Can you fix the fuckload of times you flashed "Subscribe to patreon?" Becuase Jesus that can get annoying fast. I get that you need to make money but doing it like that contradicts your intention of me wanting to subscribe. Other than that this video is really well put together, thanks for making it.
@@sponge73 I started playing about 2 months ago again. I'm really enjoying it. This video is kind of dumb in that he basically starts off by immediately telling you he didn't like Fallout 4.... If he didn't like FO4, why would he possibly like 76?
i will give bethesda this, although they are putting in effort to improve in some meaningful areas, they still miss some key things. i still enjoy the game whether im playing with friends or solo because its essentially just more fallout but i do come across things every now and then that make me facepalm...
I frickin' LOVE the idea that the Fallout 76 experiment was "fill a vault with idiots, tell them they're all geniuses, then release them into a nuclear wasteland and see what happens."
Fun fact: Bethesda has used the same engine for every game since es3: oblivion. Huge game breaking bugs that exist in starfield have existed since 2004, and still go unfixed.
heh i can't understand how can people enjoy that burned out box full of trash but i guess tastes are relatives like i loved playing read dead online even knowing how empty and dissapointing it is
I think partially the reason people were so pissed about the lack of NPCs is the fact that it's been kinda. Important in fallout in the past. Even in 4, they still structure the world. It doesn't just remove that dialogue, but it removes a lot of the point to many skills. What do you need charisma for if you never interact with NPCs? A bigger number isn't gonna help you with other real people.
It tracks. People are shallow and stupid by nature so something that makes sense on deeper levels but not on the surface would be quick to be pointed out and ridiculed.
Except NPCs have been in the game much longer than they haven't been? They were added in with the wastelanders update which was towards the end of the first year..... The game has been out for almost 5 years now..... This point has been pretty irrelevant for a very long time now
@@2ELI7E I think you missed the point that in a ROLE PLAYING GAME, removing the ability to 1. roleplay via npc interaction, 2. make Charisma as a stat almost completely useless and 3, removing something that makes your map not a drab empty mess with a few roaming packs of robots and mutants; is a mistake that should have never been made, let alone *considered*. Moot point or not whoever decided on that needs fired, the fact a Fallout title pushed NPCs as DLC is a joke
@Jom Jim You're not wrong that they changed it to fit the game, and it's an alright change, but you could have placed those perks with anything, especially considering the randomness of them. It's a logical choice, for certain, but that doesn't mean it doesn't suck out a lot of what people expect from a Fallout game. Much of the special system becomes rather arbitrary in a case such as this, where you're hardly building an actual character but instead just filling out points so you'll be allowed to use certain abilities. They added NPCs later, for certain, but I believe that's not really something you can just fix post launch, not without completely reworking your progression at least. The fact that you can freely switch up your special points makes it even worse, as at that point, there really is no reason not to remove special stats entirely and simply allow you to make whatever build you want, so the points themselves become borderline meaningless. With how easy the game is, it's not as if limitations on what you can equip will actually matter, either, so there's no point in worrying about special stats limiting what people can equip. NPC-less RPGs have their place and can be fantastic, but it simply wasn't done properly here at all, and it being a Fallout game means expectations that they were never going to be able to overcome with anything less than a phenomenal story, which is not what 76 had.
The worst thing IMO is that the game doesnt incentivize roleplaying. I was expecting people to fill the roles of NPCs, bartering and setting up camps and talking a lot on the mic openly, like DayZ or something.
The thing is stuff like that evolves naturally. You think the creator of Gmod thought people would use the game to role-play? Heck no, people just did that by themselves.
@@RikkiSan1 Sure, but you can gently nudge players into those roles. Having triple quintuple legendary weapons does not incentivize anyone to roleplay being a weak survivor, for example.
_Did you ever try to put a broken piece of glass back together? Even if the pieces fit, you can’t make it whole again the way it was. But if you’re clever, you can still use the pieces to make other useful things. Maybe even something wonderful, like a mosaic. Well, the world broke just like glass. And everyone’s trying to put it back together like it was, but it’ll never come together in the same way._
Its not Fallout 76 being an RPG that made its lack of NPCs perplexing. It's that Fallout as a series has always heavily leaned on dialogue or general Player/NPC interaction as it's main source of player expression.
Yeah. There's lots of different forms of RPGs, and some use dialogue more than others. But from what little I've played (and what more I've seen) of the Fallout series, it seems like this one really values dialogue--or at least, earlier entries did. Dialogue is where a lot of skill checks and character decisions happen. So I think it is valid to criticize a game in the series for skimping on that aspect. That alone does not make it less of an RPG, but I can see how it might make it (at least feel) less like a Fallout game
@@CostCoSettlementCheck I was kinda shocked hearing that tbh, though I wanna huff the copium and say it was an offhand joke to spur the average anticom fan
Just so you know, a big selling point of 76 and not having NPCs was that the _players_ would take the place of the NPCs and create the world. But player interactions, from what I understand, were by and large hostile because of the bounty system (especially to new players, and I believe PvP was not opt in at launch) and there wasn't a lot of infrastructure for different jobs. So there were no NPCs to interact with, and players were largely avoiding each other...so where was the roleplaying?
@@SlocumJoe7740 That's why they are using past tense. When 76 first launched, you were able to damage anyone no matter if they had pvp off or on. This initial damage was extremely low, but if you were afk you could be killed by a determined player. In order for you to do full damage to the person you were attacking, they would have to attack you back, which would then initiate pvp. Since people got tired of accidently hitting a pvper or getting killed while afk, bethesda made it so that the only way you could damage someone is if pvp was initiated. And like I said earlier, in order to initiate pvp, you have to attack someone and then that person has to attack you back
As one of the people who was actually there (and doesn't just scream about the bugs I saw from a youtube video), you're wrong. While there were some PVPers around, most interactions were cordial. Not as friendly as they are these days, but there was not only little to no reason to PVP, since it would net you a very miniscule amount of caps, while putting a bounty on you, but the 'slap' system meant that it was piss easy to literally ignore all griefing. The complaint was actually on the OTHER side. People wanted MORE reason to PVP. Excuses to raid, that kinda thing.
My issue with the “no NPCs” was not that RPGd have to have dialogue, it was that a huge part of every fallout game has been getting to know awesome characters through dialogue and checks of skill etc
Exactly. It wasn't just world-building or just dialogue, it was meeting what could fathomably be a real person in that type of environment. But as you mention, with skill-checks, it's also a way to build your character, form yourself into what you intend. New Vegas is such a master-class in this, which is why people hold it in such high regards, amongst just being a fun game.
It's really a mismatch of expectations. If Fallout 76 had been a completely original IP, no one would have cared about the absence of living NPCs, because they didn't come with any expectations. Existing Fallout fans DO have expectations about dialogue and character interactions. So it felt empty and lifeless in a way that ran counter to what many people liked about the franchise.
i personally believe that the premise patrician is describing, an empty world void of life. only scorched and audio logs to keep you company was actually quite good when the game first came out. as it was my first fallout i had nothing to compare it to so i just wandered the wastes doing quests and hoping to find a person. it really sold last one alive vibe and i think with a few tweaks like having people in enclave and such things would have made it perfect
I'm not going to publicly disparage "the people", but...seriously, maybe I just live in a bad neighborhood and I tend to also talk to people on the internet from bad neighborhoods, but a big part of me playing games is that I get to "interact" with people who are written with a purpose. Case in point: I just finished The Longest Journey(It's an absolute gem from like quarter of a century ago) and it reminded me why I like video games. I saw fascinating intersections from the lives of dozens of people. I saw a world that really couldn't be told in the format of a movie or a tv show. It just had to be a game. My point is that a game can tell a story in a way that a movie or a tv show or a radio program or a book never could. The frustration you feel when they "screw up" is the justified anger you have at the realization that millions of people, over the course of centuries, have worked together to provide the ultimate framework for storytelling, and they seemingly don't even try to make the effort to live up to that enormous undertaking. If I was given a job to write the story and the background lore and the dialogues and the monologues and fluff of a video game, you could bet I wouldn't sleep soundly or eat calmly until I hammered out a 10k page dump of worldbuilding. ...I'm a special case, but...just imagine if you were given the job of *writing a Fallout MMO* Wouldn't you give a hundred percent?! Maybe it wouldn't turn out to be the best, but at least it would stink of effort. People would say "well, it's a hit and miss, but you can tell it was made by a passionate group that really cares about the Fallout universe and wanted to craft a long lasting, enjoyable experience for Fallout fans."
Absolutely. I don't know what he's on about with this "people think RPGs need dialogue" thing. It's a straw man argument. Nobody is making the point he thinks they are, people just want and rightfully expect actual characters in their Fallout game - meaningful choices, stakes, and "life" to the world. There's a good reason that most RPGs have NPCs...
The biggest disappointment for me was just that it was a waste of a fallout game by a studio that now seems to have a lack of quality *and* quantity approach to making games. When it was announced to be multiplayer I was just like "fuuuuuck I gotta wait 10 more years for another actual fallout game and that one still might be complete shit?"
No joke...FO4 came out in Nov-2015. FO5 is scheduled to come out after ES6 which is scheduled for release in 2026. It took four years for FO4 to come out after ES5, so we're probably looking at a 2030 release date for FO5. FIFTEEN YEARS after FO4. We would might be playing FO5 right now if FO76 had never happened. I think if FO76 and Starfield had not impacted release dates for ES and FO, fans wouldn't be as salty.
@@fudgepacker2858if you liked Skyrim I’m sure you’ll be ok
Рік тому+231
That was one of the things that really bothered me in Fallout 76, the Vault 76 would be the perfect player hub where you can meet and players can trade with each other or form groups. Or you could have used the vault as a kind of community anchor base that is expanded over the course of the story and gives players collect and kill quests. But no, Bethesta made the Vault irrelevant in the first 5 seconds of gameplay.
@@wile123456llout 3 and oblivions openings are legendary and some of the most memorable parts of my first ever play throughs of those games. I’m 10 yrs older now and I still remember fighting my first goblin in oblivion or watching the couple get gunned down in vault 101
It coulda been a big "build a new city around this anchor" thing but with players. Just despawn their important shit but leave the buildings they built. Just see how long it takes for people to build to the sky box and or reach another town
Something I noticed with new releases - The discourse around games has turned into "buggy games bad, stable games good". The amount of people saying Redfall is a "solid foundation" that's broken by bugs is completely insane, there's nothing fun about that game, just like Atomic Heart and Dead Island 2 which both released in stable but mind-numbingly boring states this year. The only other metric games get widely criticized for are predatory micro-transactions, but that only seems to apply to Diablo Immortal/Star Wars Battlefront 2 level monetization.
Yes, people have no taste anymore. They'll boycott for political causes and complain about bugs, but actually talking about the mechanics is a minority opinion
@@Patrician This is more or less why I haven't bothered getting into game review content or anything since I feel like I'd be screaming into the wind because of this.
This is generally a trend I have noticed as well. As more and more broken and predatory games release, the lower people's standards become. This has resulted in a bunch of mediocre and just okay games that ARE stable and work at launch being given 9s and 10s all around. It's so sad that it has come to this.
Their priority is at creating dopamine loops/hooks, not good content. If they can catch players who are whaling for this, then they win. Diablo 4 will be normalizing Battlepass+ in-game cash shop in a 70,-+ game. People will buy all of it, we are doomed
11:00 It immediately strikes me that this could have been solved by saying that your characters are the second generation that never got to see the world but then you'd have the question of what happened to your parents. It would make sense for those who got it on in the first 5 years to have adult offspring who could be main characters and have the abysmal stats they do
Honestly they cashed in the "Cryogenically frozen" storyline too early. A vault with an indeterminant amount of residents that get woken up based on vault-tecs unknowable agenda is the perfect explanation for new players randomly joining the world
Honestly every 76 dweller being at 1 in every special explains a LOT about why the Overseer talks about the "challenges" she had with us the whole time, before the vault opened up - and gives her one more reason to leg it right away, now that i think about it.
I think the "no NPC" criticism was more that there was NPCs... But just that they were randomly robots in places where it would make sense for a human to be.
Well, if you actually use Reddit search function or Google's time function, which fun fact, you can actually limit your Google searches to specific dates, enter the dates before wastelanders and when the game launched. And you'll see that a lot of the criticism really does legitimately just boil down to. There's no end pcs, therefore not a good game. But yes, this is actually something I'm surprised pat didn't mention when he got there. And it's one of the major parts of this video that I personally disagree with, is that every Says the couldn't do something without an NPC. They did nothing creative with it, and they just plot down a robot that isn't NPC and doesn't act like any other robot ever.
I dunno about you, but my personal criticism of the "no NPCs" was that there were countless tales of those who survived the fallout (pun accidental) in their own bunkers (both in Fallout 4 and in 76 itself), and there are tons of sapient ghouls who have, by necessity, been around since before the bombs fell. So it felt like the real reason there were no NPCs was simply because the game and they didn't want to admit they were churning out a game that didn't have yknow... .
I'm no fallout historian I just played as a kid, but does it make sense to meet the brotherhood in West Virginia? They were a paramilitary techno-cult on the west coast in the first game and that was around 80 years after the bombs. I guess they just made them have outfits all over so they didn't have to invent any new factions?
They were shoe-horned in and if ANYONE tells you otherwise, they don't know the lore. It makes no sense. It's stupid. Story in this game is a joke to keep the whales defending it.
Pretty much. It would make more sense if the Enclave was on the east coast and West Virginia since in lore they would just be the remnants of the US Govt
@@RubijoyalI always figured the reason the Enclave and Brotherhood were east coast because of how just overloaded with bombs the center of the government was during the war
After hearing your breakdown of the premise, I think a better set up would be: Everyone on vault 76 was told they were the best of the best, but really they're the biggest narcissists that Vault tech could find. Partly for a joke, and partly to see if they could learn to work together and become a team. Kind of a metaphor for going from a single player game where you're the protagonist and most important person, to a multiplayer game where you're one of many. Also, have everyone be in cryo sleep and slowly be released overtime, so players that start the game at a later date have something to justify why everyone else has been there for so long. I know cryo sleep was an experiment in Fallout 4, but it could be justified as they didn't care what happens to the people in this vault because it was supposed to be a joke anyway.
I still remember on my very first playthrough, I managed to get myself stuck at one of the structures full of super mutants, I climbed to the very top and noticed a player in full power armor at the entrance who cleaned the place of the rest of the super mutants that were still roaming, asked me if I needed help, and saved me from certain death, knight in shining armor style
As a new player I experience this all the time; get in way over my head and just waiting to die when all of a sudden all my killers just drop dead, and some high-level player is giving me the thumbs up.
Eh, I recall the main complaint about the lack of NPCs was that the world felt like an empty theme park and all you did was listen to tape recordings where you already knew there was no urgency actively talking place anywhere. The player was less a character involved involved with their world and more of a librarian cataloging what was already done. It had to survive on these minor snippets of story lore to seem alive and it wasn't enough to feel that invested.
Yeah those were my issues with the lack of NPCs in the game. Also for some people it just felt like a Fallout game with the NPCs missing, like an unfinished Fallout game instead of a complete game that was well designed to function without NPCs. If I remember right that was how Jeff Gerstmann felt after he had played the game for a while.
