Fallout 76: Breaking down the B.E.T.A. before launch
Fallout 76, the new multiplayer “survival” Fallout game by Bethesda, has already been quite a polarizing title. With all sorts of claims and opinions flying around, I figured i’d drop my two cents in about what I thought after playing some of the BETA. I also figured it might be a good idea to talk about some of the hot topics surrounding the game as well.
So let’s get started. I decided to split this into segments, just for simplicity and readability for anyone interested in specific topics. I’ll explain certain things as needed, though if you want a more in-depth/detailed look into the game and how it works, there are much better sources to look through.
No NPCs, and worries about questing
One of the biggest gripes I see with people, is the lack of NPCs. It seems like a lot of players (journalists included) don’t seem to understand that Fallout 76 was never meant to be a standard Fallout experience. The idea of shifting to a survival game (more on that next) was to move away from some of the conventions that had become standard. Mainly, NPCs. Fallout 76 focuses primarily on exploration, because exploration is significantly easier to do with a group of friends. Even with the lack of NPCs, the game still has plenty of quests, most of which pop onto your tracker as you get within the area of one. More standard quests are available too, but are given to you by a deceased NPC via holotapes. Frankly I felt it to be a fairly similar, albeit streamlined, questing experience. It cuts out the unnecessary back and forth and just gets to the point. It tells you what to do, and why you’re doing it. Simple!
So in short, no the world is not populated by NPCs, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s full to the brim with notes, holotapes and terminals full of lore, stories and even hints of where to find juicy loot. It works given the open world multiplayer nature of the game, and that’s the most important part.
Survival and PvP
From the outset, Fallout 76 was touted as a survival game. Though as Todd Howard put it, a “soft-core” survival game. What exactly does that mean? Well as it turns out...it means there are effectively no aspects of survival games in Fallout 76, aside from thirst, hunger and an online world.
Some may be disappointed, and others relieved, to know that this can essentially be a singleplayer game even if you’re forced to always play online with others. Although PvP is technically possible, unless a person fires back, you do next to no damage to them. The “slap” system basically makes PvP optional. Even if another player starts slapping you, you could simply log off on the spot, log back in and be on a new server. Alternatively you could block the person while they whittle down your HP. Even if they kill you, all that happens is you can respawn, and they get a server-wide bounty put on them for everyone to see. If you don’t fight back, you don’t drop junk as you normally would in any other death scenario. By default you can see where every player is on the map, but blocking people prevents you from seeing each other. Unless you’re Wanted, of course.
Jumping back to survival, as I said before, there is very little that makes this a typical one. You can build a fairly small mobile base known as a CAMP. It will try to spawn into the world wherever you had it when you log into the world, though from my experience it tends to just come back to you and needs to be re-placed. Thanks to the matchmaking system, it means public servers have absolutely no sense of community. You will never see familiar player structures, you will never see the same faces. You won’t ever form alliances, become enemies, fight wars, help allies. There is absolutely no tension from wandering around because even if someone manages to kill you, you drop effectively nothing. This is one of my biggest gripes, but at the very least, private servers will fix this issue.
Voice Chat
After the final B.E.T.A., Bethesda released a statement going over a few of the things that were major concerns to players. One of them being the voice chat system. For those who don’t know, Fallout 76 defaults you to a “hot mic”, mean if you have a microphone, by default it was turned on. This led to some very strange moments where you’d hear people breathing, eating, talking to themselves or others. Most of whom had no idea they were live to the world. It was mostly an issue in the character creator, but it led to a significant portion of the playerbase simply disabling voice chat. You could not turn off your hot mic and still hear other voices. Bethesda heard the cries loud and clear...and issued a statement that they didn’t see the problem and people need to just deal with it for the foreseeable future. No, I’m not kidding. That wasn’t their words exactly, however, this was:
After the internet blew up for a second time, they quickly edited to say they were looking into adding it in the near future. Apparently the third time IS the charm.
Stash Size
Hoo boy, this is probably the biggest topic of them all. Each player has a personal stash, which is a magical container that you can find throughout the world, or at your own CAMP. It’s the only place to store your valuables. However during the B.E.T.A., many noticed the limit to be quite tiny. Even using all of the tactics available to stretch your storage, you still hit the limit fairly quickly. Hundreds of complaints surfaced all over the place: Reddit, Twitter, their forum, and I’m sure elsewhere. Similar to the voice chat issue, Bethesda gave this statement about stash sizes:
I didn’t really know what to make of this statement; it says that the 400 stash limit will get easier to deal with over time. What does that even mean? As someone who accrued approximately 10 hours of B.E.T.A. gameplay time, my stash is nearly full. I can assure Bethesda that within the next 10 hours, things will not be getting any easier.
