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pretentious-art-love · 2 months ago

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Game Reviews #2 - Fallout 76

I love this game to death, and the truth is that while it is not a game without serious flaws, it is overhated by the majority of the player base or at least compared as not even as great as any of the previous entries, but the truth is that while you can compare previous Fallout games, this one give something rather unique in comparison, and while I like this game a lot, I am not a Fallout fan myself, and I would not recommend it to other Fallout fans who are looking for a comprehensive CRPG experience.

The game does offer three types of gameplay loops, each loop being different than the other and it is what has helped keep the game so fresh for me and allowing me to spend so many hours in it, Fallout 4 was designed to be as replayable as possible and this game takes things a little bit further.

The three game loops are:

World Exploration in a vast, huge and hand-crafted Open World like previous entries of Fallout, or Elder Scrolls games since Morrowind (do not confuse it with their previous RPG aspects).

Looter shooter events and sections as well as quests and combat focused gameplay, like Fallout 3, 4 or Borderlands.

Building and crafting in your own bases and without any instances required, you can build on the world itself, like Minecraft, but its building system can be compared more with games like No Mans Sky or The Sims where you are limited to a certain amount of assets.

If you want me to rate each type of gameplay, they would go as this, 8/10 to 1, 6/10 to 2, and 5/10, respectively. My overall rating though, does not add up an average for these qualification, but it represents my emotional connection to the game and how it comes together with the sum of its parts.

There are also several aspects that affect and influence severely these gameplay loops, the main two being

Use of RPG stats to build a character that is better a certain type of combats than others, being faithful to the Action RPG label (Not the CRPG or Western RPG label).

The use of online gameplay. Most quests can be played solo, but every public event will require the participation of several groups of people, like in MMOs, people can visit your camp in the wilderness as well, whether is casually or teleporting there.

I will describe the two gameplay loops that I like less but I still enjoy quickly, and go a bit deeper into my favorite type of gameplay at the end.

First is the looter shooter aspect and the public events. Every 20 minutes a public event will pop up in every player’s screen and anybody can participate, the events range from taking some brahmin to their farms, to collect radiated ore and destroy ghouls and shoot a wendigo colossus monster for around 20 minutes while you get attacked by other creatures in the deep parts of a cave and your character can end up running away from the fear.

The enemies drop loot that varies from junk to build in your camp, to aid items and legendary and rare weapons, as well getting something as a reward for being in the event at all. Legendary weapons can be exchanged into a currency, scrip, to get legendary modules and upgrade your own weapons with effects that you get through RNG like 40% Power Damage or 250+ Damage Resist while reloading, so on and so forth. In this sense I would recommend Fallout 76 as your grind game. The events can be really fun, and can get very intense at times, my favorites being Radiation Rumble and my Test your Metal, but if you keep playing after 100 levels or so the loop becomes repetitive. You cannot pick a specific upgrade for your weapon, you have to collect the currency, either by exchanging the weapons you got on events, or getting seasonal rewards, and use that currency to get modules to roll upgrades for your weapons, every weapon gets 3 effects, getting one effect you want a lot is rare, so to get all 3 affects you want is going to take a long while. There are a lot of rare weapons you will need to pay a lot of caps for or other rare currencies the game introduces, like stamps or gold bullion. I feel this is designed to encourage you play the events over and over and make the game replayable, but if you aren’t into such mentality and want to avoid grind, you might not have a good time after a while. You can minimize the defects and maximize the strengths of your character, but a weapon with the right level and stats can be a long way in efficiency.

The second gameplay loop is the building and crafting part of the game. In this sense, the game excels itself allowing you to build anywhere you want as long it is not close to an already built location, like a place with a quest, a player can go wandering around through the world and simply find your house, which makes building a lot more worthwhile. This is where all the looting for junk comes place since you will use all the resources you find to build your own house and you can unlock a lot of plans to find something that you might like. You can farm and craft resources such as adhesive using vegetable starch, it takes a lot of time but you will find more joy in the craft if you are into building. There is a limit as how much you can build to avoid lag, but you can also build a shelter to build there as well, the difference is that shelters are instanced, and you will need to go through a loading screen to enter to them, which makes them less appealing.