@@zeroinfinitify Nah as someone who played before wastelanders as well as after the wastelanders patch made the game worse. The wastelanders patch and all the patches since ruined what the game originally had.
welcome to the fallout universe; if your home is still around after the nukes drop, congrats you're not homeless. otherwise, homeless IRL simulator it is.
I played 76 in 2020 with my best friend to check it out. We got a quest to deal with a deathclaw that was terrorizing a settlement or something. Me and my friend were gearing up, stockpiling chems and ammo as well as placing mines around the area where we were going to fight it. When it spawned it’s navigation bugged out and it remained frozen in place while we wailed on it, killing it with little to no effort. We both laughed so hard afterward.
my problem isnt that the game didnt have npcs, but that the game tried so hard to be a game with npcs, without npcs. they could do a game that didnt require human interaction, but bethesda replaced human interaction with listening to their audio logs and interacting with terminals instead of listening to them talk, and interacting with them.
"I do have to appreciate that, finally, after 16 years, I am playing a Bethesda game with a 10 minute introduct-Ugh! The game crashed!" I literally almost did a spit take! XD
The first responder larpers would have made sense if they were raiders using the first responders clothing as a way to lure in victims. They should have embraced the darker elements of the Fallout lore at least that would have kind of made that work.
I was so excited for 76. Me and my two other best friends are huge fallout fans, and we’re from Appalachia ourselves. We were so excited to see our home region finally represented in a game, and a fallout game we could PLAY together? It sounded too good to be true! And it was…after we all reached level 60 we just, stopped playing.
That was myself and my friend group. A co-op Fallut game was a dream come true, and we even braced ourselves for Bethesda Bugs, because as much as we loved their games at the time, we weren't diehards who ignored the flaws and acknowledged them. What we got was a game that really felt like it needed so much work done from the ground up. After the first year round of patches and updates that slowly led towards the Wastelanders release and especially after, we felt the game was finally reaching its potential and played it more earnestly and started to have fun. We were leery still, and especially when the Atom Shop started to get more predatory, and then they revealed the subscription service that paywalled features they said would be included at launch or free at first... Eventually even with updates the game's cycle of live-service grind became too boring, and their 'battlepass' gameboards while initially fun were absolute slogs due to the increasing XP grind to unlock things. You went from unlocking maybe five levels per day to slowly only being able to do 1-2 per day, and you had to reach lvl60 to complete the board. Meanwhile Conan Exiles pass I literally can clear swaths of it in a day alone, and even alter what stuff I can do to get XP. The main breaker aside from the bad balancing was the griefing caused by as lack of good anti-griefing measures. One too many times, I was tired of having to rebuild my base or having my stuff broken into, so I called it quits. There are dozens of other reasons, but ultimately Fallout 76 was a great idea that sadly Bethesda did not spend the proper amount of time and resources to make happen. It was just a content stop-gap while they poured resources into Starfield, but they even took resources from 76 for Starfield so it became a broken-broken mess by even what we expected of Bethesda. Now their communities trust is in the toilet and nobody really seems excited for Starfield and feel they'll be waiting too long for the next Elder Scrolls and proper Fallout game.
Meanwhile I just spent my childhood on Fallout (Fonline) 2 servers with real time combat - doing carvanas, quests, building base, looting and pvping in the wasteland, gang wars city conquering etc
The ammo problem is an overcompensation for how it used to be, where players were much more starved on ammo types, and manufacturing them in a sustainable volume required players to control a specific point in the NW corner of the map, meaning only one or a few players would have access to basic ammunition.
@@Aquedius Yeah I remember I was actually among the first ones to realize that the workshop up there gives you a good amount of ammo and I always hunkered down there because I always had ammo issues despite almost exclusively using the 10mm semi auto pistol. I don't even want to imagine how people with full auto builds felt.
And you couldn’t find a single weight in any of the gyms cuz of the farming to create ammo. I had to stash away guns using all kinds of ammo in the game and put them in a circulation
sometimes i believe that those big studios like bethesda, R* and so on, fired most of their staff to a point where they have the capabilities of an indie studio that at least would explain the quality of todays games
Quality is low because profit is the only thing that matters. Passion, care and finishing a game properly is not as important. In fact microtransactions, battle passes and so on always without fail make a game worse. Because without them, the devs have to make a game be actually good since only the sales matter for profits. But when they are in the game can get rushed out more to recoup some of the losses.
@@wile123456 Yep after it launches they recoup the loses off of idiots that wast their money on monitization stuff. Who decided to keep on playing the game even though it was not made well. I believe content creators actually make things worse instead of better because they actively buy allot of stuff from these games.
Your entire segment about how wastelanders ruins the original main story is something ive been saying for years, im so glad someone else sees it this way
Honestly, what made me drop the game quickly was the lack of support for human to human interaction. All fine if you have a microphone. But there was no support for simple old chatting. Which is sort of important in an MP game where there will be people unconformable, incapable, or simply unwilling to use voice chat. It just felt wrong.
It was pretty bad even for console players, PC was even worse. It's like they just ported the game over to pc without making any basic changes to make use of it being on pc. If I remember correctly there wasn't even local chat.
@@michaelmichaelagnew8503 No chat at all except for voice chat when I started. And that is why I never got into the game. One little thing. That is likely that one game I should have asked for a refund for...
I think its hilarious how you can easily change the "why does the vault have to be designed to fail" just by having it so there is now more room in the Vault to keep housing so many people and each new playing leaving is just more people who signed up to venture out.
@@deanjustdean7818 truth. There is lots of stuff Bethesda will never touch simply because Obsidian came up with it first (the entire west coast for example)
@kotzpenner Fallout 4 took plenty from New Vegas weapon customization, companions who reacted to your choices, a 4 way faction conflict that at least tried to not be Black and White. Beyond that it had a character who grew up in the NCR, Vault 114 was a gang hideout and Vault 81 was still inhabited. Vault 81 in particular stands out because it was meant to test diseases but the original Overseer sabotaged the project. This means Vault 81 was a not control Vault designed to last so the Vault has to trade with people outside because the Vault naturally degrades over time. You can see people constantly preforming maintenance on part of the Vault. I think Bethesda has weaker writing and overall prioritizes fun and silly over deep and grounded but I don't think we shouldn't acknowledge where they tried to improve and better as a studio. They did try to take inspiration from New Vegas and even if not as good I still feel it was a step in the right direction.
I actually like the idea that Vault 76 was actually an experiment to see if they took all of the most useless people and convinced them all they were actually chosen because they were the best and brightest to test the power of positive affirmation and false confidence in the wake of a nuclear apocalypse. That theory makes sense given that when you start you start off with a 1 in every stat and in no other fallout game was that the case.
I think that one of the most obvious changes that you will find is that they had something difficult and then made it easier, ammo used to be an issue so then they just made it where everything you kill drops more ammo than you typically use to kill it, water and food used to actually kill you if they got too low and now they just act as things you can fill to get buffs, etc.
lack of water and food didn't kill you but it did lower your max health and max ap. So eating and drinking allowed for you to have full bars when well fed and well hydrated.
@@MrSirMang I remember it killing me, either that or it lowered your max health to just being a one-shot, but I feel like I remember it slowly damaging you until you would die.
TBH they went too far the other way on the difficulty curve. Launch had a loop where you would need to get supplies every once and awhile but weren't spending more time doing supplies than actually doing...Stuff. Then they changed ammo crafting, enemy scaling and went *way* too far the other way. I'd spend two hours getting the ammo needed for 20 minutes of gameplay because every enemy would take 40+ rounds of anything to kill due to them having armor values so high that even reducing it by 85% meant you still only had 10 damage per shot left at the end instead of the 50+ base damage. I remember a few scorch queen fights where we had 20 people and when the event ended the queen had only lost 10% of their health because we were probably doing 1 damage per shot from anything due to her ridiculous armor values. That and a few other issues was what made me finally quit and never go back.
@@jimbot70 It is the complete opposite of that now, there are plenty of people who can solo the nuke boss events, me being one of them, and that's also without the broken legacy weapons now too.
The funny thing is that Beth ended up with a catch-22 regarding NPCs in 76. One of the major fundamental draws of Fallout was always the NPCs and seeing how humans have fared in the post-apocalypse world, and dealing with the emergent stuff, the collective main character was survivor humanity itself - so 76 removing human NPC and making it so that everyone was dead or feral-ghoul-mode was a deal-breaker to me from the start, it felt like 76 is just walking around the empty party venue the morning after and seeing only the shape in which the party left it. But Wastelanders trying to fix that only ended up breaking the original setup - it removed whatever appeal of the "everyone is gone" story you mention was present, it did so in a clumsy hamfisted way, and its new introductions pale in comparison to the original factions that are now dead. Worst part about it, though, is the reason human NPCs were cut from 76 was not narrative-driven, but rather the executive delusion of "the human NPCs will be replaced by other players of the game"; they were clearly envisioning some sort of Fallout: EVE Online on steroids and thought human NPCs would detract from that. Where, in reality, they only ended up turning the world into a still-life devoid of potential.
The idea of players filling the role of NPCs _could_ have worked if more players could actually be in the world, but public servers can only accommodate 24 people at once, so the map feels incredibly empty. The only time you ever see other players is if you're at that bar near the starting area, or if there happens to be a public event going on. I genuinely would have _loved_ a Fallout MMO, but they should have built it in a different engine. I don't know why the hell they didn't just use the Elder Scrolls Online engine, you can switch between first and third person in that game so it would work just fine for Fallout. But if they did that, they probably wouldn't have been able to reuse assets and it would take actual work. In FO76's code, the Scorchbeasts are called dragons, because they literally copy and pasted the code from Skyrim. That's why they reuse some of the same animations the dragons have.
If I remember correctly early in the lifecycle of the game, ammo was far more scarce and it just lead to players relying primarily on melee weapons in order to conserve ammo.
@@nobalkain624 a few years back melee used to be much more powerful. idk if they nerfed it or if other builds simply surpassed it. during the scorchbeast queen fight, melee users would do the most damage whenever she landed. basically, all the gun users were only there to get her on the ground. i learned melee was so powerful in the BETA when i ran out of ammo in a PvP scrap and pulled out my fire axe to use in VATS, which killed in one to two hits. since then my first and longest build was power armor VATS sledgehammer/super sledge, eventually going bloodied after a lucky drop. almost everything went down in one or a couple hits and you could clear the distance with the Blitz perk if i remember correctly. this was on ps4, i'm on pc now, and i think revisiting that character on occasion it isn't as powerful anymore, so things definitely have changed. sorry this is long i just wanted to say lol.
Also, this game has a positive score on Steam now? Oh fuck me, there really is no hope for Bethesda games anymore. I can't wait until they do the bare minimum for Starfield next year and a bunch of redditors exclaim "See? They fixed it now!"
@@Beleth420 It has an online component that, unless modders can reverse-engineer, makes it impossible for the game to run as a standalone piece of software and I very much doubt microsoft intends to release code to make their online-only products run without big brothers looking at you at all times.
@@endlessstrata6988 Does that preclude modding the game? Cause plenty of modern games, even single-player, require an internet connection and you can still mod those. Quite a few games with multiplayer components just don't allow you to engage with the multiplayer aspect if altered files are detected.
I tried it on game pass, made it about 1hr and 30 mins into the game then dropped it. I found it incredibly boring and tedious. This was after many updates and the DLC coming out. This is also coming from someone who's played through Fallout 3 and NV multiple times, beaten Fallout 4, and put 1000+hrs into Skyrim. I found it to be basically just a worse version of Fallout 4 (which was mid at best in the first place), that was heavily compromised in order to make it a multiplayer live-service and support continuous monetization.
Basically, if you like Fallout 4 gameplay for its own sake you can like Fallout 76. The core gameplay loop is essentially the same, the only difference is now there is some MMO grinding involved (five different receiver types for each gun you need to scrap to learn, enemies 50 levels above you that take no damage from shots, etc.) I thought it was pretty fun, but it's far from a masterpiece. The new story segments are awkwardly shoehorned in and the way they're reintroduced durability is infuriating to me.
Even without the Vintage Water Coolers, it was easy enough to amass purified waters from the regular water purifiers. I was constantly offloading my own waters to hit the daily cap limit.
I really like the idea of alternatively having Vault 76 be a Player Hub, functioning similar to Shady Sands. Supporting and protecting a growing city of fellow Vault Dwellers makes for a much more compelling story goal than "look for the overseer." Like wtf am i, a lost puppy? Maybe Vault 76 really was "the Dunning Kruger Vault"
Except this person is stating a lit of false statements about this game so you are not learning anything here. Characters are not locked into private worlds if the player plays in a private world with them. This guy should spend some time actually learning about games he wants to attack for clicks.
@@danielbrown8812 Pretty sure he's meaning that, if you create a character on or move a character to a private world, you cannot then take that character back to public worlds: they are effectively locked to private worlds only. Not that they are locked to a single private world itself.
I started playing about a year ago and my favorite thing about it was how nice the community was. I didn't have any friends who'd play with me so I'd just run around solo. I'd be chilling and a random level 500+ person would run by and they'd just give me things to help a newbie out. I haven't experienced such a nice online community before.
This is one thing I miss from my heavy MMO days - community. There was always a feeling of don't start no **** there'll be no **** and everyone was willing to help.
f76 has "mature" community, after palying a while you will see same ppl some times, i also drop often items to new players if i have any items i don't need atm (usualy after harder events :) ). OFC there are jerks that try to spoil fun for the others but thats marginal and simple "block" specific player mean that you probably will not see him/her ever again.
I love that you called out the lazy no man’s sky comparison at the beggining. I get that gaming conversation isnt great at nuance, but those two situations are so different it’s wild people say use that comp
Bethesda storytelling be like: "you are the chosen one. General of armies, high lord of orders, master of covens, arch wizard of all magic... now go deliver this cheese steak and sausage to an old lady in that swamp. You may not refuse."
the worst part is that the power armor skeleton bug was also present in fo4. bethesda never bothered to fix it, so modders dit. then in 76 instead of patching KNOW AND EXTREMELY DOCUMENTED issues of the game and engine they were using as a template, they just copy/pasted it and called it a day.
Honestly, it would make sense if the Vault 76 residents were TOLD they were the smartest. Tell the people they're amazing and see how they develop with their ego being constantly boosted
@Igor Oleynikov I literally just found these content creators today. I haven't seem much of their content, so I cannot tell if they are platonic friends or 2 people in love with each other. However, being oddly specific about the church location makes me think they are genuinely getting married. But it also seemed like dry humor.
The comment 'private sessions is my husband', 'we're getting married', etc I *think* it's sarcasm but I can't be 100% sure because of your staggeringly perfect deadpan narration So on the somewhat minimal chance this is some post/meta-irony ploy, congrats
yeah I wanted to write something similiar it's like "communist NCR". Knowing because of it's past videos he does not make such mistakes. He puts something like that in the video to troll and make people engage with it. That's why I didn't write anything because he's playing with us. Anyways. getting married or not. I'm happy for them they found each other. Friendship or couple - doesnt matter.
