Fallout 76 General Thread - Bethesda does it again!

[ducktales4gameboy]

Seriously, Fallout 76 is going to be remembered in gaming history as part of that same category of video games as Duke Nukem Forever, Superman 64, Custer's Revenge, Shaq Fu, Survival Arts, and Final Fantasy XIV (pre-Realm Reborn), and maybe Gone Home once the SJW movement finally stops being relevant.

I’d put Gone Home in a tier above this shitfest even since it’s a competently designed game that launched without any major bugs even if the game itself was polarizing and lukewarm.

This feels like a sequel to the Simcity reboot fiasco except Simcity flamed out much faster. It went through the exact same progression of death by microtransaction though.

 

[Thiletonomics]

So, how much longer will Bethesda hang onto this trainwreck before finally pulling the plug on it.

I think it's gonna keep trudging along, barely hanging by a thread until Starfield or Elder Scrolls VI is released.

At the earliest, I don't see Bethesda finally admitting their hubris and taking Fallout 76 out behind the wood shed to put it out of its misery until Doom Eternal's release, since last I heard, Doom Eternal was farther along in development and closer to having a release date announced than Starfield or especially Elder Scrolls VI.

Seriously, Fallout 76 is going to be remembered in gaming history as part of that same category of video games as Duke Nukem Forever, Superman 64, Custer's Revenge, Shaq Fu, Survival Arts, and Final Fantasy XIV (pre-Realm Reborn), and maybe Gone Home once the SJW movement finally stops being relevant.

There's only two reasons why Bethesda can keep fucking up this badly for this long on what is one of the biggest video game failures in history.

Even taking into account the fact that Bethesda has been run by complete and utter fuck-ups for most of the decade, there's no way their overlords at ZeniMax would be so eager to lose as much money and gain as much negative publicity as they have with Fallout 76 unless there's a damn good reason.

Either Fallout 76 is a deliberately planned failure set up to make their next major release look good by comparison and sell out faster than a whorehouse on dollar night, with Fallout 76 being the New Coke to Starfield/TES 6's Coca-Cola Classic...

...or Todd Howard has stopped taking his psych meds and switched to crystal meth instead, so ZeniMax is allowing Fallout 76 to keep existing until Todd has enough rope to hang himself with and they can finally get rid of him and any other major-league fucktards at Bethesda using the utter trainwreck of Fallout 76 as the perfect excuse.

Seriously, the release of Fallout 76 is the worst thing to happen in West Virginia since mountaintop removal

Thanks to the never-ending disaster of this game, Todd Howard has probably fucked more West Virginians than the opioid epidemic.

I’d put Gone Home in a tier above this shitfest even since it’s a competently designed game that launched without any major bugs even if the game itself was polarizing and lukewarm.

This feels like a sequel to the Simcity reboot fiasco except Simcity flamed out much faster. It went through the exact same progression of death by microtransaction though.

Also, with how Bethesda finds new wonderful ways to screw Fallout 76 up, I wonder how the sheer failure of it will compare to Artifact. Both of those were sheer magnitudes of failure, but in different ways:

-While FO76 was (and probably still is) a massive glitch-fest, Artifact was a very well polished game, with a lot fewer bugs. The only hiccup that I think the game has is it's a massive resource hog, which is an even bigger deal given that it is just a card game.

-Has there been any statistics of how many copies of FO76 were sold, as well as the player base size? That was probably one of the reasons why FO76 was quickly removed from Steam after it was listed there, probably to avoid the embarrassment of player base drops. Artifact topped out at 60k players on launch, and quickly dropped to as low as the 100s, even dipping below that during non-peak hours.

-Both games tried pushing their luck hard in terms of monetization. FO76 had the atom store and the canvas bag fiasco, and Artifact is littered with paywalls, such as the $20 initial price tag, needing to pay to buy cards, and needing to pay for tickets to play in most game modes. Also, Draft mode was originally going to be behind the ticket paywall, and Valve only made it (Phantom Draft) free to play because of how much the community bitched about the original decision. Imagine if Valve had not done that, the salt would have been even more massive.

