Every now and then the PS-Plus membership throws a major release at the members for free and I was quite excited when I saw that Fallout 76 was one of the ones that was on offer this month.
This started out like something that I was really happy with because I have such fond memories of the Fallout franchise, especially with New Vegas many years ago.
Unfortunately, it is evident that Bethesda software embraced the "modern sales model" with this game in that it is another game that is never meant to be completed, but instead played forever with constant updates and DLC in a sort of model that is true of Diablo and Destiny. While this has become the big money maker for studios, there area lot of people out there, like me, that absolutely hate this sort of game and I only made it a couple of hours in this one before throwing in the towel?
Why, well because it is essentially an MMO and I refuse to play MMO's anymore even if the company that makes them doesn't call the game an MMO.
Initially, I quite enjoyed the way things were looking and much of this probably has to do with the fact that the TV series seems to have a lot in common with this game as you are a vault survivor traveling out into the world only to discover that the world outside actually is inhabited by a bunch of people as well as mutated animals and people from the nuclear fallout.
While I didn't play it and was never going to be an early adopter of this, or any other AAA game, I do recall hearing about how the launch of this title was extremely poor and was compared to the Cyberpunk release in that it was filled with bugs and basically didn't work at all. One unnamed but key developer quipped when asked about "which parts of the game are subject to glitches" he responded "all of it, and the testing and development team is aware of the problems as well."
This didn't bode well for Bethesda as the game quickly became well-known as a buggy mess that was basically unplayable.
in the two to three hours I spent playing this game before giving up I can say that I encountered very little in the way of glitches, but I did find it amusing that when I would shoot an opossum or something, they would wildly backflip across the room. I guess they only did 1 or 2 animations for this particular dying sequence.
The gameplay was fine: Combat was intuitive enough and even though the interface is CLEARLY designed for PC play and possibly can't even be optimized for the Playstation 5, I still had a reasonable amount of fun.
The reason why I gave up after just a few hours in was because I could see the writing on the wall and realized that this is a seasonal game that is designed to never end. Even though they don't call it an MMO - since this world has a lot of negative connotations with it - it's pretty easy to see that it is an MMO.
One thing that stood out to me really early was that you get given an objective, which is normal, and told a destination for that objective and it is Friggin' ages away with no way of getting there other than walking. Ok, fair enough, but is there at least something to do along the way? Unfortunately not. You will spend a really long time just walking forward and maybe every now and then you will get attacked by some mutant roaming dogs or something like that. Basically nothing happens other than maybe gathering plants that you have no idea if they do anything or not for the next 30 minutes.
Something that really ticked me off on one of the first missions was the fact that I would get to a corpse of something I recently killed and would get the above image rather than a list of what the enemy was carrying. That my friends, is a loading wheel of death. This would sometimes go on for such a long period of time that I would forego getting the loot at all. The servers apparently are unable to keep up with the demand that this rollout of "free" is putting on them and since loot isn't determined by your local console, if the servers are backed up, then you are just going to have to wait like a jagoff until it comes around and decides to let you know what this recently killed enemy was actually carrying. This happened A LOT in just a few hours and I was also subjected to getting booted from the server all together and needing to reboot the game.
This is intolerable to me and reminds me of my DAOC or Anarchy Online days of the late 90's and early 2000's where that was just the way that gaming was. It's been nearly 30 years guys, we should be well past this at this point.
While I was annoyed by this initially, it was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back and made me realize that this is an MMO and I don't play MMO's because I feel as though they are made intentionally addictive as timesinks and are designed to never end so that profits can be eeked out of the customers constantly. I don't game that way.
The final kick in the nuts before I exited and uninstalled the game was when I was using the map, which you open frequently in Fallout games, and the button you use to enter the map is the large central button on the PS5 controller. One would think that hitting this button again would exit the map right? Well, nooooooo, if you hit the large button again it instead opens an advertisement for DLC's and seasonal activities. I haven't even completed a couple of assignments and Bethesda is inundating me with advertising to try to get me to spend money on things that I don't even know what they are yet.
It was clear to me that this game is designed to keep you in game for a long as possible and drip-feed your actual content and lure you into opening your wallet for upgrades as often as possible. Putting advertisements into the menu that you access the most frequently? That's just dirty Bethesda!
Also, it becomes evident early on that most of the quests you are given are time-eating "fetch quests" that don't actually move any of the storyline. Is there even a story here?
one reviewer described the game as a "boring post-apocalyptic walk in the woods" and I'm not going to disagree with that. Add in a bunch of glitches such as enemies rubber-banding frequently as well as massive delays on the network side of things and you have a mess of a boring game that still has the addictive psychological aspects to it that I think should be illegal in videogames.
They have base-building, which was a nice factor in Fallout 4, but since everything is server-side, I logged back in to find that my base just wasn't there anymore with some message telling me some BS that was just Bethesda making excuses for not really having the game functional yet, even though it's been many years since launch. When you go to plop your base down somewhere else, which was always an option, you have to deal with the terrain not being conducive to it and being told "you can't park there mate!" over and over again until you just say fuck it, I'm just not going to have a base.
Here's a collection of glitches that was actually a lot more entertaining than the game was for me
There are friends of mine that have hundreds of hours in this game and to them I say "more power to you." Since I was there 3000 years ago when MMO's were invented, I've been through this slog of doing the same things over and over again so I can have new "shineys" I want a game that has an actual plot, one that progresses in a clear way. Fallout 76 does have a main story, but it is so covered up with tedious bullshit that you kind of quickly forget who you are, why you are here, and what TF you are actually meant to be doing. Then you go on a really long walk and encounter damn near nothing for 30 minutes before getting into an easy, buggy, rubber-banding firefight that as often as not, is going to crash out anyway.
no thanks Bethesda. I'll sit this one out. Hell, maybe I'll reinstall Fallout 4 instead.