To solve the vault date issue, they could have made it so there is a sort of cast system or factions within the vault itself. One may be the group that stays to oversee the vault, the other could be forced out on their own reclamation day such as when they turn a certain age. This way they vault stays open but also keeps spitting out people. And that’s just off the top of my head. Bethesda had years to think this over…
One of my largest issues with FO76 is the Lack of Conflict. You have the Raiders and Scavengers with Zero Conflict. Same with the Brotherhood and the Enclave. There is Zero Conflict amongst the factions and they do m t care if you are budy budy with the aposing faction. And yes to much ope. Space with little encounters to keep the flow of any questing or exploration going strong. Which is why people would rather fast travel than walk in a barn wasteland to their next objective.
yeah as a big enclave fan i'm pretty disappointed. the enclave sort of got weaseled out as a "shadow" so most wastelanders don't know about them, but groups like the settlers and raiders, especially the BOS, should have conflict. instead, they have missions that last a fraction of an hour.
Even in 3 I would come across random encounters where super mutants and raiders fought, or slavers would get attacked by a yao-guai. NV same deal with legionaries fighting with NCR sometimes or having some of the main faction NPCs dealing with fiends or wasteland creatures. Maybe they wanted to really capitalize on that isolationist feel, but 76 is just empty. Instead of the culturally rich and folklore heavy regjon of Appalachia, it just feels like you're wandering the wash in your backyard. It's why I really appreciate the cryptids. They are a new threat to face that adds something to the world while also making the game's setting relevant
A multiplayer fallout game was, from inception, a terrible idea so you could have predicted it and I'd have believed you. What makes fallout fun and what makes multiplayer fun are very different.
8:55 Odd, I don't I've ever heard anyone else describe the New California Republic as "communist". I don't recall anything ever appearing in Fallout 2 or New Vegas (which are the two games that feature the NCR the most) that would make me think about the NCR as Communist or even Communist-adjecent. I think the intended goal was to depict the NCR as an attempt to create a federal republic in the same vein as the USA that came before it, while also presenting elements that show that this attempt is often deeply flawed, but not hopeless. Those flaws are primarily depicted as it often being corrupt and militaristic (or even Imperialistic) in its handling of bordering territory, as well as an unregulated economy giving certain players too much power. One could even make the argument that the creation of a republic like the NCR represent the re-appearance of capitalism in the wasteland, and a move away from the communal ways of life found in more tribal or underdeveloped territories. There's an actual economy, people work for money, there's a semi functional currency and (semi-)free market to support this, there's a constitution, there's representation through direct election of representatives, etc. My interpretation of the NCR has always been that the original developers tried to depict a more "flawed" version of the USA as a federal republic. As I mentioned before, many of the depicted flaws are corruption, imperialist sentiment and monopolies leading to unelected people wielding too much power. All those major flaws clearly have direct links to challenges faced by the United States throughout its history and that still remain issues to this very day. I *genuinely* don't think any of the writers intended it to be interpreted as being akin to a Communist state. Perhaps the canon created by Bethesda implies this? I'm not that familiar with the background story in Fallout 3 or 4 (since I don't really like those games), but the NCR doesn't appear in much detail in those two games.
It was sarcasm. People tend to portray the NCR as kinda communist or the most commie faction, and pat just finds that funny because they actually aren't, kinda? So yeah, it's basically an inside joke.
As someone who has clocked over 300+ hours in 76 It's hard for me to re contextualize how newer players would handle the main plot being side tracked from the wastelanders inclusion. I still love the game despite the issues for various reasons but I can certainly acknowledge it's massive retcon issues being tough to ignore. Always nice to see videos on 76 whether good or bad just to see people's personal thoughts and reasons why or why not they enjoyed something.
Yeah, I played 76 on launch and enjoyed my time and the story was simple to follow. Came back years later to all these updates and it's just a clusterfuck, IMO, so I pretty quickly dropped it.
I played this game on launch. I’m going to have a dissenting opinion here… it was extremely boring. The narrative choice for audio logs was not well thought out, as the idea is you would be playing with friends. Try to follow a story with tons of ambient noise and people talking in your ear. And once the “story” was run down that was it, very little any else. Not saying wastelanders was a good idea, not by a long shot, but the game has never felt like more than a scavenge, kill, loot, craft, repeat loop.
The difficulty and ammo economy seems to have changed radically - being overcompensated a lot! Previously you'd get passable damage only if you specced fully into one specific style OR if you went Legendary hunting OR just went full co-op to overpower enemies There were also guides on where to find the specific scrap type needed for ammo Guess the complaints got to bethesda and they just said "Fine then, take it all!" instead of trying to carefully balance
@@TravJam317yeah. The people who enjoy the game like me know it has indeed gotten better, because we've literally been there the entire way. Objectively yes, it has gotten better, the things that have changed just aren't enough for the general population I guess. One of those "you needed to be there" things.
@@TravJam317 not really, it's an objective fact the game has issues like bugs and flawed game design and that wastelanders does not merge well with the original intent of the game
33:04 is the reason I loved Fallout 76 at launch. Like exploring a museum, I really enjoyed that. I haven’t played in a couple of years despite being excited about wastelanders. I honestly think that artistically they should have stuck with the original plan, but their decisions have kept the game alive, even if it is full length wild wasteland.
"A disasterous launch" And preorder. And beta. And post launch. And bug fixing. And merch store. And roadmap. And dlc. And literally anything related to this game. I have never seen a game so cursed.
Yeah man, I couldn't afford it at the time and my friend preordered it. We were in high school and only made minimum wage working at a restaurant, so buying new games was expensive. I remember asking him how it was on launch and him saying "it destroyed his faith in the series". I've always been a fallout fan (mostly because of the fan community and modding) but he never had the same passion for the games again. I think it's telling just how garbage this game was on launch if it literally made fans quit the series.
man that description of the initial premise of 76 sounds kind of cool, waking up after the apocalypse, being the only real human alive, hunting the trail of the *recent* survivors in the area. A pity all the random npcs hanging out erase that vibe.
@@quintonbrady3238 I suppose that's a valid point, but I guess it's tragic that all these once empty places that used environmental story telling now have a npc five feet away to tell the story like its a tourist attraction.
@@privatepessleneck It becomes even more ridiculous, when you find npc in hostile locations, like there is a guy living in fort defiance literally one room away from a pack of feral ghouls (yeah, he has a sob story about his sister who died there, but still, man, at least move to the safe 4th floor). I mean it's clearly a gameplay thing, because you supposed to clean the area during mainquest, and game behaves like enemies are not respawning, but still it peaks immersion breaking
I'm really fond of the segment that tears down the premise and opening of the game, so much that it'd put it on a similar tier to your discussion of the Oblivion opening, and the simple question in that of "Why is Emperor escaping out of the city" and why the method was so inefficient. My suggestion for 76 would be to make residents prospective *children*. It's not perfect, and I think there's probably already a vault of children, but it makes for a better fit for the expected audience, who would be most prone to make insane (relatively) young adults.
That’s funny, I wasn’t a fan of the opening because it made it sound like Bethesda has been capable of making a good experience in the last 20 years at all
I found a 3 star shotgun with recover health on hit, explosive bullets, and double shot. I became immortal and immediately put down the game because all tension was lost. Interestingly I did find an obscenely rare (as in the wiki didn't even have a log on it at the time) fully modded "enclave' plasma rifle variant and had the brotherhood spec ops gear drop for me so. Pretty much did everything I wanted to do with the game.
That's my biggest concern. I eventually figured out that I don't need to try anymore by capturing a power plant, farm fusion cores, then go nuts with power armor and a gatling laser with a heavy weapons + power armor perks build. I can easily kill three-star cryptids that way. I also have 100 stimpacks. The game just gets super boring once you powercreep, just like in Fallout 4. There is also no scaling for weapons above lvl 50. Really, I can't justify spending time in this game unless you're with a friend chatting on Discord.
@Kwisatz Haderach it may not be double shot (maybe crit chance on hit or something? I remember infinite crits) but since it was a shotgun it had crazy spread anyway and still resulted in infinite health pretty much. If you're on Xbox I'll re-download it and give you the spec ops gear, enclave plasma, and the shotgun lol
Hold up 8:55, I'll need you to explain that one. How is the NCR communistic at all, imperialist and expansionist sure but considering the presence of competing companies and private ownership of the means of production calling them communist makes about as much sense as calling the US today communist.
@@ravensflockmateDude, that was not Audible sarcasm, that was a calmly stated falsehood that assumes everyone is into Fallout lore to catch on it's an absurd statement and therefore a "joke". He needs to modulate his voice more to convey jokes in an otherwise factual video.
Gunner is a better defender than Engineer. Shield is obvious, but his weapons are better when everyone has to stay together as well. Engineer's PGL WILL hit teammates if the bugs get close, and Fatboy can destroy the run. Gunner can protect the team and keep the bugs at bay. Engineer can create cover, but Driller can just create a bunkie if the Uplink is in a bad spot. Scout 🤢. My preference; Gunner>Driller>Engineer>Scout.
Its pretty contrived, in my opinion, to say that the lack of NPCs in Fallout 76 was an "experiment". Its far more likely that the higher ups at Zenimax wanted a new Live Service Game with a Fallout coat of paint released pronto, and so NPCs and their resultant needs for dialogue and scripting (both of which require mountains of man-hours to write, program, and test) were the very first thing scrapped in order to shove the game out the door. I mean, its a whole asset class that the development team just suddenly doesn't need to worry about. Seriously though, whats more likely? That a creative at Bethesda had an idea for a story, or an empty suit thought to himself, "You know what takes a lot of unnecessary time and effort in a typical BethSoft game? NPCs!" and told the developers to scrap NPCs whilst dreaming about all the money and development time the company will save? Put more simply, what's more likely, that someone on the development team had an idea for a story that wasn't in the studio's wheelhouse, or that Bethesda did what Bethesda does: cut corners?
The lack of NPCs IS a problem. Here's why. The vault has JUST ejected ALL of its inhabitants. NONE of them are wandering around? NONE of them are curious why this place is empty aside from a ton of monsters? NONE of them are trying to figure out how to fix this mess? I know, the Vault is just an excuse to spawn Players, a very poor one since they established everyone was being kicked out at the same time and if they don't leave they DIE. Regardless, you still need NPCs to fill the roles of mission givers and busy bodies. If all there is, is players, then nothing will ever get done. Players don't want to sit around in one place all day, online at ALL times just waiting for someone to come and sell a bunch of scrap to them. You can explain why this supposedly abandoned town is populated, BY GIVING EVERYONE A VAULT 76 SUIT! THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT OF THE VAULT KICKING EVERYONE OUT! TO POPULATE THE AREA! It's really that easy, you can have the mystery of where everyone went, you just need to account for the people you've introduced. Aside from that, stats like Charisma are fucking useless if there aren't people around!
@Whoeveritwas It's not about negetivity. I enjoy longform analysis content; its satisfying to listen to and prehaps gain a new perspective or some insight on a topic I hadn't previously known or considered, and imo he does it better than anyone else - at the very least, anyone else I've heard. I also work a fairly monotonous job with a lot of downtime, so his videos are great to listen to in the background. I think I've listened to each of his TES videos in full about three times in the last few months. Its hard to find similar content of the same quality and in-depth explanation. I love TES, and I also love Fallout. Iirc he stated in his Skyrim video he wasn't sure what to do after - Fallout seems to be a logical continuation.
@Gold Luminance If you don't know him yet, you should check out Mauler. He has made many detailed analyses of video games and movies. Mauler and Patritian are my top two long form analysis creators.
@@austinkious3940 I used to like MauLer, but I find his content insufferable now. I tried listening to a recent episode in his TFA review and I about fell asleep. Not sure if it's his delivery or what.
@@DartNoobo I know I'm arguing against no one since you're just guessing titles, but I'd be surprised if any NV fan doesn't think about it's flaws. Not as good as you think is very bold.
The major problem in my opinion is that it's immediately established as 100% fact that there are no humans (npcs) in the world rather than that being the case but we're unsure for a while until we start uncovering things, this, for me, ruined the experience of the game, not because of the lack of NPCs but because of the lack of anything to emotionally engage with, I vaguely remember a quest where there's someone on a tape sobbing saying they've lost someone and then you go and find them and surprise surprise they're dead, coz everyones dead, we established that earlier, and I figured that out in the first 5 seconds of the quest so there was 0 emotional weight, why would I care about the disconnected voice of someone I've never met and will never meet and I already know is dead, Fallout 76 is like if someone sat there and took notes of a group of people having a DnD adventure and then you read those notes but didn't actually get to engage in the story, and the notes are poorly written, and you already know how the campaign ended.
@@Xarr23 If that was the case then the building mechanic wouldn't be somehow worse than Fallout 4, it also felt heavily disconnected from the game and largely pointless to the character as well as the benefits from building weren't that essential a lot of the time, also there was no real attachment to building, it's not like Rust or other similar games where you live in the building and it's an essential part of the game and you spend a good amount of time upgrading it and the building persists even when you log out. Everything I thought Fallout 76 could be it failed at by either not committing heavily enough to ideas, creating this bland soup, mid-for-everyone-great-for-no-one experience, or just completely missing the point behind things they added. One of the first ideas I had when I heard about a multiplayer Fallout coming out with no NPCs was playermade quests, how they would've handled it I'm not 100% sure but I don't think it would've been too difficult to implement and it's something that could've been expanded upon, that immediately makes buildings more useful (would serve as the makeshift quest starting/handing-in point) and would also give a reason to interact with other players as there wasn't really much of a need to I found.
That's a good way of putting it. Like, one of the most painful parts of playing through 76 to me is like, looking at all these cool factions and stories that I can never engage with because they all died like right before you left the vault. All the stuff about the free states and the responders and stuff just made me wish I was playing a different game that didn't exist.
Tim Cain - one of the original creators of Fallout (but not the only one) - has been releasing videos recently which are basically "Uncle Tim's Gamedev storytime" and they've been super illuminating as to how worlds like these are made. These guys made these worlds just through conversations and I can see them immediately poking holes in the idea of Vault 76, just because they're talking about it and exploring the idea. But they did that because it was their passion - I can't imagine similar conversations happening with the 76 team. Not only does the game fundamentally go against the vibe of the originals (which is fine, things need to change to stay fresh), but it doesn't even have internal consistency with what's happening and why. It feels like nobody talked about these ideas. Thing is, dumber players like me who don't notice these contradictions can still feel them in the game's overall presentation. That things weren't thought out. That this wasn't thought of as a real world. Just look at the terrain. How the buildings don't feel like they belong where they're put. How the animations are so shoddy that you cannot think of this world as anything but a game. I know Bethesda fixed this game and it's better, but it's riddled with the technical debt of this company's atrocious engine, and a whole litany of issues that have been in every game since Oblivion. These issues won't be fixed, they're gonna be in Starfield. You'll have animations which make everyone look like they're gliding & pivoting. Bullet-sponge enemies with insufficient reactivity to make the combat satisfying. A story which won't be core to the game's goals and will be as disposable as the rest of the writing. If I'm wrong about anything, that's good, but these are known faults that have appeared in every Bethesda game for almost 20 years.
your timing couldn't be more perfect its insane how bad i've been itching for a longform fallout 76 analysis, there's surprisingly hardly any on UA-cam and im just glad we get to hear your thoughts on it
@@wills5482 hell even videos released around years ago are hardly existent i could only find joseph anderson talk about the game and maybe a few other retrospectives that aren't worth a watch
@@Oxygen97 can’t tell what’s worse being Perceived as a sheep or being a victim of abuse. As long as there’s people like you games are only going to get worse.
