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REVIEW: FALLOUT 76 (PS4, XBOX ONE, PC - PS4 VERSION TESTED)

5/12/2018

19 Comments

 
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GUEST REVIEW BY SUPER BAD ADVICE

Museums are pretty great – where else can you see dinosaur skellies, poorly taxidermised cross-eyed apes and probably cursed mummies in the same place? What’s not great, though, is going to a museum with someone who insists on taking in every word of every single information panel.
 
You know the sort: while you want to move on to the T. Rex and that bit where you can pull levers and make a dented ping-pong ball go down a pipe to represent nuclear fission, they’ll be reading a novel-length epic about a lump of bauxite in a dusty corridor that hasn’t been visited in decades.
 
Worse still, they’ll even linger to read plaques in the human reproduction exhibit, right in front of the disturbingly hirsute nudey models who look like they’re from that ‘funny yoga’ book you found under your mum and dad’s bed in 1982. Perverts.
 
Now, imagine that you’re with 3 or 4 people like that, and you ALL have to read the information boards before you’re allowed to move on whether you like it or not. Does that sound like fun? Does it, Dennis? Of course it doesn’t. So you’ll be as delighted as I was to discover that this craptacular gaming mechanic has inexplicably been made an integral part of Fallout 76’s multiplayer experience.

​Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee.
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GROPE
​Fallout 76 is Bethesda’s latest grope of the udder of the franchise cow, and unfortunately if this is game is anything to go by she’s currently got crippling mastitis. Unlike previous games in the series, this new instalment takes the whole shebang online. There are still a host of missions and tasks to do of course, but now you can team up with up to 4 chums (or randoms you meet along the way) to tackle them.
 
Team-based fun with friends in the Fallout world as a concept clearly sounds great. So what went wrong? Answer: most things went wrong.
 
First off, it’s got that trademark Bethesda bugginess – and by this I don’t mean irradiated cockroaches. Like a desperately unsuccessful clubber attempting to breach a VIP area, I got stuck behind a roped-off section before I’d even left the alleged safety of my bunker and had to restart the whole sodding game from scratch – and having checked online, it seems this particular bug has happened to a lot of people. 
 
Framerates also stutter frequently, even on a PS4 Pro, and character and scenery models often glitch and warp all over the shop. Often hilariously, until you remember (a) this cost you 50 quid and (b) this nonsense has been going on with Bethesda games since Oblivion.
 
So far, so arse then.
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BARREN
​Once you’re outside and in the wilderness though, things must pick up, surely? Well in the sense you have to go and pick up a load of stuff, yes. Otherwise, not so much. Because if you’re hoping for a world full of interesting characters and survivor stories, you’ve come to the wrong postapocalypse. Fallout 76 is empty. So very, very empty.
 
Bethesda made the decision that, as this was going online, to avoid confusion there would be no humans in this game other than fellow players (explained away by the storyline of this game happening very early on in the Fallout timeline – i.e. everyone else is either freshly nuked or still hunkered down underground). The take-away fact though is Bethesda think you’re too stupid to tell a genuine person from an AI character, which is nice of them.
 
Anyway, the result is all the NPCs are robots or mutants, and all your tasks come from recordings or text files left by corpses because everyone else is stone dead. The knock-on of this is you don’t have any sense of feeling connected to the plot: anyone you could possibly get invested about the story of is already taking the big dirt nap, so who cares?
 
But what it ALSO means is that you have to read or listen to a lot of canned exposition to advance the quests you’re on, or indeed have any clue why you’re doing them in the first place. There’s no in-game storytelling here, because there’s no one left alive in game to tell it. And if you’re doing a quest with other players, this is where the aforementioned ‘museum bore’ factor comes in – because you ALL have to do ALL quest steps to progress.
 
So if that’s listening to a recording, or clicking through 5 screens of text on a terminal, every single one of you has to do each bit.
 
This obvious teeth-grinding tedium aside, it makes teaming up with people to complete quests in the first place a mess too; you have to be on the same quest step or wait for whoever is behind to catch up, or you’ll be horribly out of sync. It also means you can’t properly work as a team to do quests more quickly – after all, how can you divide up goals if you all have to do the same ones?
 
As design ideas go, it’s as stupid as building a house out of yoghurt.
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GRINDING
​Talking of building, you can make your own little base with crafting facilities wherever you like – and you’ll need to, because the other grindtastic feature of Fallout 76 is that like a cat with worms or a hot tramp, you’re constantly getting hungry and thirsty. In other Fallout games eating and drinking acts to restore stamina and hit points. Here, it’s a constantly decaying stat that needs to be periodically topped up or your max health and HP will drop.
 
This means time that could be used for exploring – one of Fallout 76’s few saving graces is that it is still occasionally a fascinating world to mooch around – is instead spent on crushingly dull chores. Get water, boil water. Kill rat, cook rat bits and so on. I boiled so much water in my first few hours the game felt more like a kettle simulator.
 
What about combat then? Regrettably, this too is a ‘Parson’s milkshake’ – a meaningless phrase I’ve just made up because I’m so annoyed at how poor it is, it doesn’t even deserve a legitimate insult.
 