-I'm not sure how fun FO76 is/was as a game, but Artifact was fun to only a very small population of players, with things such as the game being a giant math equation, with so much RNG to the point that the players feel like that they have no control, and that they are playing to not lose, instead of playing to win. And while the hardcore Artifact fanboys still claim that the RNG can be dealt with, it still doesn't negate the fact that the sheer amount of it will make at least one player feel awful when it doesn't go their way.

-In terms of fanbases, which one is the bigger out of Fallout, or DOTA 2? (in which Artifact takes place in this universe) I know that DOTA 2 players tend to not overlap with other gaming communities, so much so that some players play DOTA 2 and only just that, with some even playing the original DOTA back in the WC3 days. The card game communities also tend to be smaller too, not to mention how Artifact didn't do a good job of attracting DOTA players to play it.

-Also, in terms of fanbases, which of the two had the bigger and more numerous White Knight defenders of the game? I haven't kept up with the latest FO76 drama, but Artifact had a TON of White Knight defenders, and the excuses that those people came up with in terms of defending the game are quite insane. Those things include:

-Saying "this game is meant to be niche", which to be fair, both Richard Garfield and Gabe Newell said that about the game as well.

-The Artifact community also tended to tell a lot of people off, saying things such as "you don't have high enough IQ for this game", with some people even using the Rick & Morty unironically to describe the game, and saying "if you don't like the game, then go away", which people actually did.

-The Artifact subreddit in particular was also quite toxic, in which those people shot down almost any form of valid criticism, and only when the game dropped to 100-ish players did they light up on that, although some people still believe that The Long Haul will come true for this game. Some people even did "background checks" of anyone that dared to say anything negative about the game, calling them out just for playing or posting on the subreddits for Hearthstone/MTG Arena/"insert other low-IQ card game here", and some people even believed that those are paid shills, in which Blizzard/Wizards of the Coast hired specifically to defame the game.

-And while FO76 is still going on, Valve eventually stated that Artifact did not live up to their expectations (although they waited until the player base dropped to the 200s to do so), and say that they will rework the game from the ground up, ala Final Fantasy XIV. Whether that actually happens is a big pipe dream at this point.

There's a lot of other stuff about Artifact's failure that I haven't brought up, and it's a doozy in all.

I think FO76 probably will out-edge Artifact in terms of sheer failure, because of how much more media press FO76 got for those fuck ups, compared to Artifact.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

Dota 2 is massive can of worms in terms of dumb administrative decisions. I played for a couple years and stopped before Artifact came out but Valve bullshittery was rampant for most of it.

Here’s the cliff notes summary of two incidents that stand out as particularly amusing:

1. Reborn.

‘Dota 2’ is actually really more like Dota 3. The original Dota 2 was a port from WC3 to the source engine, and valve being valve decided to just slap cosmetic after cosmetic onto it until it became as big of a jumbled barely-loadable mass as the original. So they decide to port the whole mess to Source 2. It does not go well. A year or so later ‘Dota 2 beta’ is pushed to the beta releases category on steam featuring a much better UI, about 10% of the cosmetics from the original and a billion showstopper bugs. Everyone plays a game or two of it and promptly abandons it due to instability and tiny playerbase comparative to the main client.

A few months later the ‘Reborn’ update hits and the crashy awful beta client permanently replaces the main one. The salt waves are massive, unceasing and on a zero-second cooldown. Not only can the client not handle the playerbase but it still crashes frequently enough to be an issue and continued to be one for months afterwards as players discover that essentially every major bug fix in the old client is missing from Reborn.

2. Turbo.

The one A+ amazing decision Valve made with D2 was allowing you to upload really complex custom game modes that they would host for you. Take an hour to write Pikachu’s Dick Smasher and throw it on the workshop and anyone in the world can queue/matchmake for it using the same matchmaking infrastructure that the normal game uses, completely for free. This lead to the playerbase fracturing quite a bit since playing silly fuck-around modes with unbalanced rules was a ton more entertaining than the normal game since you could just leave and do something else with no penalty if you got matched up with toxic players.