I legitimately don't understand why is hunger and thirst even in 76. I mean in Fallout 4 survival difficulty it made the experience a lot more fun because you had to actually go out there and hunt for it, more often than not forcing you into danger as the food came from enemies that on this difficulty could tear you to shreds in an near instant if you're not careful especially early game. In 76 on the other hand hunger and thirst is just kinda there never being an issue because not only the game is easy AF you also can't walk 10 steps without bumping into food or water.
@@isoSw1fty or you just don't eat or drink because there's no penalty anymore to not doing so. You don't need any of the buffs this game provides through food or water.
The worst part is people dont care how baddly Betrhesda handled the game, how bad the game is or anything really. Thjey will keep buying Fallout games made this way and nothing will change because they just want a Fallout themed open world shooter. Its sad to think that such a great series is cursed to be this way just because its current audience is 100% fine with it being watered down garbage made by an unapolotegically terrible game company.
I'm going to be watching all four of your videos so I can hear all your opinions before I give my final thoughts, but I wanted to share something amusing about the over abundance issue that plagues Fallout 76. I played since launch, and my goal was always to become a pack mule healer + tank. So getting vampiric legendary gear and keeping a healthy (hyuk) supply of stims on me was essential. With the addition of the backpack, I could carry more than someone wearing power armor could fathom. By the time I quit playing, I was easily able to haul around over 400 stims without being over encumbered. Ammo and chems? No challenge in acquiring them. But getting the right legendary items you want for the build you're pursuing? In all the time I played the game, I never found a single 3 star legendary item with the stats I wanted. And ultimately, the demand for vampiric weapons and high health armor was never in high demand... so most people just threw it away as soon as they got it. That meant I could never find it on vendors. Ultimately, the main reason why I quit the game is because I got fed up with the impossible RNG grind. There are a lot of things I hate about the game, but that's what drove me to quitting. Anywho, I'll keep watching and see what my final thoughts are. But with the talk of huge supplies of ammo and chems, that's just something I wanted to say.
A couple of my friends love this game for some reason, they keep trying to say it's great now. Having played a couple hours a couple weeks back and... it really isn't. It's better than it was but even if you put it out, a dumpster fire is still gonna stink up the place.
No olive branch needed for me. I like this game for what it is and I don't sweat the bad things about it as they are not horrible. My biggest 2 gripes is that they (Bethesda) seems to forget about the previous content after rolling new stuff. Example: Remember Wastelanders? I spent time building faction with and siding with the raiders and what do we have to show for it? "Hey Seventy Six nice job out there....blah blah blah". sooo anything new to do Meg? "Hey Seventy Six nice job out there ...blah blah blah" and the other gripe is The Pitt, I am Pittsburgh born and raised but I have no idea what in the blue hell i'm looking at in 76's The Pitt at least Fallout 3 had some vaguely recognizable landmarks in the Pitt DLC. You are doing a fine job!
Oh definitely, it seems like they just couldn't get the old voice actors back. Why are we trading with some rando in Foundation when I know Paige? Why can't I pull on Meg to get the War Party to cooperate? Probably because it's cheaper to mill new voice actors instead of re-hiring and potentially increasing the pay of old ones.
33:02 Definetly the greatest shame of 76 is it's ignorance of the Great War. In making the setting all "colorful and pretty" they ingnored the HUMOUNGUS loss of life that had occurred just two decades before. Of all the moments in your reviews this is the best highlight of just how far removed 76 is from fallout, specifically it's themes and setting. "200 years later, in the burnt out, bone strewn remains of earth's greatest nation, you can wander across a similair radio signal. It's a cry of help from a family with a dying daughter, crying out for anyone to help her. If you follow the signal you'll come across the drainage pipe they crawled into, and the long dried bones of the family. The daughter likely died first, with the parents hugging eachother and their daughter as they succumbed to the fallout. " "But theres actually a wacky borderlands raider, sitting next to the bones, who's been maintaining the radio broadcast as a tourist attraction." I would expect their to be dessicated corpses littering the streets of struck cities and towns, so thick that you wouldn't be stepping on the ground. There should've been corpses in almost every tree line from the unlucky who didn't die from the initial blast, instead suffered the organ rupturing, skin tearing shockwave. In almost every nook and crany near a city should have been some soul who slowly had every cell in their body malfunction and die due to the radiation. This should have been closer to a horror game. But, I guess it's probably for the best that they didn't represent what the emediate aftermath of nuclear armegeddon would have been. Would make it harder to sell to a general audience.
Yes, even in Fallout 4, Bethesda kinda forgot about the end of the world. Sure, they literally show the bomb going off, and the glowing sea was cool, but the trees are green and the water is plentiful and things grow all over. And we're told Boston never died out entirely, there were always people living there. It's even worse in 76, and that doesn't have the excuse of being 2 centuries away. Even New Vegas, where nearly every nuke aimed at the area was intercepted, went effectively dead for decades. Like, what's the point of a post-apocalyptic setting if you aren't going to do the post-apocalypse?
The only thing slightly worse than F76 is your tendency to repeat and rephrase the same argument 3 to 5 times over, before ironically saying something like "And now we can finally move on", as if you were somehow forced to give a synopsis of the game's premise 5 times and explaining why it doesn't make sense each time. The actual information delivered in this video belongs in a 5 minute little rant otherwise. Is the joke that just like the game, you're offering only fluff and wasting people's time?
i played 76 for a long time and this is a really good breakdown and review so far and your additon of live action segments is cool love to see more of them in your next project
"76 didn't fix anything" "Wastelanders added NPCs" "Players complained there weren't NPCs" "Actually, NPCs are bad" NPC (Heather Hill) is made optional "76 is LARPing" Not to mention, an hour baited as 76 being bad, about how much better 76 is than Wastelanders. You Fallout "fans" are so very deeply full of it.
I'm not saying it's worse than people know. I am confident that even people who play this game don't know how deep the rabbit hole of bad design goes on this one
@@Patrician I'll with hold my comments on this until I watch the entire series but as someone who to this day can go on a rant about the one wasteland update ruining slow firing high damage weapons or whatever the hell is going on with the broadsider to this day, or the absolute comedy that was the laser weaponry damage not being calculated correctly. Or the magic damage bug I could go on. But yeah I'm sure I'll learn a lot even I didn't know.
The reason the bottlecaps are the currency in Appalachia is because there was a limited time promotion at the Whitespring Mall where you could turn in nuka cola bottlecaps to win prizes. A glitch occoured in the bot's systems, making this promotion last for infinity, so essentially, as long as you have nuka cola bottlecaps to turn in, you can trade with them for all kinds of goods at the Whitespring mall. That is why the nuka cola bottlecap is the currency in the region. This is a possible explanation why on the East coast, the caps became a currency. Traveling merchants and caravans travel between regions, telling people to collect nuka cola bottlecaps in exchange for their goods, and when it's time they halt back to Applachia to the Whitespring which is almost like a warehouse stocked to infinity with supplies. Maybe in 200 years people forgot why the bottlecap started and they just kept using it. But it originates from Appalachia, trading with robot vendors who thought caps were money.
This probably wouldn’t appeal to anyone but me, but I liked the idea of no humans, because what they could have done is make all NPCs robots. It keeps the “conquering a new world” angle somewhat intact, ties into the world-building of WV being a tech capitol, gives a unique angle, and keeps the players and the vault dwellers feeling “special” as the only humans around. This is technically what they did at launch, but those characters were more a function to serve as a store or a questgiver, rather than being an actual character. Tldr maybe extend the concept behind that one raider ms nanny in the game.
I get giving props to Bethesda for experimenting with the story by having no human NPCs, but that experiment was a colossal failure. I played on launch for maybe 20-40 hours and having every story be inconsequential, because every NPC is already dead, and getting “rewarded” with an audio log to listen to was painful as fuck. Every quest went exactly the same way. Quest given by automated computer or radio broadcast, combat and minor investigation, loot drop, audio log, corpse of person you went there to see. It eventually becomes comedic how many ways Bethesda had to come up with to kill all the human NPCs so there wouldn’t be any in the world. It gets so nonsensical that it becomes absurd.
Yeah, I was confused by that analysis. I feel like the gimmick will only work once or twice. You sort of need people in a post-apocalyptic setting, it's what they're based around. I had this same depressing feeling of absurdity playing Project Zomboid: seeing the world apparently fall apart, yet I am always on my own no matter what I do or where I go.
My personal favorite quest for this is the one where a nanny robot is looking for the kid she’s supposed to be watching. You go on this long and drawn out quest to find where the kid ended up, assuming the kid died, but instead he was taken to a bunker where he would be safe from the bombs. Do we ever see this bunker, interact with it in any way, or perhaps have some other payoff? Nope. Just a convoluted quest that goes nowhere with an audio log at the end and a lot drop.
Guys, they fixed the game.
Private Sessions project - ua-cam.com/video/I-SN2Uz2ODM/v-deo.html
so do I play it or not? 😭
Can you fix the fuckload of times you flashed "Subscribe to patreon?" Becuase Jesus that can get annoying fast.
I get that you need to make money but doing it like that contradicts your intention of me wanting to subscribe.
Other than that this video is really well put together, thanks for making it.
@@sponge73 no! Don't give any company your money that does pay to win, period.
@@sponge73 I started playing about 2 months ago again. I'm really enjoying it. This video is kind of dumb in that he basically starts off by immediately telling you he didn't like Fallout 4....
If he didn't like FO4, why would he possibly like 76?
i will give bethesda this, although they are putting in effort to improve in some meaningful areas, they still miss some key things. i still enjoy the game whether im playing with friends or solo because its essentially just more fallout but i do come across things every now and then that make me facepalm...
This better be 76 hours long.
look at the description it at least gonna be 50mins, but it's 1/4.
This better be 76000 hours long
16 times the hours
Haaaaah
Imagine
I frickin' LOVE the idea that the Fallout 76 experiment was "fill a vault with idiots, tell them they're all geniuses, then release them into a nuclear wasteland and see what happens."
"see what happens." Mass looting of anything not nailed down occurs not even a second after leaving the damn thing
That 100% would explain the outcome just being the whole region being overrun by a bunch of dickheads who can't help killing each other
The Dunning-Kruger Vault
@@klaus6027”john where is leg?” “It’s wasn’t nailed down.”
@GreenTea💚 the technical term is redditors
FunFact: the power armor bug has been in the game since launch and was even a issue in fallout 4
"They patched the old fallout 4 creation engine into to a new frame work" slightly paraphrased from internet historian
Fun fact: Bethesda has used the same engine for every game since es3: oblivion. Huge game breaking bugs that exist in starfield have existed since 2004, and still go unfixed.
@@willisveryniceoblivion is es4
@@chipsdubbo3783sorry for typo
@@willisverynice it's okay :*
"A key feature of a burning dumpster *is* the fire. Put that out, and its just a box full of trash again"
What a fantastic analogy
The absolute bottom line when people say 'the bugs are fixed now'. Yeah, the bugs were the only interesting part.
I'm a fan of the fallout series as a whole. And I do kinda like fallout 76. I'm also a fan of a lot of Bugthesda games.
@@13r12ad Good for you.
Great line
heh i can't understand how can people enjoy that burned out box full of trash but i guess tastes are relatives like i loved playing read dead online even knowing how empty and dissapointing it is
I think partially the reason people were so pissed about the lack of NPCs is the fact that it's been kinda. Important in fallout in the past. Even in 4, they still structure the world. It doesn't just remove that dialogue, but it removes a lot of the point to many skills. What do you need charisma for if you never interact with NPCs? A bigger number isn't gonna help you with other real people.
It tracks. People are shallow and stupid by nature so something that makes sense on deeper levels but not on the surface would be quick to be pointed out and ridiculed.
Except NPCs have been in the game much longer than they haven't been? They were added in with the wastelanders update which was towards the end of the first year..... The game has been out for almost 5 years now..... This point has been pretty irrelevant for a very long time now
@@2ELI7E I think you missed the point that in a ROLE PLAYING GAME, removing the ability to 1. roleplay via npc interaction, 2. make Charisma as a stat almost completely useless and 3, removing something that makes your map not a drab empty mess with a few roaming packs of robots and mutants; is a mistake that should have never been made, let alone *considered*. Moot point or not whoever decided on that needs fired, the fact a Fallout title pushed NPCs as DLC is a joke
@@2ELI7E He was talking about the reaction at launch.
@Jom Jim You're not wrong that they changed it to fit the game, and it's an alright change, but you could have placed those perks with anything, especially considering the randomness of them. It's a logical choice, for certain, but that doesn't mean it doesn't suck out a lot of what people expect from a Fallout game. Much of the special system becomes rather arbitrary in a case such as this, where you're hardly building an actual character but instead just filling out points so you'll be allowed to use certain abilities. They added NPCs later, for certain, but I believe that's not really something you can just fix post launch, not without completely reworking your progression at least. The fact that you can freely switch up your special points makes it even worse, as at that point, there really is no reason not to remove special stats entirely and simply allow you to make whatever build you want, so the points themselves become borderline meaningless. With how easy the game is, it's not as if limitations on what you can equip will actually matter, either, so there's no point in worrying about special stats limiting what people can equip. NPC-less RPGs have their place and can be fantastic, but it simply wasn't done properly here at all, and it being a Fallout game means expectations that they were never going to be able to overcome with anything less than a phenomenal story, which is not what 76 had.
The worst thing IMO is that the game doesnt incentivize roleplaying. I was expecting people to fill the roles of NPCs, bartering and setting up camps and talking a lot on the mic openly, like DayZ or something.
The thing is stuff like that evolves naturally. You think the creator of Gmod thought people would use the game to role-play? Heck no, people just did that by themselves.
@@RikkiSan1 Keyword "Incetivize"
@@RikkiSan1 Sure, but you can gently nudge players into those roles. Having triple quintuple legendary weapons does not incentivize anyone to roleplay being a weak survivor, for example.
The player base isnt as big for that
Lol people didn't do that in dayz naturaly it required mods for that stuff to happen
_Did you ever try to put a broken piece of glass back together? Even if the pieces fit, you can’t make it whole again the way it was. But if you’re clever, you can still use the pieces to make other useful things. Maybe even something wonderful, like a mosaic. Well, the world broke just like glass. And everyone’s trying to put it back together like it was, but it’ll never come together in the same way._
This is very deep.
Alexa, play The Fetuccini Sequence by Periphery.
Like the plate in breaking bad, the shard was the atom shop and Walter was us all putting Bethesda to sleep with a reality check 😂
Lol you just described Bethesda modding
Oh yeah. Time to bring back rule34 in mosaic.
I don’t what u talking bout I do that crud all the time
Its not Fallout 76 being an RPG that made its lack of NPCs perplexing. It's that Fallout as a series has always heavily leaned on dialogue or general Player/NPC interaction as it's main source of player expression.