You can also sell items at your camp, from aid items, to junk and even weapons and plans, which are the most purchased items between players. If you get a plan you already knew in a quest, you can sell it to someone else and get caps for it. Some players have reported getting so many caps that they don’t know what to do with them, but from my side I always run out when I buy a resource I can’t find in the map at the mall.

If this game was as great as it was in this sense, I would have rated it higher than the looter shooter section of the game, but the truth is that it gets a 5/10 from me because most of the crafting section of this game is hidden behind a paywall. If you want more than two camp slots, you will have to buy atoms for them. If you see a specific construction set you like, like an organ, haunted house walls, a well, certain type of stairs, if you want a bigger shelter, you will have to pay for it, no way around it, you will be subjected by what you find on the game and what it is on the shop, which makes construction discouraging in a certain sense, and even more when the building system is not as robust as with other games, you can’t make a diagonal wall or build a circle, unless using some very well practiced exploits.

As a side note, there are utility items that you can also buy with microtransactions, like repair kits or experience boosts lunchboxes that last for an hour, which do fall in the category of pay to win, but you can absolutely do without those in the game, and I can say that while I have spent a lot of money on the game, I can calmly say I never paid for any paid to win items at all, and I never needed them.

Now, what I like most of the game is its world. The first game-play loop I mentioned and the third one we are going to discuss. The truth is that most Fallout world building ends up really depressing for me considering all the post-apocalyptic nature of it, but this game is slightly different in its presentation.

I found previous Fallout worlds not that visually appealing, but Fallout 76 has a beautiful map composed of green areas, foggy swamps, radioactive red plain areas, several trainyards, ghost towns, castles, white valleys that look like snow, and zones covered in ash where everything is dark and brown, it is a beautiful world, and it is fantastic to explore it and sight see.

While I understand the point of the public in saying not having NPCs simply didn’t allow for any illusions for roleplay with the story itself, I have to disagree that it made the game boring. I like the idea of surviving on your own, and the environmental storytelling is incrediblyy rewarding. People will call Fallout 76 creatively bankrupt but will never get the chance to learn about all the characters hidden in the terminals and holotapes of this world. There is Lewis, the mad scientist that loved Nuka Cola and created a nuclear alcoholic beverage to continue with his obsession to get Nuka Cola merchandise. There is Shannon Rivers, the former voice actress of a comic character that formed a sisterhood with abandoned girls to fight against the raiders, there is Lucy, the ghoul that was killed by her husband when ghouls just had started to appear and people were still afraid of them, there is Jesus Sunday, who couldn’t deal with the fact that his brother was in love with a woman, and there is Cheryl, who had to escape from the bunker of her husband as he lost his sanity. I can draw a direct comparison with Bioshock, Portal 2 or The Phantom Pain, games that also uses a character that can be heard only through prerecorded audio, and the difference in reception is abysmal. In Fallout 76 you have a world for yourself, and you have to explore to find the tapes and every story, but that's what makes everything rewarding, it is an open world game, and every moment you find is a treasure.

There are just an endless number of wonderful stories you find in the world and make you feel so many things, you feel sadness, because all of the people you are listening to are dead, but you feel at least some happiness, for being at least for a moment in a part of their lives, you feel their pain, and you feel what they had to go through when the world ended in a nuclear apocalypse, it hurts, but it inspires you to survive. There is a beautiful quest where you get a list of places an old grandad wanted to visit for his daughter in her honor, and you find the list on his corpse. You can build a camera and take a photo of every place they wanted to visit. It is really beautiful and soothing in a way.

Traveling is not as impressive, since you depend on fast travel which is not only immersion breaking but also very monotone, walking through the wasteland is not as interesting as using a hookshot in Just Cause 2 and 3, or take a silt strider in Morrowind, but you can get a jetpack which allows you to climb and glide and makes the world exploring a lot more fun, you will still depend of fast travel when you are going to an event or going to an incredibly long distance, but exploring by yourself is still very enjoyable.