Valve at this point noticed some of the main queue numbers dropping off and introduced Turbo Mode in an attempt to make the game more appealing to newcomers and casual players. This was advertised heavily in the client and given top-tier billing alongside the normal modes. Without getting into the details, Turbo mode was a custom game that removed/reworked a bunch of the core mechanics so that a match would average 10-15 minutes instead of an hour. As a side effect 90% of the economic strategy was removed (imagine a Civ game where all research is instantaneous and you’re pretty close) and the playerbase split in two between the people who just wanted to click things and see flashy spells and the people who wanted to play actual dota.

The result was the average normal-game experience getting exponentially more toxic overnight leading to something like a 30% drop in total player volume over the course of a week since it was now nearly impossible to find a regular match without running into toxic shitheads. 90% of the people I knew who played moved on to other games when this happened, myself included.

One thing to add about Artifact though, since it’s fucking hilarious:

One of the reasons why it tanked as hard as it did was that a valve oversight managed to completely crash the market for cards in the first week. There’s a metapackage on Steam called the Valve Complete Package. If you own it, you own all Valve games, and Steam will add any valve games you don’t have to your library whenever you log in.

Enter two steam accounts, A and B. A buys the complete pack, installs Artifact and launches it. The game gives them a couple boosters as the new player bonus. A immediately opens a steam trade with B and gives them the boosters, then exits Artifact and tells steam to remove it from their account. Steam removes the entitlement -and player data - from A’s account. A relaunches steam, and since A owns the complete pack Steam sees they don’t own Artifact and adds it to their account, noticing also that it’s already installed. A launches Artifact, receives their new player boosters and trades them to B..

Now imagine thousands and thousands of Russian accounts doing this via automation software and dumping several million boosters onto the market overnight, and you’ve got a good summary of why Artifact cards have no value and why there’s no playerbase. When everyone has all the special cards, nobody is special.

 

[Ruin]

I've seen 9.99 copies of Fallout 76 at Gamestop so it can't be doing very well.

 

[OmnipotentStupidity]

There’s a metapackage on Steam called the Valve Complete Package. If you own it, you own all Valve games, and Steam will add any valve games you don’t have to your library whenever you log in.

Enter two steam accounts, A and B. A buys the complete pack, installs Artifact and launches it. The game gives them a couple boosters as the new player bonus. A immediately opens a steam trade with B and gives them the boosters, then exits Artifact and tells steam to remove it from their account. Steam removes the entitlement -and player data - from A’s account. A relaunches steam, and since A owns the complete pack Steam sees they don’t own Artifact and adds it to their account, noticing also that it’s already installed. A launches Artifact, receives their new player boosters and trades them to B..

Now imagine thousands and thousands of Russian accounts doing this via automation software and dumping several million boosters onto the market overnight, and you’ve got a good summary of why Artifact cards have no value and why there’s no playerbase. When everyone has all the special cards, nobody is special.

I think you're mixing up the two. The Valve Complete Pack doesn't give you that ability, The Valve Friends and Family Complimentary Package does that, and you can't actually buy that on the Steam Store. You could have gotten it a few different ways in the past however, either by being someone whom Valve acknowledges as important enough via a press interview or some other correspondence, through owning Steam on Mac as an apology for how much they fucked up people's hardware, being an early adopter to their products (i.e. the Steam Link, Steam Controller, Valve Index, etc.), or through going to a special E3 event back in 2013.

When you own the VFaFCP, it will give you all Valve games past, present, and future. The Valve Complete Pack does not give you all of their new games retroactively. The method you described wouldn't actually work unless a bunch of Russians somehow got a hold of that thing, which (unless you're an incredibly active and/or loyal Steam user and supporter whom has influence/a huge wallet) is next to impossible to get nowadays.