I know, right? Between that and calling the NCR a "communist state" I'm wondering if this dude even likes fallout
Yeah. There's lots of different forms of RPGs, and some use dialogue more than others. But from what little I've played (and what more I've seen) of the Fallout series, it seems like this one really values dialogue--or at least, earlier entries did. Dialogue is where a lot of skill checks and character decisions happen. So I think it is valid to criticize a game in the series for skimping on that aspect. That alone does not make it less of an RPG, but I can see how it might make it (at least feel) less like a Fallout game
@@CostCoSettlementCheck guess this dude would get shocked over Caesars Legion and how they look at everything. If he thinks NCR is communists lmao 😂
@@CostCoSettlementCheck I was kinda shocked hearing that tbh, though I wanna huff the copium and say it was an offhand joke to spur the average anticom fan
Dialogue isnt making this terrible bullet sponge game good
Just so you know, a big selling point of 76 and not having NPCs was that the _players_ would take the place of the NPCs and create the world. But player interactions, from what I understand, were by and large hostile because of the bounty system (especially to new players, and I believe PvP was not opt in at launch) and there wasn't a lot of infrastructure for different jobs. So there were no NPCs to interact with, and players were largely avoiding each other...so where was the roleplaying?
Auto pvp basically begging players to kill/bully other players
@@havenprice First off, PvP is entirely optional if you set yourself to Pacifist Mode, Auto-PvP doesn't Exist.
@@SlocumJoe7740 That's why they are using past tense. When 76 first launched, you were able to damage anyone no matter if they had pvp off or on. This initial damage was extremely low, but if you were afk you could be killed by a determined player. In order for you to do full damage to the person you were attacking, they would have to attack you back, which would then initiate pvp. Since people got tired of accidently hitting a pvper or getting killed while afk, bethesda made it so that the only way you could damage someone is if pvp was initiated. And like I said earlier, in order to initiate pvp, you have to attack someone and then that person has to attack you back
As one of the people who was actually there (and doesn't just scream about the bugs I saw from a youtube video), you're wrong.
While there were some PVPers around, most interactions were cordial. Not as friendly as they are these days, but there was not only little to no reason to PVP, since it would net you a very miniscule amount of caps, while putting a bounty on you, but the 'slap' system meant that it was piss easy to literally ignore all griefing.
The complaint was actually on the OTHER side. People wanted MORE reason to PVP. Excuses to raid, that kinda thing.
@@TheDapperDragon During launch this was also my experience but I only ever played like 16 hours and havent touched 76 since
My issue with the “no NPCs” was not that RPGd have to have dialogue, it was that a huge part of every fallout game has been getting to know awesome characters through dialogue and checks of skill etc
Exactly. It wasn't just world-building or just dialogue, it was meeting what could fathomably be a real person in that type of environment. But as you mention, with skill-checks, it's also a way to build your character, form yourself into what you intend. New Vegas is such a master-class in this, which is why people hold it in such high regards, amongst just being a fun game.
It's really a mismatch of expectations. If Fallout 76 had been a completely original IP, no one would have cared about the absence of living NPCs, because they didn't come with any expectations. Existing Fallout fans DO have expectations about dialogue and character interactions. So it felt empty and lifeless in a way that ran counter to what many people liked about the franchise.
i personally believe that the premise patrician is describing, an empty world void of life. only scorched and audio logs to keep you company was actually quite good when the game first came out. as it was my first fallout i had nothing to compare it to so i just wandered the wastes doing quests and hoping to find a person. it really sold last one alive vibe and i think with a few tweaks like having people in enclave and such things would have made it perfect
I'm not going to publicly disparage "the people", but...seriously, maybe I just live in a bad neighborhood and I tend to also talk to people on the internet from bad neighborhoods, but a big part of me playing games is that I get to "interact" with people who are written with a purpose.
Case in point: I just finished The Longest Journey(It's an absolute gem from like quarter of a century ago) and it reminded me why I like video games. I saw fascinating intersections from the lives of dozens of people. I saw a world that really couldn't be told in the format of a movie or a tv show. It just had to be a game.
My point is that a game can tell a story in a way that a movie or a tv show or a radio program or a book never could.
The frustration you feel when they "screw up" is the justified anger you have at the realization that millions of people, over the course of centuries, have worked together to provide the ultimate framework for storytelling, and they seemingly don't even try to make the effort to live up to that enormous undertaking.
If I was given a job to write the story and the background lore and the dialogues and the monologues and fluff of a video game, you could bet I wouldn't sleep soundly or eat calmly until I hammered out a 10k page dump of worldbuilding.
...I'm a special case, but...just imagine if you were given the job of *writing a Fallout MMO*
Wouldn't you give a hundred percent?!
Maybe it wouldn't turn out to be the best, but at least it would stink of effort. People would say "well, it's a hit and miss, but you can tell it was made by a passionate group that really cares about the Fallout universe and wanted to craft a long lasting, enjoyable experience for Fallout fans."
Absolutely. I don't know what he's on about with this "people think RPGs need dialogue" thing. It's a straw man argument. Nobody is making the point he thinks they are, people just want and rightfully expect actual characters in their Fallout game - meaningful choices, stakes, and "life" to the world. There's a good reason that most RPGs have NPCs...
The biggest disappointment for me was just that it was a waste of a fallout game by a studio that now seems to have a lack of quality *and* quantity approach to making games.
When it was announced to be multiplayer I was just like "fuuuuuck I gotta wait 10 more years for another actual fallout game and that one still might be complete shit?"
Even Bethesda's top line of staff are having issues making ANYTHING
No joke...FO4 came out in Nov-2015. FO5 is scheduled to come out after ES6 which is scheduled for release in 2026. It took four years for FO4 to come out after ES5, so we're probably looking at a 2030 release date for FO5. FIFTEEN YEARS after FO4. We would might be playing FO5 right now if FO76 had never happened. I think if FO76 and Starfield had not impacted release dates for ES and FO, fans wouldn't be as salty.
10 years indeed. Them doing ESO and then 76 took them away from making actual worthwhile games for way too long
I thought the same thing… when I played fallout 3.
@@fudgepacker2858if you liked Skyrim I’m sure you’ll be ok
That was one of the things that really bothered me in Fallout 76, the Vault 76 would be the perfect player hub where you can meet and players can trade with each other or form groups. Or you could have used the vault as a kind of community anchor base that is expanded over the course of the story and gives players collect and kill quests. But no, Bethesta made the Vault irrelevant in the first 5 seconds of gameplay.
Bethesda making terrible railroaded openings in all the games since oblivion is likely to blame for that
I mean not really if anything at this point it would be inconvinient
@@wile123456llout 3 and oblivions openings are legendary and some of the most memorable parts of my first ever play throughs of those games.
I’m 10 yrs older now and I still remember fighting my first goblin in oblivion or watching the couple get gunned down in vault 101
It coulda been a big "build a new city around this anchor" thing but with players.
Just despawn their important shit but leave the buildings they built.
Just see how long it takes for people to build to the sky box and or reach another town
@@jacktaylor6253 that would make the awful engine crash in 2 seconds though
Despite all the vivid analogies, the fact that "stacks of legendaries are abandoned" is, in and of itself, very telling.
In and of * itself
@@idrinkmilk282 I prefer my manner
xD thanks, fixed
Something I noticed with new releases - The discourse around games has turned into "buggy games bad, stable games good". The amount of people saying Redfall is a "solid foundation" that's broken by bugs is completely insane, there's nothing fun about that game, just like Atomic Heart and Dead Island 2 which both released in stable but mind-numbingly boring states this year.
The only other metric games get widely criticized for are predatory micro-transactions, but that only seems to apply to Diablo Immortal/Star Wars Battlefront 2 level monetization.
Yes, people have no taste anymore. They'll boycott for political causes and complain about bugs, but actually talking about the mechanics is a minority opinion
@@Patrician This is more or less why I haven't bothered getting into game review content or anything since I feel like I'd be screaming into the wind because of this.
This is generally a trend I have noticed as well. As more and more broken and predatory games release, the lower people's standards become. This has resulted in a bunch of mediocre and just okay games that ARE stable and work at launch being given 9s and 10s all around. It's so sad that it has come to this.
Atomic Heart at least had interesting design. As is to be expected from slavjank
Their priority is at creating dopamine loops/hooks, not good content. If they can catch players who are whaling for this, then they win.
Diablo 4 will be normalizing Battlepass+ in-game cash shop in a 70,-+ game. People will buy all of it, we are doomed
11:00 It immediately strikes me that this could have been solved by saying that your characters are the second generation that never got to see the world but then you'd have the question of what happened to your parents. It would make sense for those who got it on in the first 5 years to have adult offspring who could be main characters and have the abysmal stats they do
Honestly they cashed in the "Cryogenically frozen" storyline too early. A vault with an indeterminant amount of residents that get woken up based on vault-tecs unknowable agenda is the perfect explanation for new players randomly joining the world
That’s what struck me too. It’s impressive how often BGS leave in major plot holes that can be remedied with the most minor of tweaks.
If you talk to the Overseer enough, she mentions that she saw your character grow up. You character IS the second generation.
@@etherdemon Ah so Wastelanders fixed it
So Esbern is only 20-25 years old? Oof.
Honestly every 76 dweller being at 1 in every special explains a LOT about why the Overseer talks about the "challenges" she had with us the whole time, before the vault opened up - and gives her one more reason to leg it right away, now that i think about it.
"Jesus Christ Bob, NO"! "You don't eat food, you COOK IT"!
I think the "no NPC" criticism was more that there was NPCs... But just that they were randomly robots in places where it would make sense for a human to be.
Well, if you actually use Reddit search function or Google's time function, which fun fact, you can actually limit your Google searches to specific dates, enter the dates before wastelanders and when the game launched. And you'll see that a lot of the criticism really does legitimately just boil down to. There's no end pcs, therefore not a good game. But yes, this is actually something I'm surprised pat didn't mention when he got there. And it's one of the major parts of this video that I personally disagree with, is that every Says the couldn't do something without an NPC. They did nothing creative with it, and they just plot down a robot that isn't NPC and doesn't act like any other robot ever.
I dunno about you, but my personal criticism of the "no NPCs" was that there were countless tales of those who survived the fallout (pun accidental) in their own bunkers (both in Fallout 4 and in 76 itself), and there are tons of sapient ghouls who have, by necessity, been around since before the bombs fell. So it felt like the real reason there were no NPCs was simply because the game and they didn't want to admit they were churning out a game that didn't have yknow... .
I'm no fallout historian I just played as a kid, but does it make sense to meet the brotherhood in West Virginia? They were a paramilitary techno-cult on the west coast in the first game and that was around 80 years after the bombs. I guess they just made them have outfits all over so they didn't have to invent any new factions?
yeah, likely to cash in on the fact that they're a recognizable faction that people like.
What happens in 76 is one of the reasons they turn into a techno-cult.
They were shoe-horned in and if ANYONE tells you otherwise, they don't know the lore.
It makes no sense. It's stupid. Story in this game is a joke to keep the whales defending it.
Pretty much. It would make more sense if the Enclave was on the east coast and West Virginia since in lore they would just be the remnants of the US Govt
@@RubijoyalI always figured the reason the Enclave and Brotherhood were east coast because of how just overloaded with bombs the center of the government was during the war
After hearing your breakdown of the premise, I think a better set up would be:
Everyone on vault 76 was told they were the best of the best, but really they're the biggest narcissists that Vault tech could find. Partly for a joke, and partly to see if they could learn to work together and become a team. Kind of a metaphor for going from a single player game where you're the protagonist and most important person, to a multiplayer game where you're one of many.
Also, have everyone be in cryo sleep and slowly be released overtime, so players that start the game at a later date have something to justify why everyone else has been there for so long. I know cryo sleep was an experiment in Fallout 4, but it could be justified as they didn't care what happens to the people in this vault because it was supposed to be a joke anyway.
I still remember on my very first playthrough, I managed to get myself stuck at one of the structures full of super mutants, I climbed to the very top and noticed a player in full power armor at the entrance who cleaned the place of the rest of the super mutants that were still roaming, asked me if I needed help, and saved me from certain death, knight in shining armor style
God, I love 76s community.
As a new player I experience this all the time; get in way over my head and just waiting to die when all of a sudden all my killers just drop dead, and some high-level player is giving me the thumbs up.
Yeah, fallout 3 did have a lot of bugs
Eh, I recall the main complaint about the lack of NPCs was that the world felt like an empty theme park and all you did was listen to tape recordings where you already knew there was no urgency actively talking place anywhere. The player was less a character involved involved with their world and more of a librarian cataloging what was already done. It had to survive on these minor snippets of story lore to seem alive and it wasn't enough to feel that invested.
Yeah those were my issues with the lack of NPCs in the game. Also for some people it just felt like a Fallout game with the NPCs missing, like an unfinished Fallout game instead of a complete game that was well designed to function without NPCs. If I remember right that was how Jeff Gerstmann felt after he had played the game for a while.
yeah that was 4 years ago, it was fixed with Wastelanders patch
He's really missing the forest for a piece of bark IMO.
@@zeroinfinitify Nah as someone who played before wastelanders as well as after the wastelanders patch made the game worse. The wastelanders patch and all the patches since ruined what the game originally had.
@@zeroinfinitify"Fixed" by sabotaging the previous content, and shoehorning in lower quality story telling
this game felt like a homeless simulator where I spent my time scrounging, scavenging, putting scraps together, and avoiding crazies.
welcome to the fallout universe; if your home is still around after the nukes drop, congrats you're not homeless. otherwise, homeless IRL simulator it is.
Sounds like something one would do in a post apocalyptic wasteland.
😂 this made me chuckle
Yeah because that's nothing like what a nuclear wasteland would be... why are people so dense?
Sounds about right
I played 76 in 2020 with my best friend to check it out. We got a quest to deal with a deathclaw that was terrorizing a settlement or something. Me and my friend were gearing up, stockpiling chems and ammo as well as placing mines around the area where we were going to fight it.
When it spawned it’s navigation bugged out and it remained frozen in place while we wailed on it, killing it with little to no effort. We both laughed so hard afterward.
What’s funny is if you typed the same comment but replaced “76” with “3,” no one would have batted an eye.
my problem isnt that the game didnt have npcs, but that the game tried so hard to be a game with npcs, without npcs. they could do a game that didnt require human interaction, but bethesda replaced human interaction with listening to their audio logs and interacting with terminals instead of listening to them talk, and interacting with them.
"I do have to appreciate that, finally, after 16 years, I am playing a Bethesda game with a 10 minute introduct-Ugh! The game crashed!" I literally almost did a spit take! XD
The first responder larpers would have made sense if they were raiders using the first responders clothing as a way to lure in victims. They should have embraced the darker elements of the Fallout lore at least that would have kind of made that work.
I was so excited for 76. Me and my two other best friends are huge fallout fans, and we’re from Appalachia ourselves. We were so excited to see our home region finally represented in a game, and a fallout game we could PLAY together? It sounded too good to be true! And it was…after we all reached level 60 we just, stopped playing.
That was myself and my friend group. A co-op Fallut game was a dream come true, and we even braced ourselves for Bethesda Bugs, because as much as we loved their games at the time, we weren't diehards who ignored the flaws and acknowledged them. What we got was a game that really felt like it needed so much work done from the ground up. After the first year round of patches and updates that slowly led towards the Wastelanders release and especially after, we felt the game was finally reaching its potential and played it more earnestly and started to have fun. We were leery still, and especially when the Atom Shop started to get more predatory, and then they revealed the subscription service that paywalled features they said would be included at launch or free at first... Eventually even with updates the game's cycle of live-service grind became too boring, and their 'battlepass' gameboards while initially fun were absolute slogs due to the increasing XP grind to unlock things. You went from unlocking maybe five levels per day to slowly only being able to do 1-2 per day, and you had to reach lvl60 to complete the board. Meanwhile Conan Exiles pass I literally can clear swaths of it in a day alone, and even alter what stuff I can do to get XP.