The usual Fallout VATS system wouldn’t work here because of course you can’t slow down time for each person in an online multiplayer world without breaking reality. So instead, there’s a heavily neutered version that works as a sort of auto-aim bonus. Which you may well need: Fallout has never exactly been a stellar shooter, but now you’re bereft of the ability to target a shot in bullet time real-time combat is all you have. And gawd, is it clunky.
 
Enemies aren’t particularly threatening unless in large numbers, but the shooting is so cumbersome you’ll often favour running away if you can just to avoid the bother of killing them. And melee combat is awful – your character can flail about in first or third person, but regardless of which you choose it just feels like you’re thrashing away and blows are landing out of chance rather than skill.
 
If an enemy scoots off, you’re left with the choice of burning through your ammo reserves trying to hit them at range with the gutted remnants of a system designed for slow-mo precision shooting, or sprinting after them and hoping you can get close enough to land a hit in some sort of ultraviolent homage to a Benny Hill chase sequence. 
 
PvP is a bit of an odd experience too. It does exist, once you’ve levelled up a bit, but you do greatly reduced damage until the other person shoots back. So rather than the tension that could have been created from having to fight off fellow scavengers for the scarce resources on offer, you’re left with a weirdly polite situation where you shoot someone, wait for them to shoot you back to indicate they’re up for it, and only *then* engage.
 
Or, you just have to hope they’ve left their controller and gone to the toilet so you can get in enough shots with your weakened attacks to kill them before they return and simply bugger off. Your reward for a kill though? Next to nothing and a Wanted bounty on your head
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SHOVE
​This all acts to shove players towards co-op play in an entirely unsubtle manner. Which to be honest is no bad thing, as the most enjoyment in Fallout 76 is to be had is in just exploring the open world with another few players – when you have no mission requirements to hamstring you, it’s a big and occasionally fabulous-looking world to explore, with plenty of secrets to stumble across.
 
But just as you’re actually starting to enjoy yourself, something moronic like a cow floating past at head height, or an open-world event causing mobs of inexplicably high level enemies to instantly spawn into a previously safe, empty area and insta-kill you will happen, dragging you back to reality. Or, worse still, you’ll have to boil some more bloody water.
 
Fallout 76 is like a quiche someone dropped in a sink. All the bits are there, but it’s gone all wet and runny, and doesn’t hold together. Is it salvageable (the game, not the quiche)? Possibly, but that will depend on Bethesda’s commitment to a title that’s been received as warmly as a mandatory injection of wasp sting juice to be delivered direct to the perineum.
 
The real question though is, why would you even hang around to see if they do fix it? While it’s true other big developers have made massive stink-ups of open world launches before, like Destiny 2 and The Division, there’s always been a very obvious somethingthere to make player perseverance in the hope of improvement worthwhile – a good story, or pin-sharp gameplay mechanics to (re)build on.
 
Fallout 76 doesn’t even have that, though. Well, unless you enjoy trudging about looking at scenery (and you’d REALLY have to like it) while periodically being gnawed on by rats. I liked the theme music, so I suppose that’s something.

Other than that, boring chores, rubbish fighting, bad design choices, bugs galore and a (dead) cast of characters you don’t give two hoots about does not a fun time make.

Hugely disappointing.  
 
SCORE: 4 MEGATONS OUT OF 10 MEGATONS (also: the tons are tons of poo)

19 Comments
Harry Steele
5/12/2018 09:56:59 am

Bethesda. Bethesda never changes

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Scott C
7/12/2018 08:02:00 pm

Remember that Bethesda brought us Doom 2016, though.

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Pete Davison link
5/12/2018 10:18:15 am

The most common argument I've heard from Fallout 76 apologists is "it's Bethesda, they support their games, it'll get better". But I think you've hit the nail on the head when you ask why anyone would possibly stick around to see if it actually gets any better?

The fundamental way this game is designed, the very concept of it, is flawed and antithetical to the reasons people enjoyed the past Fallout games. I can completely understand why people are annoyed with it... particularly when there are some real showstopper bugs still in there.

A blogger I follow was really enjoying the game and spent three hours meticulously building her perfect base... then logged in again later only to discover that the game had completely forgotten about it, and there was no means of recovering it. She is no longer playing Fallout 76.

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B3tan_Tyronne
5/12/2018 12:13:45 pm

Fallout 76 for me is this years worst gaming purchase and I thought I was doing alright by getting it for 30 quid for the pc - gawd how wrong I was.
This `game` is the very embodiment of shite.
So, so many bugs - piss poor graphics from years ago - THE most tedious quests I have ever played - the dreadful base building that I loathed from Fallout 4 makes a comeback and the utter feeling of being alone in a huge area with a handful of people populating it.
I cannot tell people to AVOID this game enough - it really is a huge turd of an experience.
I honestly do not see them getting this game into any fit state for me to want to go back and try it - the only small amount of fun I had was running down a road in my pants shouting out `this game is crapppppp` over voicechat.
It does not even warrant a 1 out of 10 - it warrants fuck all.

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Parson
5/12/2018 01:00:36 pm

Hey! Leave my milkshake out of this!!

