always online. How do you have a follower? How do you do trading? Towns? Many questions that were answered in Wastelanders (to a degree) but were still up in the air. Maybe it was Zenimax's choice, that they needed more content to inflate company profits, so they said that 76 needed to be released as soon as possible. Since it's Bethesda, that means a early holiday release, especially for anything on the 'day the bombs dropped'. They couldn't wait a year because the company *needed* to inflate their profits, to make the company seem as good as it could get for Microsoft and others that wanted to buy them. Reputation be damned, the board of directors wanted their paycheck and to be gone. The game was changed, people scrapped probably for the lack of time and resources they had to do something that major. Dialogue was either reused or re-recorded for robots and holotapes, whole stories crammed into single terminals (I'm looking at you that insane asylum I forgot the name of). The story was made as quickly as possible, and it was probably similar to what they originally intended. Vault dwellers leaving 76 to arrive in a wasteland of people on the verge of destruction? Most settlements graveyards save for a few? It would explain why so many elements feel like everyone *just* died, because in the original version they all just had, now a few small handfuls that would need the player's help. I think the developers wanted to release a incredible game, the online aspect why it was called 76, something special that stood apart from the main trilogy. But instead they were forced along by the greed of a board that could only see the number of zeros on the paycheck. Almost every issue post-launch, the nylon bag, nuka cola dark, responses from Bethesda customer support, none of that's the developers. The studios have all still been trying to do the same thing as before, do as much as they can in as little time as possible. The main office likely couldn't help the secondary team patching 76 simply because of starfield, a title they *needed* to have part of ready to show investing companies. Maybe now that Microsoft is buying them (even if it will take several months for that merger to finish), 76 can be fixed. The microtransaction store from overpriced hell replaced with a cosmetic-only shop at a decent price (or just cosmetic only again, that still bugs me more than however much it costs). The game can be patched, and maybe, maybe it will have a story one day worth actually buying the game. Until then...I'm sorry to the developers, because it seems like they drew a straw almost as short as the people buying the game they made.
That intro gave me chills. You put a lot of very intentional effort into this video and everyone who cares about the gaming industry should commend you
It's Robert Altman, CEO of ZeniMax, who pushed for in-game purchases and forced Bethesda to release 76 a year early. This was not Bethesda's decision. Bethesda insiders say this has destroyed the studio. No other projects have moved forward at all. But ZeniMax owns them and forced them to do this. Altman has been banned permanently from banking due to very questionable financial management. He was also indicted (but not convicted) of bribery. The only way to fix Bethesda is for someone else to buy them. Probably they will just fail and the developer team will reform under a different studio, but this kind of transition is hard for people who depend on their job. Which is why Todd Howard has been forced to go out and lie to fans to keep ZeniMax from pulling the plug, so Howard's team can keep their jobs and try to save something of the studio's projects.
Man I have been binge watching your content for the past week and I fucking love what I'm seeing, keep up the good work man I really look forward to seeing more long ass video essays from you in the future
i feel really really bad for the developers on this game. I can't imagine the stress and exhaustion of having to rush such a huge project only to have to keep doing overtime after release