The main breaker aside from the bad balancing was the griefing caused by as lack of good anti-griefing measures. One too many times, I was tired of having to rebuild my base or having my stuff broken into, so I called it quits. There are dozens of other reasons, but ultimately Fallout 76 was a great idea that sadly Bethesda did not spend the proper amount of time and resources to make happen. It was just a content stop-gap while they poured resources into Starfield, but they even took resources from 76 for Starfield so it became a broken-broken mess by even what we expected of Bethesda. Now their communities trust is in the toilet and nobody really seems excited for Starfield and feel they'll be waiting too long for the next Elder Scrolls and proper Fallout game.
Meanwhile I just spent my childhood on Fallout (Fonline) 2 servers with real time combat - doing carvanas, quests, building base, looting and pvping in the wasteland, gang wars city conquering etc
One of the funniest stuff was there was 1000 people on Ashes of Phoenix
But it was just basically just a non-stop pvp arena without much goals so people dropped
The ammo problem is an overcompensation for how it used to be, where players were much more starved on ammo types, and manufacturing them in a sustainable volume required players to control a specific point in the NW corner of the map, meaning only one or a few players would have access to basic ammunition.
Nah ammo wasn't that hard to come by. That's not true.
@@SamahLama Yeah no. It was a problem enough that at launch the munitions factory had constant competition.
@@Aquedius Yeah I remember I was actually among the first ones to realize that the workshop up there gives you a good amount of ammo and I always hunkered down there because I always had ammo issues despite almost exclusively using the 10mm semi auto pistol. I don't even want to imagine how people with full auto builds felt.
And you couldn’t find a single weight in any of the gyms cuz of the farming to create ammo. I had to stash away guns using all kinds of ammo in the game and put them in a circulation
sometimes i believe that those big studios like bethesda, R* and so on, fired most of their staff to a point where they have the capabilities of an indie studio
that at least would explain the quality of todays games
Between hiring for diversity quotas and firing for lack of wokeness all major creative industries are dying.
The people who made the old games don't work there anymore and have been replaced with woketards
Quality is low because profit is the only thing that matters. Passion, care and finishing a game properly is not as important. In fact microtransactions, battle passes and so on always without fail make a game worse. Because without them, the devs have to make a game be actually good since only the sales matter for profits. But when they are in the game can get rushed out more to recoup some of the losses.
@@wile123456 Yep after it launches they recoup the loses off of idiots that wast their money on monitization stuff. Who decided to keep on playing the game even though it was not made well. I believe content creators actually make things worse instead of better because they actively buy allot of stuff from these games.
@@michaelmichaelagnew8503 yep and they also do free advertising unless they trash the game and help ruin it's reputation
Perfect timing. The day I finish up university for good and I have patrician to help me over the finish line.
congrats ! I still have at least 1 year left and even that gonna be a struggle, not sure Ill make it lok
@Stan Manlyman I got a year left too. Listen, if you made it this far, you can go all the way. It may not mean much, but I got faith in you.
Congrats on getting out, i have a few more years in front of me
Thank you friend. I'll do my best :)
Congrats, I graduated with you. Good job
Your entire segment about how wastelanders ruins the original main story is something ive been saying for years, im so glad someone else sees it this way
What story? I was there. The "story" was that everyone died.
Honestly, what made me drop the game quickly was the lack of support for human to human interaction. All fine if you have a microphone. But there was no support for simple old chatting. Which is sort of important in an MP game where there will be people unconformable, incapable, or simply unwilling to use voice chat. It just felt wrong.
It was pretty bad even for console players, PC was even worse. It's like they just ported the game over to pc without making any basic changes to make use of it being on pc. If I remember correctly there wasn't even local chat.
@@michaelmichaelagnew8503 No chat at all except for voice chat when I started. And that is why I never got into the game. One little thing. That is likely that one game I should have asked for a refund for...
text chat is the only chat. i will not suffer another squeaker.
I think its hilarious how you can easily change the "why does the vault have to be designed to fail" just by having it so there is now more room in the Vault to keep housing so many people and each new playing leaving is just more people who signed up to venture out.
@@deanjustdean7818 truth. There is lots of stuff Bethesda will never touch simply because Obsidian came up with it first (the entire west coast for example)
@@kotzpennerI’m pretty sure there is a couple vaults in fallout 4 being used by raiders.
@kotzpenner Fallout 4 took plenty from New Vegas weapon customization, companions who reacted to your choices, a 4 way faction conflict that at least tried to not be Black and White.
Beyond that it had a character who grew up in the NCR, Vault 114 was a gang hideout and Vault 81 was still inhabited. Vault 81 in particular stands out because it was meant to test diseases but the original Overseer sabotaged the project. This means Vault 81 was a not control Vault designed to last so the Vault has to trade with people outside because the Vault naturally degrades over time. You can see people constantly preforming maintenance on part of the Vault.
I think Bethesda has weaker writing and overall prioritizes fun and silly over deep and grounded but I don't think we shouldn't acknowledge where they tried to improve and better as a studio. They did try to take inspiration from New Vegas and even if not as good I still feel it was a step in the right direction.
@@kotzpenner im so sorry.
I actually like the idea that Vault 76 was actually an experiment to see if they took all of the most useless people and convinced them all they were actually chosen because they were the best and brightest to test the power of positive affirmation and false confidence in the wake of a nuclear apocalypse. That theory makes sense given that when you start you start off with a 1 in every stat and in no other fallout game was that the case.
The Dunning Kruger Vault
That writing is too clever for Bethesda writing team who themselves has 1 in their speech skill
@@wile123456 xD they got so creative that they decided to take a realistic approach
I think that one of the most obvious changes that you will find is that they had something difficult and then made it easier, ammo used to be an issue so then they just made it where everything you kill drops more ammo than you typically use to kill it, water and food used to actually kill you if they got too low and now they just act as things you can fill to get buffs, etc.
lack of water and food didn't kill you but it did lower your max health and max ap. So eating and drinking allowed for you to have full bars when well fed and well hydrated.
@@MrSirMang I remember it killing me, either that or it lowered your max health to just being a one-shot, but I feel like I remember it slowly damaging you until you would die.
TBH they went too far the other way on the difficulty curve. Launch had a loop where you would need to get supplies every once and awhile but weren't spending more time doing supplies than actually doing...Stuff. Then they changed ammo crafting, enemy scaling and went *way* too far the other way. I'd spend two hours getting the ammo needed for 20 minutes of gameplay because every enemy would take 40+ rounds of anything to kill due to them having armor values so high that even reducing it by 85% meant you still only had 10 damage per shot left at the end instead of the 50+ base damage. I remember a few scorch queen fights where we had 20 people and when the event ended the queen had only lost 10% of their health because we were probably doing 1 damage per shot from anything due to her ridiculous armor values.
That and a few other issues was what made me finally quit and never go back.
@@jimbot70 It is the complete opposite of that now, there are plenty of people who can solo the nuke boss events, me being one of them, and that's also without the broken legacy weapons now too.
@@itsmehere1 Yeah it seems like they've swang back towards easy too far now.
The funny thing is that Beth ended up with a catch-22 regarding NPCs in 76. One of the major fundamental draws of Fallout was always the NPCs and seeing how humans have fared in the post-apocalypse world, and dealing with the emergent stuff, the collective main character was survivor humanity itself - so 76 removing human NPC and making it so that everyone was dead or feral-ghoul-mode was a deal-breaker to me from the start, it felt like 76 is just walking around the empty party venue the morning after and seeing only the shape in which the party left it. But Wastelanders trying to fix that only ended up breaking the original setup - it removed whatever appeal of the "everyone is gone" story you mention was present, it did so in a clumsy hamfisted way, and its new introductions pale in comparison to the original factions that are now dead.
Worst part about it, though, is the reason human NPCs were cut from 76 was not narrative-driven, but rather the executive delusion of "the human NPCs will be replaced by other players of the game"; they were clearly envisioning some sort of Fallout: EVE Online on steroids and thought human NPCs would detract from that. Where, in reality, they only ended up turning the world into a still-life devoid of potential.
The idea of players filling the role of NPCs _could_ have worked if more players could actually be in the world, but public servers can only accommodate 24 people at once, so the map feels incredibly empty. The only time you ever see other players is if you're at that bar near the starting area, or if there happens to be a public event going on. I genuinely would have _loved_ a Fallout MMO, but they should have built it in a different engine.
I don't know why the hell they didn't just use the Elder Scrolls Online engine, you can switch between first and third person in that game so it would work just fine for Fallout. But if they did that, they probably wouldn't have been able to reuse assets and it would take actual work. In FO76's code, the Scorchbeasts are called dragons, because they literally copy and pasted the code from Skyrim. That's why they reuse some of the same animations the dragons have.
Bethesda has been in a catch 22 since they bought the rights to fallout but remained incapable of making a good game.
If I remember correctly early in the lifecycle of the game, ammo was far more scarce and it just lead to players relying primarily on melee weapons in order to conserve ammo.
That's seems good for immersion.
yes but melee weapons were (might still be) OP
@@colin591 They can be fun to use at times, but in no way OP. During Events you almost never find people using Melee.
@@nobalkain624 a few years back melee used to be much more powerful. idk if they nerfed it or if other builds simply surpassed it.
during the scorchbeast queen fight, melee users would do the most damage whenever she landed. basically, all the gun users were only there to get her on the ground.
i learned melee was so powerful in the BETA when i ran out of ammo in a PvP scrap and pulled out my fire axe to use in VATS, which killed in one to two hits.
since then my first and longest build was power armor VATS sledgehammer/super sledge, eventually going bloodied after a lucky drop. almost everything went down in one or a couple hits and you could clear the distance with the Blitz perk if i remember correctly.
this was on ps4, i'm on pc now, and i think revisiting that character on occasion it isn't as powerful anymore, so things definitely have changed. sorry this is long i just wanted to say lol.
@@nobalkain624 Chainsaw meta says what
Also, this game has a positive score on Steam now? Oh fuck me, there really is no hope for Bethesda games anymore. I can't wait until they do the bare minimum for Starfield next year and a bunch of redditors exclaim "See? They fixed it now!"
My biggest problem with 76 is that it doesn't feel like fallout, there isnt any wasteland, just a regular world with some mutants thrown in.
That's how I feel about every bethesda fallout.
3 of the 6 zones are literal wastelands, the map is the best one in the franchise.
@@mojic9421that makes it the worst map only half the map is a wasteland unlike every other fallout where the whole maps a wasteland
A Bethesda game without mods to fix the gameplay was always a no go for me, glad to see that I didn't miss anything.
I wonder how long before a unofficial patch after elder scrolls 6 release lmao
@@Beleth420 It has an online component that, unless modders can reverse-engineer, makes it impossible for the game to run as a standalone piece of software and I very much doubt microsoft intends to release code to make their online-only products run without big brothers looking at you at all times.
@@endlessstrata6988 Does that preclude modding the game? Cause plenty of modern games, even single-player, require an internet connection and you can still mod those. Quite a few games with multiplayer components just don't allow you to engage with the multiplayer aspect if altered files are detected.
I tried it on game pass, made it about 1hr and 30 mins into the game then dropped it. I found it incredibly boring and tedious. This was after many updates and the DLC coming out. This is also coming from someone who's played through Fallout 3 and NV multiple times, beaten Fallout 4, and put 1000+hrs into Skyrim. I found it to be basically just a worse version of Fallout 4 (which was mid at best in the first place), that was heavily compromised in order to make it a multiplayer live-service and support continuous monetization.
Basically, if you like Fallout 4 gameplay for its own sake you can like Fallout 76. The core gameplay loop is essentially the same, the only difference is now there is some MMO grinding involved (five different receiver types for each gun you need to scrap to learn, enemies 50 levels above you that take no damage from shots, etc.)
I thought it was pretty fun, but it's far from a masterpiece. The new story segments are awkwardly shoehorned in and the way they're reintroduced durability is infuriating to me.
I can't handle the Rick and Morty stream moments, it's like cringe injected right into my veins
This better mention the light wood laminate.
I want five eighteenths of the the white power armor paint
Wow, I really should've thought about my previous comment might look like before I typed it, lmao
@@dmdeign7116 i laughed very hard at it, your comment's great
@@dmdeign7116 lmaooooo, I didn't think of your comment like that. Beautiful.
Even without the Vintage Water Coolers, it was easy enough to amass purified waters from the regular water purifiers. I was constantly offloading my own waters to hit the daily cap limit.
I really like the idea of alternatively having Vault 76 be a Player Hub, functioning similar to Shady Sands.
Supporting and protecting a growing city of fellow Vault Dwellers makes for a much more compelling story goal than "look for the overseer."
Like wtf am i, a lost puppy? Maybe Vault 76 really was "the Dunning Kruger Vault"
Interesting watch to learn more about the game beyond all the memes about it being broken.
fancy seeing you here
@@willferrous8677 real recognize real!
Except this person is stating a lit of false statements about this game so you are not learning anything here. Characters are not locked into private worlds if the player plays in a private world with them. This guy should spend some time actually learning about games he wants to attack for clicks.
@@danielbrown8812 I haven't finished the video yet but you should post a paragraph about whatever is incorrect then so he would be informed instead.
@@danielbrown8812 Pretty sure he's meaning that, if you create a character on or move a character to a private world, you cannot then take that character back to public worlds: they are effectively locked to private worlds only. Not that they are locked to a single private world itself.
I started playing about a year ago and my favorite thing about it was how nice the community was. I didn't have any friends who'd play with me so I'd just run around solo. I'd be chilling and a random level 500+ person would run by and they'd just give me things to help a newbie out. I haven't experienced such a nice online community before.
This is one thing I miss from my heavy MMO days - community. There was always a feeling of don't start no **** there'll be no **** and everyone was willing to help.
f76 has "mature" community, after palying a while you will see same ppl some times, i also drop often items to new players if i have any items i don't need atm (usualy after harder events :) ). OFC there are jerks that try to spoil fun for the others but thats marginal and simple "block" specific player mean that you probably will not see him/her ever again.
That's probably because only dedicated, uber fans who actually enjoy the game play it.
You should try out this obscure multiplayer co op game called “ dark souls “
@@xaikken or no?
I love that you called out the lazy no man’s sky comparison at the beggining.
I get that gaming conversation isnt great at nuance, but those two situations are so different it’s wild people say use that comp
Bethesda storytelling be like:
"you are the chosen one. General of armies, high lord of orders, master of covens, arch wizard of all magic... now go deliver this cheese steak and sausage to an old lady in that swamp. You may not refuse."
the worst part is that the power armor skeleton bug was also present in fo4. bethesda never bothered to fix it, so modders dit.
then in 76 instead of patching KNOW AND EXTREMELY DOCUMENTED issues of the game and engine they were using as a template, they just copy/pasted it and called it a day.