Rant aside, many (myself included) have speculated that 400 was simply a BETA limit to stifle hoarding pre-launch. Which would make a ton of sense. That idea was shaken a bit by that statement, but it’s all too possible the person writing the reply had no idea what the plan was for the stash going forward. given it’s a fairly vague response. We’ll just have to wait and see what Bethesda does. If launch rolls around and that 400 limit remains, no nuclear bunker will be strong enough to save us from the explosive rage of the fanbase.
Just a cute little note, but older MMO/Diablo 2 players might be entertained by the thought that it IS technically possible to make your excess character slots into “mules” for your extra junk. Though it does require a friends help to transfer items. I don’t know why the return of mule characters entertains me so much.
PC support
PC players will be annoyed to learn that Fallout 76 is worse than ever when it comes to their platform of choice. There are very few graphical options, and a lot of console specific features remain intact and unable to be disabled due to how the settings seem to work. This means no removing motion blur, depth of field, or other mildly annoying things that make the game look a lot worse to save performance. There also isn’t an FOV slider, which I believe is fairly standard for Bethesda games to not have. Though unlike before, thanks to a much stricter hold on mods, many of these issues can’t simply just be fixed by modders. Bethesda hasn’t given us much on this particular topic, but they did have this to say about FOV:
Some fans have pointed out (many times), this claim is false, as modders always quite easily work in a FOV slider with little issue. Bethesda just seems to be stubbornly resisting this issue for whatever reason. Hopefully it’ll be resolved fairly soon, as it is one of the bigger complaints many PC users have.
For everything else, I suppose we’ll just have to wait and hope. If Bethesda declines to fix the issues, we can only hope a clever fan will find a solution.
Exploits
This is an important issue that mostly affects PC users. There was a lot of chatter floating around about exploits. Most of this seemed to be from a lot of sites (very incorrectly) reporting on a “speed hack” that had already been discovered. While somewhat true, it’s hard to have called it a “hack”. What it was, is players realizing that just like every other Bethesda game on the Creation/Gamebryo engine, physics are tied to framerate. Hilariously, this meant that turning off v-sync in an .ini file allowed them to essentially speed themselves up. You could move faster, attack faster, and I believe it even sped up enemies. It was a fairly inconsistent exploit that only a few could really use properly thanks to the game running rather poorly for most people. But nonetheless it was a pretty big one, so Bethesda forced a 60 FPS lock on all PC players for the remainder of the B.E.T.A. as a bandaid fix. I doubt much damage was caused by it since it was only a limited exploit, and at best people just saved themselves some travel time.
Outside of that, there were numerous fear mongering threads popping up around Reddit and the forums, however they all ended up being speculation and none had any real proof. A lockpicking mod was created to show the sweet spot for any locks, because the sweet spot was shared with the game client and thus readily available for modders to display. People went wild with this tiny bit of info and speculated all manner of exploits, but in the end nothing ever happened for the entirety of the B.E.T.A.. I imagine if such egregious exploits were running wild, people would have made others quite aware.
Bethesda seems properly receptive to receiving and dealing with exploits as they hit, at least so far. So hopefully they keep it up and nip anything that might show up sooner, rather than “in the future”.
General Thoughts
As someone who enjoys the Fallout series, but has never been a diehard fan, I was very skeptical going into the B.E.T.A.. I was excited for a proper Fallout survival game, but I eventually came to terms with the idea that such a thing won’t exist until private servers can make it so.
Despite that, I had a lot of fun. Shifting the focus away from dull, uninteresting NPC conversations and more onto exploration really worked well for me. The world is huge, and I barely even dented it. There’s bits of lore all over the place. My favourite was when I’d find a note describing the location of a key, or a loot stash. It made it actually worth checking notes even if you’re not fully interested in lore. The world is full of stuff to do and discover. Plenty of room for screwing around as well. Workshops need some work but are still fairly fun to hold for some sweet, sweet resources.
It plays like any other FPS Fallout game, just with a larger variety of mods and weapons. Combat is fine for the most part thanks to guns being hitscan, though melee can be a bit annoying when you swing THROUGH enemies due to sync issues. But overall it worked as well as to be expected. There may not be any humans, but Scorched effectively replace the role of raiders by toting guns and being ruthless.
Perks are much more interesting this time around, allowing for all sorts of cool theorycrafting around builds. It takes a while to get things going due to most good cards unlocking further up the level spectrum, but once you get there, it’s great. There are a few quirks they could work out, like receiving useless duplicate cards of perks that can’t level up. But otherwise the system is very well done, and provides options for hundreds of cool builds.
Needless to say, I’m ready for launch. I’m hoping to be able to do an official GBAtempTV stream when the time comes, but we’ll have to see how my schedule works out around that time! If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask. I’ve unhealthily immersed myself into the community so I have a decent amount of knowledge that didn’t fit into a write-up.
Stay tuned for our full review, which will be out just a little after launch.
