Fallout 76, a Review Part 1 -Bethesda releases an open world version of Rouge Warrior
Bethesda Softworks LLC has managed to take a fine and respected game title and show what a nuclear war and corporate greed can really do. Fallout 76 (FO76) is the most recent title to the Fallout brand of post-apocalyptic games. Unfortunately, this one really should have been left in the vault. FO76's Break it Early Test Application or BETA release shows some the scale and scope of the game while allowing the developer to receive feedback on bugs, and overall reception of the game. The response was not kind, in most cases.
I was one of those early access BETA testers and aside for the obvious issues many of us discovered the most important problem was one that Bethesda never fixed, of in my case even acknowledged. The forum boards that Bethesda runs just for the purpose of feedback from the BETA players, flagged just about every single submission as SPAM and prevented any postings to the boards. This prevented most of the BETA testers from ever passing on the problems and comments they the BETA was supposed to collect and, if you can take Bethesda at face value, fix. I attempted several times over the course of the BETA play window to submit issues I found in the game in hopes that the final product would be a better and smother product. I was never able to submit anything so all that effort was for naught. Even better, but not for Bethesda or it's customers, is the method that Bethesda requres anyone wishing to contact the company to use. It is...wait for it...the forum boards! Yes, that same system that will not let me post to, is the one that Bethesda wants me to use to tell them I cant post to the forum boards. Bethesda Fails Again!
But getting back to the original intention of this missive, the review of my experience playing FO76 so far. A short review might be "Almost all the space of Everquest without the charm, entertainment and interactions." But that might sell FO76 a bit short. It leaves out the buggy vendor system, the poorly thought out item storage allocation, the questionable tiny budget allocation for C.A.M.P. site facilities and the list goes on, and on, and on. From the need to eat and drink liquids almost continuously, to the inability to maintain any human team cohesion when working as a co-op in between server drops, to apparently random and arbitrarily assigned HP allocations to various monster NPC's regardless of any indicated levels. This is just the short list of problems that make playing FO76 almost painful that I wrote down while playing.
Food and drink – In Fallout 4 the Survival Mode required the Lone Wanderer to maintain an adequate supply of food and water while wandering the wastes. This was not a significant an issue as one might expect. A modest quantity of rather commonly available items were typically all that was needed to augment the stimpacks and other drugs that are used as part of the game-play. In FO76 this all changes. If you are not packing around a dozen or more pounds of food and drink you are not going to last more than a couple of day cycles in the game. If I ate and drank as much as my Lone Wanderer, I'd quickly be casting for a staring roll on "My 600 Pound Life" or a job as a Sumo Wrestler.
Vending bots and trading – In previous Fallout games, if you wanted to trade with a vendor you gave them stuff and they gave you caps in return. If you had no caps, you collected stuff and traded that stuff for other stuff you needed to continue on with your wandering. Need 100 .308 rounds to go snipe on a nest of Raiders? Easy peasy, go find a few hundred empty bottles, scrap metal, burnt books, or anything else that was laying around the wasteland to the local vendor. You would soon have enough ammo to take that sniper rifle you found hidden in a carved out rock and teach those raider bastards a lesson they would soon forget; mainly because the gray matter that they needed to remember was rapidly expanding from the compact mass between the ears and painting a Kandinsky or creating a Bauhaus (a Banksy, for you younger readers) all over the wall or floor. This is definitely NOT the case in FO76! FO76 is set in West Virginia, and in WV the Company owns and operates the Store. I don't know how many of you have ever dealt with a Company Store, but is sure seems like one of the Programmers on the FO76 team did. Hell, whoever that someone was I'll wager RAN that store. Now in FO76 you get to collecting and think you have a nice haul that's worth some caps. It may not be a never used set of X-01 Power Armor and all the plates, but it's a decent haul of pipe pistols, pump action shotguns and lightly used armor that you stripped off some poor bloke who made the bad choice of picking on you. After a hard day in the WV wastes you trot back into town thinking it's enough of a haul to set you up with a nice scoped rifle, some stimpacks, maybe even a nice energy weapon. What you actually get is about 5% - 10% of the actual value of that stuff. If you are lucky it's enough to get some change in your pocket and perhaps one stimpack. Oh, by the way the vendor bot only has about 200 caps to buy from. Now as if that was not bad enough, you're thinking OK I'll get my 200 caps from that bot with my sold items then buy some of the stuff I need so the bot will have all those caps to buy more of my stuff. Nope, that's not how it works. You buy 400 caps of stuff and 45 or so caps come back available in the buying window for the bot to use. Sorry Charlie, it's a tough life, but I can teach you the lyrics to “16 tons” if ya like. As if that was not enough to put you off, the prices the vendor bot wants for basic items is a crime. Even after maxing out the cards for better vending prices, it's still unreasonable; think NYC retail store prices at the peak of Holiday shopping season unreasonable. All this and a UI that has all the charm and response time of a Radio Shack TRS-80. (That's the first model with 4k of RAM, not the second one with 64K of memory.)
Part 2 to follow soon...