The commentary and expectations of Starfield really aged well lol
I looked for this comment lol
Like wine
Like the finest of wines
Honestly, it would make sense if the Vault 76 residents were TOLD they were the smartest. Tell the people they're amazing and see how they develop with their ego being constantly boosted
Im so happy Patrician and PRIVATE SESSIONS are finally getting married.
i'm so happy for them
Good for them
I still wonder if it's a joke or not.
I mean they look so cute toghether.
@@asgoritolinasgoritolino7708 why would anyone joke about this.
@Igor Oleynikov I literally just found these content creators today. I haven't seem much of their content, so I cannot tell if they are platonic friends or 2 people in love with each other. However, being oddly specific about the church location makes me think they are genuinely getting married. But it also seemed like dry humor.
The comment 'private sessions is my husband', 'we're getting married', etc I *think* it's sarcasm but I can't be 100% sure because of your staggeringly perfect deadpan narration
So on the somewhat minimal chance this is some post/meta-irony ploy, congrats
yeah I wanted to write something similiar
it's like "communist NCR". Knowing because of it's past videos he does not make such mistakes. He puts something like that in the video to troll and make people engage with it. That's why I didn't write anything because he's playing with us.
Anyways. getting married or not. I'm happy for them they found each other. Friendship or couple - doesnt matter.
Yeah it's hard to tell if it's sarcasm or not due to how cute they seem toghether.
To solve the vault date issue, they could have made it so there is a sort of cast system or factions within the vault itself. One may be the group that stays to oversee the vault, the other could be forced out on their own reclamation day such as when they turn a certain age. This way they vault stays open but also keeps spitting out people. And that’s just off the top of my head. Bethesda had years to think this over…
My favorite part of 76 is that we got 16x the detail
One of my largest issues with FO76 is the Lack of Conflict. You have the Raiders and Scavengers with Zero Conflict. Same with the Brotherhood and the Enclave. There is Zero Conflict amongst the factions and they do m t care if you are budy budy with the aposing faction. And yes to much ope. Space with little encounters to keep the flow of any questing or exploration going strong. Which is why people would rather fast travel than walk in a barn wasteland to their next objective.
yeah as a big enclave fan i'm pretty disappointed. the enclave sort of got weaseled out as a "shadow" so most wastelanders don't know about them, but groups like the settlers and raiders, especially the BOS, should have conflict. instead, they have missions that last a fraction of an hour.
Even in 3 I would come across random encounters where super mutants and raiders fought, or slavers would get attacked by a yao-guai.
NV same deal with legionaries fighting with NCR sometimes or having some of the main faction NPCs dealing with fiends or wasteland creatures.
Maybe they wanted to really capitalize on that isolationist feel, but 76 is just empty. Instead of the culturally rich and folklore heavy regjon of Appalachia, it just feels like you're wandering the wash in your backyard.
It's why I really appreciate the cryptids. They are a new threat to face that adds something to the world while also making the game's setting relevant
A multiplayer fallout game was, from inception, a terrible idea so you could have predicted it and I'd have believed you.
What makes fallout fun and what makes multiplayer fun are very different.
8:55 Odd, I don't I've ever heard anyone else describe the New California Republic as "communist". I don't recall anything ever appearing in Fallout 2 or New Vegas (which are the two games that feature the NCR the most) that would make me think about the NCR as Communist or even Communist-adjecent. I think the intended goal was to depict the NCR as an attempt to create a federal republic in the same vein as the USA that came before it, while also presenting elements that show that this attempt is often deeply flawed, but not hopeless. Those flaws are primarily depicted as it often being corrupt and militaristic (or even Imperialistic) in its handling of bordering territory, as well as an unregulated economy giving certain players too much power.
One could even make the argument that the creation of a republic like the NCR represent the re-appearance of capitalism in the wasteland, and a move away from the communal ways of life found in more tribal or underdeveloped territories. There's an actual economy, people work for money, there's a semi functional currency and (semi-)free market to support this, there's a constitution, there's representation through direct election of representatives, etc.
My interpretation of the NCR has always been that the original developers tried to depict a more "flawed" version of the USA as a federal republic. As I mentioned before, many of the depicted flaws are corruption, imperialist sentiment and monopolies leading to unelected people wielding too much power. All those major flaws clearly have direct links to challenges faced by the United States throughout its history and that still remain issues to this very day.
I *genuinely* don't think any of the writers intended it to be interpreted as being akin to a Communist state. Perhaps the canon created by Bethesda implies this? I'm not that familiar with the background story in Fallout 3 or 4 (since I don't really like those games), but the NCR doesn't appear in much detail in those two games.
It's an inside joke shitpost.
@@Magnanimoose It's a joke? Ok I guess that's 30 minutes of writing a dumb post that I'm not getting back I guess 😅
It was sarcasm.
People tend to portray the NCR as kinda communist or the most commie faction, and pat just finds that funny because they actually aren't, kinda? So yeah, it's basically an inside joke.
@@asgoritolinasgoritolino7708 Thanks for the clarification, I'm immune to internet sarcasm.
I wonder which faction has more potential to revive America, The Minutemen, or NCR?
As someone who has clocked over 300+ hours in 76 It's hard for me to re contextualize how newer players would handle the main plot being side tracked from the wastelanders inclusion. I still love the game despite the issues for various reasons but I can certainly acknowledge it's massive retcon issues being tough to ignore.
Always nice to see videos on 76 whether good or bad just to see people's personal thoughts and reasons why or why not they enjoyed something.
That's what is frustrating. I've said before that I wish I got to play this game the week before Wastelanders came out.
Yeah, I played 76 on launch and enjoyed my time and the story was simple to follow. Came back years later to all these updates and it's just a clusterfuck, IMO, so I pretty quickly dropped it.
@@Patrician it was shit
I played this game on launch. I’m going to have a dissenting opinion here… it was extremely boring. The narrative choice for audio logs was not well thought out, as the idea is you would be playing with friends. Try to follow a story with tons of ambient noise and people talking in your ear. And once the “story” was run down that was it, very little any else. Not saying wastelanders was a good idea, not by a long shot, but the game has never felt like more than a scavenge, kill, loot, craft, repeat loop.
@@MrSkeltal268 this was my expierence, digital narcolepsy
The difficulty and ammo economy seems to have changed radically - being overcompensated a lot!
Previously you'd get passable damage only if you specced fully into one specific style OR if you went Legendary hunting OR just went full co-op to overpower enemies
There were also guides on where to find the specific scrap type needed for ammo
Guess the complaints got to bethesda and they just said "Fine then, take it all!" instead of trying to carefully balance
If they had left the vault open as a hub to build from, it would have been a lot like the colonization of Pern in Anne McCaffrey’s books
Anne McCaffrey? That's a name i didn't hear in a while.
I had a girlfriend in the 80's whom read those Dragonrider books. I completely forgot.
Or Vault City in Fo2
Thanks for debunking the "it got good nowadays" myth
Someone needs to do this for cyberpunk
Hardly a debunk. It's just an opinion. There are long-time Fallout fans who think 76 is now better than FO4. It's impossible to please everyone.
@@TravJam317yeah. The people who enjoy the game like me know it has indeed gotten better, because we've literally been there the entire way. Objectively yes, it has gotten better, the things that have changed just aren't enough for the general population I guess. One of those "you needed to be there" things.
@@TravJam317 not really, it's an objective fact the game has issues like bugs and flawed game design and that wastelanders does not merge well with the original intent of the game
@@TravJam317 "Better than FO4" isn't a good bar to set.
33:04 is the reason I loved Fallout 76 at launch. Like exploring a museum, I really enjoyed that. I haven’t played in a couple of years despite being excited about wastelanders. I honestly think that artistically they should have stuck with the original plan, but their decisions have kept the game alive, even if it is full length wild wasteland.
Kinda like how Ed gein kept his victims alive
"A disasterous launch"
And preorder. And beta. And post launch. And bug fixing. And merch store. And roadmap. And dlc. And literally anything related to this game.
I have never seen a game so cursed.
Yeah man, I couldn't afford it at the time and my friend preordered it. We were in high school and only made minimum wage working at a restaurant, so buying new games was expensive. I remember asking him how it was on launch and him saying "it destroyed his faith in the series". I've always been a fallout fan (mostly because of the fan community and modding) but he never had the same passion for the games again. I think it's telling just how garbage this game was on launch if it literally made fans quit the series.
man that description of the initial premise of 76 sounds kind of cool, waking up after the apocalypse, being the only real human alive, hunting the trail of the *recent* survivors in the area. A pity all the random npcs hanging out erase that vibe.
That’s funny, because when the game came out, the world was empty. Without all the extra npcs. Then people complained so they added them in
@@quintonbrady3238 And the people who were complaining about that were wrong and the game was hurt by their addition
@@quintonbrady3238 I suppose that's a valid point, but I guess it's tragic that all these once empty places that used environmental story telling now have a npc five feet away to tell the story like its a tourist attraction.
@@privatepessleneck It becomes even more ridiculous, when you find npc in hostile locations, like there is a guy living in fort defiance literally one room away from a pack of feral ghouls (yeah, he has a sob story about his sister who died there, but still, man, at least move to the safe 4th floor). I mean it's clearly a gameplay thing, because you supposed to clean the area during mainquest, and game behaves like enemies are not respawning, but still it peaks immersion breaking
there's a fallout 4 mod that remakes 76 and they go wholly into the liminal, freaky, "where the fuck is everyone?" side of appalachia
I'm really fond of the segment that tears down the premise and opening of the game, so much that it'd put it on a similar tier to your discussion of the Oblivion opening, and the simple question in that of "Why is Emperor escaping out of the city" and why the method was so inefficient.
My suggestion for 76 would be to make residents prospective *children*. It's not perfect, and I think there's probably already a vault of children, but it makes for a better fit for the expected audience, who would be most prone to make insane (relatively) young adults.
That’s funny, I wasn’t a fan of the opening because it made it sound like Bethesda has been capable of making a good experience in the last 20 years at all
I found a 3 star shotgun with recover health on hit, explosive bullets, and double shot. I became immortal and immediately put down the game because all tension was lost. Interestingly I did find an obscenely rare (as in the wiki didn't even have a log on it at the time) fully modded "enclave' plasma rifle variant and had the brotherhood spec ops gear drop for me so. Pretty much did everything I wanted to do with the game.
How many hours did that end up being?
That's my biggest concern. I eventually figured out that I don't need to try anymore by capturing a power plant, farm fusion cores, then go nuts with power armor and a gatling laser with a heavy weapons + power armor perks build. I can easily kill three-star cryptids that way. I also have 100 stimpacks. The game just gets super boring once you powercreep, just like in Fallout 4. There is also no scaling for weapons above lvl 50. Really, I can't justify spending time in this game unless you're with a friend chatting on Discord.
u cant have a gun with both double shot and health restoration effects the same time
it isn'tpossible and never was, even on extremely buggy lunch
@@Lucky38GamingHub Maybe dinner then?
@Kwisatz Haderach it may not be double shot (maybe crit chance on hit or something? I remember infinite crits) but since it was a shotgun it had crazy spread anyway and still resulted in infinite health pretty much. If you're on Xbox I'll re-download it and give you the spec ops gear, enclave plasma, and the shotgun lol
Hold up 8:55, I'll need you to explain that one. How is the NCR communistic at all, imperialist and expansionist sure but considering the presence of competing companies and private ownership of the means of production calling them communist makes about as much sense as calling the US today communist.
paused and scrolled down to see if anybody else caught that lol
Yeah I have no idea where he is getting that idea from.
Since nobody replied in months to tell you, it's a JOKE that taxes = communism. Come on.
there are these mythical concepts called sarcasm and deadpan humor you may not have heard of it before but i'd recommend looking them up
@@ravensflockmateDude, that was not Audible sarcasm, that was a calmly stated falsehood that assumes everyone is into Fallout lore to catch on it's an absurd statement and therefore a "joke". He needs to modulate his voice more to convey jokes in an otherwise factual video.
The 'mostly positive' steam rating is insane to me. The game is atrocious.
I just checked, and there's about 44,000 more positive reviews than negative on Steam. It's absolutely unbelievable.
Gunner is a better defender than Engineer. Shield is obvious, but his weapons are better when everyone has to stay together as well. Engineer's PGL WILL hit teammates if the bugs get close, and Fatboy can destroy the run.
Gunner can protect the team and keep the bugs at bay. Engineer can create cover, but Driller can just create a bunkie if the Uplink is in a bad spot. Scout 🤢.
My preference; Gunner>Driller>Engineer>Scout.
Subliminal request for Deep Rock Galactic video
@PatricianTV well this is embarrassing. I typed that up on a different video while yours was queued up and it played. Oopsy
Its pretty contrived, in my opinion, to say that the lack of NPCs in Fallout 76 was an "experiment".
Its far more likely that the higher ups at Zenimax wanted a new Live Service Game with a Fallout coat of paint released pronto, and so NPCs and their resultant needs for dialogue and scripting (both of which require mountains of man-hours to write, program, and test) were the very first thing scrapped in order to shove the game out the door. I mean, its a whole asset class that the development team just suddenly doesn't need to worry about.
Seriously though, whats more likely? That a creative at Bethesda had an idea for a story, or an empty suit thought to himself, "You know what takes a lot of unnecessary time and effort in a typical BethSoft game? NPCs!" and told the developers to scrap NPCs whilst dreaming about all the money and development time the company will save?
Put more simply, what's more likely, that someone on the development team had an idea for a story that wasn't in the studio's wheelhouse, or that Bethesda did what Bethesda does: cut corners?
The lack of NPCs IS a problem.
Here's why.
The vault has JUST ejected ALL of its inhabitants. NONE of them are wandering around? NONE of them are curious why this place is empty aside from a ton of monsters? NONE of them are trying to figure out how to fix this mess?
I know, the Vault is just an excuse to spawn Players, a very poor one since they established everyone was being kicked out at the same time and if they don't leave they DIE.
Regardless, you still need NPCs to fill the roles of mission givers and busy bodies. If all there is, is players, then nothing will ever get done. Players don't want to sit around in one place all day, online at ALL times just waiting for someone to come and sell a bunch of scrap to them. You can explain why this supposedly abandoned town is populated, BY GIVING EVERYONE A VAULT 76 SUIT! THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT OF THE VAULT KICKING EVERYONE OUT! TO POPULATE THE AREA! It's really that easy, you can have the mystery of where everyone went, you just need to account for the people you've introduced.
Aside from that, stats like Charisma are fucking useless if there aren't people around!
Dawg i cannot wait for more patrician-tier content from pat hehe
Oh man, I was hoping for this. I'd love to see a longform video series for Fallout like you did for TES; especially for New Vegas and 4.
NV is not as good as you think and F4 is worse than you think?
@Whoeveritwas It's not about negetivity. I enjoy longform analysis content; its satisfying to listen to and prehaps gain a new perspective or some insight on a topic I hadn't previously known or considered, and imo he does it better than anyone else - at the very least, anyone else I've heard.
I also work a fairly monotonous job with a lot of downtime, so his videos are great to listen to in the background. I think I've listened to each of his TES videos in full about three times in the last few months. Its hard to find similar content of the same quality and in-depth explanation.
I love TES, and I also love Fallout. Iirc he stated in his Skyrim video he wasn't sure what to do after - Fallout seems to be a logical continuation.