Wastelanders and subsequent updates added human NPCs which were the answer to a popular criticism with the game, and while I feel these changes and updates break the world building and atmosphere of the game a little bit, I do not hate them, because you can also find interesting characters in them. There is Lou, the ghoul that keeps trying to kill himself because he is afraid to go feral, there is Polly, the friendly Assaultron that you have to rescue and get a body for, and that might be in a relationship with her human male friend, a character that did speak to me a lot, and there is Sofia, the astronaut that fell from deep sleep before the war and you have to help with. These human NPC quests do have a single purpose though, and is that they are mostly used to create enemies to kill and loot to get, so you will find them limited in a way, but they do serve the purpose of giving the players that like human interaction something to experience the quest with.

After level 25 you can change your special points as you please and reorganize any perks you have picked with, this comes with the side effect of making spell checks useless since you can just leave the interaction and get the points you need to pass a check, but it helps you get a better combat build, you can get a perk card every level, so even if you are at level 500, you will still have a reason to level up so you can get more perks for different builds, or scrap them to rank up your legendary perk cards.

In a way, I do not care about the side effect of making spell check useless, since while I consider the environmental story telling very rewarding, a lot of NPC quest stories are not very good or noteworthy, they tend to me more kitsch in this sense, and long time Fallout fans will only enjoy them in an ironic/self parodying type of way, and either way, it does not focus in the appeal of choice in storytelling, and it is absolutely not a classic Western RPG or CRPG.

I can't blame Fallout 76 for not being like Fallout 1 or 2, after change in several development teams, change in companies, change in gameplay, change in ownership, and 20 years of time. Franchises change just like people do, and a name is just a name, Fallout 76 might not be the Fallout game you are looking for, but it is a good game in its own way.

There is also the seasonal content, like any other multiplayer game, there are updates every certain time, like you can see with the scoreboard of each season, you can complete challenges every day and every week and that will give you a score that will unlock limited and rare items. While it does suck that you cannot get items from previous seasons on your own and that you have to grind experience leveling up to finish it, or at least play every single day to get enough points, it is a great excuse if you want to make of this your grind game, you can learn to maximize as much as possible your build to get that rare item that you want, or you can simply play the story on your own, and let it be after that since the world on itself is fantastic and the soundtrack is sad and cathartic on its own. I do think that since we are doing this with friends, the grind is fun and rewarding.

I heard people don't usually rate live service games properly, and that is also the case here. Massive multiplayer games are often akin to a social experience or a competition and putting them through the same lens as single player games or standalone art pieces is non necessarily appropriate. We as players are part of the content, the people you meet and the players you interact with are part of the content. Sure, you will not find a deep socialization experience, that is for sure, but I do like the simplicity of the interactions when you play in games. It's like making friends like back when we were kids, "You like trains? I also like trains! Let's play together!" or in this case it's like "You like melee combat? Nice me too! Here is a cool gaunlet I found! Wanna do an expedition together? Wanna do Earl? Here is a heavy gun with heavy DPS that will help him melt in no time!" Yes, with small silly pastimes like that, when you stop doing missions, when you stop playing together at school, you will end up stop talking with a lot of people, but from all of those people you can end up finding a few you stay in contact with, you will even find someone that can turn into your friend, that's the kind of simple things where socialization just happen can give to you. In the game you can go together in missions like daily operations or expeditions and having people to do it together gives the chance of make it differently every time, say something different every time or mess around in a new way in every new iteration, and that's what makes the grinding work. In this community interactions are usually positive, there is no lack of negative experiences, but you will always find that person with so many items that will give you a super rare plan you didn’t have, or you will have a reason to pick up and do a new mission so you can continue over and over, this is a give it or take it thing, love it, or hate it.

I would recommend it to play it sooner rather than later, though. Updates also seem to be slow lately with us getting very little new content, probably with the company focusing manpower on Starfield or slowly moving on from the game at all, which makes me a little sad, but with multiplayer games it is hard to determine what is really the cost of keeping servers alive.