 

[Billy_Sama]

I've seen 9.99 copies of Fallout 76 at Gamestop so it can't be doing very well.

I give mid year till Bethesda makes the game Free to Play with heavy focus on microtransactions.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

I think you're mixing up the two. The Valve Complete Pack doesn't give you that ability, The Valve Friends and Family Complimentary Package does that, and you can't actually buy that on the Steam Store. You could have gotten it a few different ways in the past however, either by being someone whom Valve acknowledges as important enough via a press interview or some other correspondence, through owning Steam on Mac as an apology for how much they fucked up people's hardware, being an early adopter to their products (i.e. the Steam Link, Steam Controller, Valve Index, etc.), or through going to a special E3 event back in 2013.

When you own the VFaFCP, it will give you all Valve games past, present, and future. The Valve Complete Pack does not give you all of their new games retroactively. The method you described wouldn't actually work unless a bunch of Russians somehow got a hold of that thing, which (unless you're an incredibly active and/or loyal Steam user and supporter whom has influence/a huge wallet) is next to impossible to get nowadays.

Ooh, that's interesting. I remember the exploit getting pretty widely reported around when it happened but further research shows that if anything it was just like a 40$ drop (and also turned up this amusing site). I wonder if the milling was coming from somewhere peripheral to Valve that would have access to accounts with the VFAFCP.

 

[AnOminous]

I give mid year till Bethesda makes the game Free to Play with heavy focus on microtransactions.

The autistic rage of anyone who actually paid for it is going to be hilarious.

 

[Oddjob OTP]

The autistic rage of anyone who actually paid for it is going to be hilarious.

Anyone who bought this game at 60 dollars and isn't already filled with autistic rage towards FO76 will just act like the broken housewife to Bethesda's alcoholic husband. At worst they'll throw another "Customer Appreciation" grant of 5 dollars in Atoms to shut the pay pigs up.

 

[Syaoran Li]

The worst part is that as bad as Fallout 76 was at launch, it could have gotten better if Bethesda took a step back and evaluated the situation properly instead of going out of their way to piss everyone off in increasingly worse ways.

Remember Final Fantasy XIV?

Back when it first came out in 2010, it was a massive flop and was hated by nearly everyone and their mother for reasons similar to the initial problems Fallout 76 had back at launch (mostly in terms of glitches, microtransactions weren't a thing at the time) but Square Enix was smart enough to look at where they screwed up and reevaluated everything

In 2013, they decided to set things right and shut down the original FF XIV game and do a heavily improved reboot known as Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn and it is one of the few successful MMO's in operation today (not counting GTA Online, as its success was mainly due to being bundled with Grand Theft Auto V)

Had Bethesda kept their heads on straight and not gone off the deep end, they could have salvaged Fallout 76 and did a reboot of the game a couple years down the line but instead continued to self-sabotage to an insane and exponential degree, so now it is too late to redeem the game now.

Again, this makes me think FO76 was set up to fail so Elder Scrolls VI will look amazing by comparison even if it's only a 6/10 mediocre game on its own merits simply because it will be better than Fallout 76, and then Bethesda will be liked again.

Fallout 76 is Bethesda's New Coke. The question is what will be their Coca-Cola Classic?

My best guess is Elder Scrolls VI, but I would also consider Starfield or Doom Eternal as likely possibilities as well.

 

[neverendingmidi]

The worst part is that as bad as Fallout 76 was at launch, it could have gotten better if Bethesda took a step back and evaluated the situation properly instead of going out of their way to piss everyone off in increasingly worse ways.

Remember Final Fantasy XIV?

Back when it first came out in 2010, it was a massive flop and was hated by nearly everyone and their mother for reasons similar to the initial problems Fallout 76 had back at launch (mostly in terms of glitches, microtransactions weren't a thing at the time) but Square Enix was smart enough to look at where they screwed up and reevaluated everything

In 2013, they decided to set things right and shut down the original FF XIV game and do a heavily improved reboot known as Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn and it is one of the few successful MMO's in operation today (not counting GTA Online, as its success was mainly due to being bundled with Grand Theft Auto V)

Had Bethesda kept their heads on straight and not gone off the deep end, they could have salvaged Fallout 76 and did a reboot of the game a couple years down the line but instead continued to self-sabotage to an insane and exponential degree, so now it is too late to redeem the game now.