@Gold Luminance If you don't know him yet, you should check out Mauler. He has made many detailed analyses of video games and movies. Mauler and Patritian are my top two long form analysis creators.
@@austinkious3940 I used to like MauLer, but I find his content insufferable now. I tried listening to a recent episode in his TFA review and I about fell asleep. Not sure if it's his delivery or what.
@@DartNoobo I know I'm arguing against no one since you're just guessing titles, but I'd be surprised if any NV fan doesn't think about it's flaws. Not as good as you think is very bold.
The major problem in my opinion is that it's immediately established as 100% fact that there are no humans (npcs) in the world rather than that being the case but we're unsure for a while until we start uncovering things, this, for me, ruined the experience of the game, not because of the lack of NPCs but because of the lack of anything to emotionally engage with, I vaguely remember a quest where there's someone on a tape sobbing saying they've lost someone and then you go and find them and surprise surprise they're dead, coz everyones dead, we established that earlier, and I figured that out in the first 5 seconds of the quest so there was 0 emotional weight, why would I care about the disconnected voice of someone I've never met and will never meet and I already know is dead, Fallout 76 is like if someone sat there and took notes of a group of people having a DnD adventure and then you read those notes but didn't actually get to engage in the story, and the notes are poorly written, and you already know how the campaign ended.
The players were supposed to bring life to the world with their buildings. Quests and info where there so the character had leads to find stuff.
@@Xarr23 If that was the case then the building mechanic wouldn't be somehow worse than Fallout 4, it also felt heavily disconnected from the game and largely pointless to the character as well as the benefits from building weren't that essential a lot of the time, also there was no real attachment to building, it's not like Rust or other similar games where you live in the building and it's an essential part of the game and you spend a good amount of time upgrading it and the building persists even when you log out. Everything I thought Fallout 76 could be it failed at by either not committing heavily enough to ideas, creating this bland soup, mid-for-everyone-great-for-no-one experience, or just completely missing the point behind things they added. One of the first ideas I had when I heard about a multiplayer Fallout coming out with no NPCs was playermade quests, how they would've handled it I'm not 100% sure but I don't think it would've been too difficult to implement and it's something that could've been expanded upon, that immediately makes buildings more useful (would serve as the makeshift quest starting/handing-in point) and would also give a reason to interact with other players as there wasn't really much of a need to I found.
That's a good way of putting it. Like, one of the most painful parts of playing through 76 to me is like, looking at all these cool factions and stories that I can never engage with because they all died like right before you left the vault. All the stuff about the free states and the responders and stuff just made me wish I was playing a different game that didn't exist.
So if you're getting married, does that make you Patrician Sessions or will Private Sessions become PrivateTV?
They'll hyphenate. Patrician TV-Sessions.
I find the private sessions friendship so cute. It's heartwarming to see shitting on Oblivion bring people together
Tim Cain - one of the original creators of Fallout (but not the only one) - has been releasing videos recently which are basically "Uncle Tim's Gamedev storytime" and they've been super illuminating as to how worlds like these are made. These guys made these worlds just through conversations and I can see them immediately poking holes in the idea of Vault 76, just because they're talking about it and exploring the idea. But they did that because it was their passion - I can't imagine similar conversations happening with the 76 team. Not only does the game fundamentally go against the vibe of the originals (which is fine, things need to change to stay fresh), but it doesn't even have internal consistency with what's happening and why. It feels like nobody talked about these ideas.
Thing is, dumber players like me who don't notice these contradictions can still feel them in the game's overall presentation. That things weren't thought out. That this wasn't thought of as a real world. Just look at the terrain. How the buildings don't feel like they belong where they're put. How the animations are so shoddy that you cannot think of this world as anything but a game.
I know Bethesda fixed this game and it's better, but it's riddled with the technical debt of this company's atrocious engine, and a whole litany of issues that have been in every game since Oblivion. These issues won't be fixed, they're gonna be in Starfield. You'll have animations which make everyone look like they're gliding & pivoting. Bullet-sponge enemies with insufficient reactivity to make the combat satisfying. A story which won't be core to the game's goals and will be as disposable as the rest of the writing. If I'm wrong about anything, that's good, but these are known faults that have appeared in every Bethesda game for almost 20 years.
yeah now games are made by people with degrees who study all this theory. and its lead to far worse games over all tbh
Yeah you've pretty much summed up my feelings about bethesda, fallout, elder scrolls, and starfield.
your timing couldn't be more perfect its insane how bad i've been itching for a longform fallout 76 analysis, there's surprisingly hardly any on UA-cam and im just glad we get to hear your thoughts on it
People really don't give a shit about this game anymore, only shills and tryhards are playing at this point
@@wills5482 hell even videos released around years ago are hardly existent i could only find joseph anderson talk about the game and maybe a few other retrospectives that aren't worth a watch
@@wills5482Or people that picked it up recently and are actually enjoying it? Don't be a sheep.
@@Oxygen97 can’t tell what’s worse being Perceived as a sheep or being a victim of abuse. As long as there’s people like you games are only going to get worse.
I legitimately don't understand why is hunger and thirst even in 76. I mean in Fallout 4 survival difficulty it made the experience a lot more fun because you had to actually go out there and hunt for it, more often than not forcing you into danger as the food came from enemies that on this difficulty could tear you to shreds in an near instant if you're not careful especially early game. In 76 on the other hand hunger and thirst is just kinda there never being an issue because not only the game is easy AF you also can't walk 10 steps without bumping into food or water.
Early on you would die if you did not eat and drink.
So you buy the perfect bubblegum with irl money to rid it of its annoyance of actually getting the food and water each session imo
@@isoSw1fty or you just don't eat or drink because there's no penalty anymore to not doing so. You don't need any of the buffs this game provides through food or water.
Playing it with a friend definitely boosted your opinion of the game. I played this by myself for about 5 hours before I got incredibly bored
You're right, the sheet metal hammering piece is distinct when literally nothing else overlaps it.
The worst part is people dont care how baddly Betrhesda handled the game, how bad the game is or anything really. Thjey will keep buying Fallout games made this way and nothing will change because they just want a Fallout themed open world shooter. Its sad to think that such a great series is cursed to be this way just because its current audience is 100% fine with it being watered down garbage made by an unapolotegically terrible game company.
I'm going to be watching all four of your videos so I can hear all your opinions before I give my final thoughts, but I wanted to share something amusing about the over abundance issue that plagues Fallout 76.
I played since launch, and my goal was always to become a pack mule healer + tank. So getting vampiric legendary gear and keeping a healthy (hyuk) supply of stims on me was essential. With the addition of the backpack, I could carry more than someone wearing power armor could fathom.
By the time I quit playing, I was easily able to haul around over 400 stims without being over encumbered. Ammo and chems? No challenge in acquiring them.
But getting the right legendary items you want for the build you're pursuing? In all the time I played the game, I never found a single 3 star legendary item with the stats I wanted. And ultimately, the demand for vampiric weapons and high health armor was never in high demand... so most people just threw it away as soon as they got it. That meant I could never find it on vendors.
Ultimately, the main reason why I quit the game is because I got fed up with the impossible RNG grind. There are a lot of things I hate about the game, but that's what drove me to quitting.
Anywho, I'll keep watching and see what my final thoughts are. But with the talk of huge supplies of ammo and chems, that's just something I wanted to say.
A couple of my friends love this game for some reason, they keep trying to say it's great now. Having played a couple hours a couple weeks back and... it really isn't. It's better than it was but even if you put it out, a dumpster fire is still gonna stink up the place.
I made this comment at the start of the video and you used this comparison, if in a slightly different way.
No olive branch needed for me. I like this game for what it is and I don't sweat the bad things about it as they are not horrible. My biggest 2 gripes is that they (Bethesda) seems to forget about the previous content after rolling new stuff. Example: Remember Wastelanders? I spent time building faction with and siding with the raiders and what do we have to show for it? "Hey Seventy Six nice job out there....blah blah blah". sooo anything new to do Meg? "Hey Seventy Six nice job out there ...blah blah blah" and the other gripe is The Pitt, I am Pittsburgh born and raised but I have no idea what in the blue hell i'm looking at in 76's The Pitt at least Fallout 3 had some vaguely recognizable landmarks in the Pitt DLC. You are doing a fine job!
Oh definitely, it seems like they just couldn't get the old voice actors back. Why are we trading with some rando in Foundation when I know Paige? Why can't I pull on Meg to get the War Party to cooperate? Probably because it's cheaper to mill new voice actors instead of re-hiring and potentially increasing the pay of old ones.
@Sui Ton Fallout,Fallout 2, Fallout 3 (+ all DLC) Fallout New Vegas (+all DLC) Fallout 4 (+all DLC) and Fallout 76
37:51 (regarding Starfield) “I hope I’m not gonna be looking forward to a bunch of consistently grey rocks”
Oh boy.
33:02
Definetly the greatest shame of 76 is it's ignorance of the Great War. In making the setting all "colorful and pretty" they ingnored the HUMOUNGUS loss of life that had occurred just two decades before. Of all the moments in your reviews this is the best highlight of just how far removed 76 is from fallout, specifically it's themes and setting.
"200 years later, in the burnt out, bone strewn remains of earth's greatest nation, you can wander across a similair radio signal. It's a cry of help from a family with a dying daughter, crying out for anyone to help her. If you follow the signal you'll come across the drainage pipe they crawled into, and the long dried bones of the family. The daughter likely died first, with the parents hugging eachother and their daughter as they succumbed to the fallout. "
"But theres actually a wacky borderlands raider, sitting next to the bones, who's been maintaining the radio broadcast as a tourist attraction."
I would expect their to be dessicated corpses littering the streets of struck cities and towns, so thick that you wouldn't be stepping on the ground. There should've been corpses in almost every tree line from the unlucky who didn't die from the initial blast, instead suffered the organ rupturing, skin tearing shockwave. In almost every nook and crany near a city should have been some soul who slowly had every cell in their body malfunction and die due to the radiation.
This should have been closer to a horror game. But, I guess it's probably for the best that they didn't represent what the emediate aftermath of nuclear armegeddon would have been. Would make it harder to sell to a general audience.
Yes, even in Fallout 4, Bethesda kinda forgot about the end of the world. Sure, they literally show the bomb going off, and the glowing sea was cool, but the trees are green and the water is plentiful and things grow all over. And we're told Boston never died out entirely, there were always people living there. It's even worse in 76, and that doesn't have the excuse of being 2 centuries away. Even New Vegas, where nearly every nuke aimed at the area was intercepted, went effectively dead for decades. Like, what's the point of a post-apocalyptic setting if you aren't going to do the post-apocalypse?
The only thing slightly worse than F76 is your tendency to repeat and rephrase the same argument 3 to 5 times over, before ironically saying something like "And now we can finally move on", as if you were somehow forced to give a synopsis of the game's premise 5 times and explaining why it doesn't make sense each time.
The actual information delivered in this video belongs in a 5 minute little rant otherwise.
Is the joke that just like the game, you're offering only fluff and wasting people's time?
"Esbern and Delphin went out to uncover the mystery of where all the people went, and if Parthumax had killed them!" this was way too funny 😭
i played 76 for a long time and this is a really good breakdown and review so far and your additon of live action segments is cool love to see more of them in your next project
"76 didn't fix anything"
"Wastelanders added NPCs"
"Players complained there weren't NPCs"
"Actually, NPCs are bad"
NPC (Heather Hill) is made optional
"76 is LARPing"
Not to mention, an hour baited as 76 being bad, about how much better 76 is than Wastelanders.
You Fallout "fans" are so very deeply full of it.
excuse me, but putting a dumpster fire out doesn't just leave a box of trash, it leaves a burnt and melted box of trash. if you please.
Actually yes, I do know it's worse than many people know. :( but it's good to know I'm not crazy thinking it.
I'm not saying it's worse than people know. I am confident that even people who play this game don't know how deep the rabbit hole of bad design goes on this one
@@Patrician I'll with hold my comments on this until I watch the entire series but as someone who to this day can go on a rant about the one wasteland update ruining slow firing high damage weapons or whatever the hell is going on with the broadsider to this day, or the absolute comedy that was the laser weaponry damage not being calculated correctly. Or the magic damage bug I could go on. But yeah I'm sure I'll learn a lot even I didn't know.
Ive never played a second of 76 and will die happily knowing that.
Tbh this game wouldn’t be too bad if they actually delivered on the mods they said they would add.
You aren't missing anything. It's a tedious, pointless grind and that's entirely by design.
Caps are a big issue for me, because they shouldn't exist in the setting AT ALL. The Hub won't be around for DECADES.
The reason the bottlecaps are the currency in Appalachia is because there was a limited time promotion at the Whitespring Mall where you could turn in nuka cola bottlecaps to win prizes.
A glitch occoured in the bot's systems, making this promotion last for infinity, so essentially, as long as you have nuka cola bottlecaps to turn in, you can trade with them for all kinds of goods at the Whitespring mall.
That is why the nuka cola bottlecap is the currency in the region.
This is a possible explanation why on the East coast, the caps became a currency. Traveling merchants and caravans travel between regions, telling people to collect nuka cola bottlecaps in exchange for their goods, and when it's time they halt back to Applachia to the Whitespring which is almost like a warehouse stocked to infinity with supplies.
Maybe in 200 years people forgot why the bottlecap started and they just kept using it. But it originates from Appalachia, trading with robot vendors who thought caps were money.
This probably wouldn’t appeal to anyone but me, but I liked the idea of no humans, because what they could have done is make all NPCs robots. It keeps the “conquering a new world” angle somewhat intact, ties into the world-building of WV being a tech capitol, gives a unique angle, and keeps the players and the vault dwellers feeling “special” as the only humans around.
This is technically what they did at launch, but those characters were more a function to serve as a store or a questgiver, rather than being an actual character.
Tldr maybe extend the concept behind that one raider ms nanny in the game.
Quite a few people miss the launch world, shit was dark and bleak.
I get giving props to Bethesda for experimenting with the story by having no human NPCs, but that experiment was a colossal failure. I played on launch for maybe 20-40 hours and having every story be inconsequential, because every NPC is already dead, and getting “rewarded” with an audio log to listen to was painful as fuck. Every quest went exactly the same way.
Quest given by automated computer or radio broadcast, combat and minor investigation, loot drop, audio log, corpse of person you went there to see. It eventually becomes comedic how many ways Bethesda had to come up with to kill all the human NPCs so there wouldn’t be any in the world. It gets so nonsensical that it becomes absurd.
Yeah, I was confused by that analysis. I feel like the gimmick will only work once or twice. You sort of need people in a post-apocalyptic setting, it's what they're based around. I had this same depressing feeling of absurdity playing Project Zomboid: seeing the world apparently fall apart, yet I am always on my own no matter what I do or where I go.
My personal favorite quest for this is the one where a nanny robot is looking for the kid she’s supposed to be watching. You go on this long and drawn out quest to find where the kid ended up, assuming the kid died, but instead he was taken to a bunker where he would be safe from the bombs. Do we ever see this bunker, interact with it in any way, or perhaps have some other payoff? Nope. Just a convoluted quest that goes nowhere with an audio log at the end and a lot drop.
You can say a lot about the failings of 76 but the team hass been supporting it since it came out.