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Kellis
5/12/2018 01:05:12 pm

Too late, I'm afraid. All the boys have been brought to the yard already.

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Marro
5/12/2018 06:56:56 pm

And their frame-rate is better than yours.

Col. Asdasd
5/12/2018 01:02:04 pm

I don't know quite how to describe it. It feels as though there's a cult at work inside the games industry - the Cult of the Open World. It started small, as the interesting idea that technological improvements meant games now longer had to be segmented into discrete levels.

This is the sort of idea that catches a designer's imagination, because it brings with it a raft of potentially systemic and immersive features (sometimes a symptom of Molyneitis). But it's also an idea that gives lots of people something to do on both the art and programming side; open worlds take a lot of money and person power, which provides a certain managerial lure, because what manager doesn't want to take on the project that swells the resources of their fiefdom? And the games sell, which obviously helps meet revenue targets..

So the Cult of the Open World grew, and grew, until the Open World wasn't the feature of a game, so much as being able to play game in it was notionally a feature of the Open World. Everything that serves to constrain an Open World, such as a tightly crafted narrative, or gameplay which requires responsive, attentive level design, or mission structure more nuanced than go to these coordinates and do X Y or Z? Those are nice to have, but when push comes to shove, Fallout 76 shows that they aren't considered strictly necessary.

And so here we are in 2018, with games like Fallout 76 where the Open World-iness of the Open World seems to have swallowed everything else up, where it exists for its own sake and its mere existence stands as justification for release in the absence of anything else.

Listen, maybe this is all highly selective bollocks. Maybe there's far more that open worlds have to offer and I'm just not, like, getting it, man. Maybe I should play Red Dead 2 and it'll all become clear. But I think this game indicates something strange; that somehow, developers don't seem to be able to control the Open Worldism that's taken root in their games anymore. Open Worlds have made the wrong kind of people rich, have settled too into our accepted notion of what the average release looks like, and now there's far too much incentive for anyone to dig them out of our model of making and financing games.

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MENTALIST
5/12/2018 01:18:05 pm

I'm not sure you've got the right target for your ire here. Open-World games have been kind of Bethesda's thing since at least Morrowind in 2002, possibly longer since I don't know what the first two Elder Scrolls games were like.

And there's not necessarily a big problem with multiplayer in open worlds, either. GTA Online has been successful enough, Crackdown's coop was well-received in its day, I've heard vaguely positive things about MGSV's multiplayer, too. Minecraft, for which vast servers have been popular for years is an open-world game, and under the hood of the most popular Battle Royales is a streaming open world playground.

The problem here is that Bethesda have combined multiplayer, and their RPG world very badly. And it's worrying that is seems to be indicative of a continuing slide in quality from Bethesda after Fallout 4's surprisingly indifferent reception.

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Col. Asdasd
5/12/2018 03:24:22 pm

Good points well made. For a moment I just went a bit Beautiful Mind and suddenly saw all the dots connecting!

Marro
5/12/2018 07:15:41 pm

I think the problem's even simpler (and more grotesquely greedy) than that: Bethesda have released as a Xmas placeholder the multiplayer component of Fallout 4 that was unfinished in time to meet the base game's release date: over three years later, with very little finessing in the meantime (especially with graphics).
Is it me or are AAA releases getting more shamelessly shat out? I just bought Battlefield 5 and it feels like a Beta test. Although it's still quite fun (not a patch on BF1, though) there's very few maps and it's glitchy as hell - why won't my bald headed soldier lady jump through the window?!!! Aarrrghh!

BigWillyMan
5/12/2018 01:11:27 pm

as i read this review, i asked myself - has this guy ever played an MMO before? i'm guessing not. this reads exactly how i would expect someone who's never played an MMO to review an MMO that they expected to feel like a single player RPG.

all the bad reviews i've seen for fallout76 are from people who generally play and review single player games and then relate their experience in this MMO to their previous single player RPG experiences. making major notes on the differences as if it's relevant. when it's not. you have to review it as different genre, as a fallout spinoff, not a crap fallout 5.

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MENTALIST
5/12/2018 01:28:11 pm

Bethesda have no-one to blame but themselves if they've failed at expectation management. No Man's Sky should have been the only lesson the industry needed on that.

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Super Bad Advice
5/12/2018 01:45:18 pm

So...MMO players like really bug-ridden, crushingly boring games with recycled 3-year-old graphics? Bit of a sweeping generalisation there, ‘Billy’.

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Random Reviewer76
8/12/2018 12:17:27 am

Ok then., here's a quick review of Fallout 76 as an MMO in it's own right:

It's compete dogshit.

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Floop
5/12/2018 02:08:21 pm

The filthy truth is bethesda games have always been crap, only fan made bugfixes and mods elevate them to goodness.
And with an online only microtransaction game, thats not going to be an option here.

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Scott C
7/12/2018 08:06:31 pm

Doom 2016 says "hi".

Reply
Blocks100
7/12/2018 10:46:18 pm

Doom 2016 says "hi, we weren't developed by Bethesda"

Random Reviewer76
8/12/2018 12:20:10 am

Not a Berhseda game.




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