Again, this makes me think FO76 was set up to fail so Elder Scrolls VI will look amazing by comparison even if it's only a 6/10 mediocre game on its own merits simply because it will be better than Fallout 76, and then Bethesda will be liked again.

Fallout 76 is Bethesda's New Coke. The question is what will be their Coca-Cola Classic?

My best guess is Elder Scrolls VI, but I would also consider Starfield or Doom Eternal as likely possibilities as well.

Oh how cute. You think Bethesda won't shit the bed in both new and old ways for their next game because reasons. The next thing released will still be riddled with micro transactions, bugs, and be pushed out too soon to make a quarter look good. 'Tis the way now.

Maybe, maybe it won't be as blatantly obvious a fuckup as 76, simply because they don't release as much merchandise for the next game, so no cheap vinyl bag, no plastic case with cheap rum bottle in it, only a terrible game.

 

[Tanner Glass]

The worst part is that as bad as Fallout 76 was at launch, it could have gotten better if Bethesda took a step back and evaluated the situation properly instead of going out of their way to piss everyone off in increasingly worse ways.

Remember Final Fantasy XIV?

Back when it first came out in 2010, it was a massive flop and was hated by nearly everyone and their mother for reasons similar to the initial problems Fallout 76 had back at launch (mostly in terms of glitches, microtransactions weren't a thing at the time) but Square Enix was smart enough to look at where they screwed up and reevaluated everything

In 2013, they decided to set things right and shut down the original FF XIV game and do a heavily improved reboot known as Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn and it is one of the few successful MMO's in operation today (not counting GTA Online, as its success was mainly due to being bundled with Grand Theft Auto V)

Had Bethesda kept their heads on straight and not gone off the deep end, they could have salvaged Fallout 76 and did a reboot of the game a couple years down the line but instead continued to self-sabotage to an insane and exponential degree, so now it is too late to redeem the game now.

Again, this makes me think FO76 was set up to fail so Elder Scrolls VI will look amazing by comparison even if it's only a 6/10 mediocre game on its own merits simply because it will be better than Fallout 76, and then Bethesda will be liked again.

Fallout 76 is Bethesda's New Coke. The question is what will be their Coca-Cola Classic?

My best guess is Elder Scrolls VI, but I would also consider Starfield or Doom Eternal as likely possibilities as well.

Fallout 76 : A Realm Reborn won't happen because of how massive the undertaking was for FFXIV.

Square Enix was shockingly honest about where they had gone wrong, they had said they were complacent and arrogant - a statement you'll never get from Bethesda even though most of their mistakes are from a similar place of extreme arrogance.

Naokia Yoshida (the FFXIV producer/director) cried while thanking the fans for sticking by him and the company when they had misplaced their trust. All you're going to get from Todd Howard is another joke about "I guess it doesn't just work, huh?" and then him unironically suggesting that Blades is going to be a good game even though it's currently a beta with real microtransactions already.

 

[Medicated]

Fallout 76 : A Realm Reborn won't happen because of how massive the undertaking was for FFXIV.

Square Enix was shockingly honest about where they had gone wrong, they had said they were complacent and arrogant - a statement you'll never get from Bethesda even though most of their mistakes are from a similar place of extreme arrogance.

Naokia Yoshida (the FFXIV producer/director) cried while thanking the fans for sticking by him and the company when they had misplaced their trust. All you're going to get from Todd Howard is another joke about "I guess it doesn't just work, huh?" and then him unironically suggesting that Blades is going to be a good game even though it's currently a beta with real microtransactions already.