What I like about Fallout 76 is the sum of its parts, while the world building was taken over by the human NPCs, the looter shooter has to be taken with a grindy mindset, and the building and crafting is behind paywalls, you will still find new things to do and you can change the activity that you are realizing if you get bored, if you don’t want to do events, you can go explore, if you don’t want to explore, you can build a new shelter or base. If I want fast gameplay I can do fast gameplay, if I want to slow down, I can slow down, and this is all contained in one beautiful world full of eye candy and it is not a lonely experience, it has that kind of endless content I want the most: people. Overall, it just hits a lot of the itches I look in games, but it is not just that, but it is also the fact that it is online.

At first I was dubious about online games, but this game has won me over and I wish a lot more games did this with their campaigns, the ability to play alone if you want, to let you do your own thing, but still being multiplayer enough that you can casually meet others whereas is in the wasteland or in an event, I have had beautiful interactions with others, people that have giving me aid, people we keep killing each other with because is fun, someone who gifted me a Halloween Witch Costume when they saw my Haunted House camp, people getting dizzy at seeing my camp at the top of a monorail wagon, it adds the best elements of casual building gameplay in games like Animal Crossing or Minecraft, but now you can meet each other casually in the game itself, how beautiful is that? Not to mention the world is not cartoonified or simplified in its graphics to make construction more doable or save resources in a portable console. How beautiful would it be if you could meet with others while doing your own quest in other games? There are MMOs, sure, but having 24 people at most in a server, means it is a lot more possible someone will find you and see your camp, and the world is not split in sections you have to go around, it is all one big world you can travel on your own, and that is beautiful. There aren't any games like Fallout 76 anywhere, even when so many companies keep pushing live service games, I feel the only one that has had a chance to gain me over, is Fallout 76, allowing me to speed up and down the gameplay as much as I want, and immersing me the most in a new world I am thrilled to explore, that is why right now I want to give it 5 stars. F76 in a way, its unique, it will give you a pure single player experience with the change of meeting with others, but still not forcing you to, it is the heaven for introverted people that want to make friends in a subtle way! No need to ask someone to add you and start co op the two of you together, alone, without knowing each other. The fact that there is only voice live is an obstacle the game has but it is well complemented with the fan and official discords when looking for groups. Not to mention that this game is really overstimulating with every activity and event and that is really appealing to someone with such attention span like mine. I feel overcharged and I feel great. It is casual, over stimulating, beautiful to explore, it is funny, and it is single player but just multiplayer enough, this game is my jam, it is my heaven and safe space.

The community is really nice, and I can say that of every bad interaction I have had, I have had at least 9 great interactions with others, I love this game because aside of being very over stimulating and massive, it is a perfect casual game to make friends with, there are no leaderboards when events end, you did what you could, and you had fun, and while I know that AI generated content will change how we look this type of endless content genre of games in the future, this game as 2023 absolutely succeeded in being that massive, seemingly endless game I could sink myself in, and escape from the world, without being entirely alone. With Fallout 76 I can submerge myself in the feeling of having experienced the world end, but still finding something beautiful to go on, and a reason to live.

I want to end quoting the holotape of Miguel Caldera, one of the survivor stories that you can find in the Flatwoods.

“Even when you think everything is over… it's… it's not. It goes on. I mean it's awful too, don't get me wrong. All the people dead and hurt. But, well, those are things beyond my control, so I'm making the best of it. So, for all you future people… just know that we lived through something… horrible. But we did it. Somehow, we're alive… And if you're hearing this, then well… I guess at least some of us made it. Right? So hey, chin up, kiddo! You'll be okay. Okay?”

9/10

I'm not playing again until they let me buy The Hills Are Alive, though.

#bethesda #fallout #fallout 76 #todd howard #live service games #open world games #rpg #multiplayer #the sims #bugs #mmo #looter shooter #post apocalyptic #survival #first person shooter #building

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