That's the thing I've noticed that tends to separate a lot of the Japanese vs the Western companies. For the Western companies PR is everything, they'll shut down entire sites and delay reviews on the regular just to sell more copies. But the tendency for Japanese developers and especially the higher ups to actually step up and admit they were arrogant or explicitly say what they did wrong and why. I hope the US tech people trying to gain a foothold in Japan don't destroy that culture like they have everything else.

Even Metal Gear Survive, considered a lazy cashgrab by Japanese standards, completely shits on most "always online" modern releases in terms of stability, bugs, or trying to take money out of your pocket. But because they Cali media isn't in bed with Konami, it was absolutely roasted online from the first playtest.

 

[Tanner Glass]

That's the thing I've noticed that tends to separate a lot of the Japanese vs the Western companies. For the Western companies PR is everything, they'll shut down entire sites and delay reviews on the regular just to sell more copies. But the tendency for Japanese developers and especially the higher ups to actually step up and admit they were arrogant or explicitly say what they did wrong and why. I hope the US tech people trying to gain a foothold in Japan don't destroy that culture like they have everything else.

Even Metal Gear Survive, considered a lazy cashgrab by Japanese standards, completely shits on most "always online" modern releases in terms of stability, bugs, or trying to take money out of your pocket. But because they Cali media isn't in bed with Konami, it was absolutely roasted online from the first playtest.

Metal Gear Survive wasn't great (I like it but) it was at least an ambitious use of existing assets and it felt like a lackluster but technically complete game. If they took more time and rounded out some gameplay issues it may have even approached "good". I personally would have seperated out the offline and online modes because they don't mesh remarkably well.

Fallout 76 was garbage all the way through and will likely go down in history as one of the most shameless cash grabs of all time.

 

[The Vinyl Solution]

So, how much longer will Bethesda hang onto this trainwreck before finally pulling the plug on it.

For about as long as thier contemptuous hubris remains validated by the handfull of filthy casuals that spend money in the in-game shop.

 

[No creativity]

Again, this makes me think FO76 was set up to fail so Elder Scrolls VI will look amazing by comparison even if it's only a 6/10 mediocre game on its own merits simply because it will be better than Fallout 76, and then Bethesda will be liked again.

If that's the plan then it's not going to work. The public might be slow to react and it generally takes them a couple of bad games in a row before they decide to turn on a company but they won't forget a blunder of the level of Fallout 76.

The public opinion has shifted against Bethesda and both the gaming press and all the CleanPrinceYongSterlings of Youtube have made it their goal in life to document every single one of their fuckups.

 

[IAmNotAlpharius]

I heard No Mans Sky was able to turn the game around. I don’t know if that’s true because I haven’t played it. I doubt Fallout 76 could change course though. Bethesda keeps screwing up everything it touches.

 

[SiccDicc]

The autistic rage of anyone who actually paid for it is going to be hilarious.

It'll lead to a class action lawsuit and though nothing will come of it I still see it happening.

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

I heard No Mans Sky was able to turn the game around. I don’t know if that’s true because I haven’t played it. I doubt Fallout 76 could change course though. Bethesda keeps screwing up everything it touches.

I watched the Internet Historian video. What struck me is when you collect all the decisions together, it's like watching a man deliberately hitting himself in the nutsack with a hammer. Over. And over. Again.

I would've offered FO76 as F2P, leave the Atom Store in place (similar to Fallout Shelter). Explain that it is a tech demo and experiment to see how well things would work for a full on Fallout Online game.

But instead, you have Todd Howard hyping the crowd, offering the moon and then Bethesda gets fucked when they can't deliver.

 

[vertexwindi]

I watched the Internet Historian video. What struck me is when you collect all the decisions together, it's like watching a man deliberately hitting himself in the nutsack with a hammer. Over. And over. Again.

I would've offered FO76 as F2P, leave the Atom Store in place (similar to Fallout Shelter). Explain that it is a tech demo and experiment to see how well things would work for a full on Fallout Online game.

But instead, you have Todd Howard hyping the crowd, offering the moon and then Bethesda gets fucked when they can't deliver.

to be fair if you actually thought bethesda could deliver on the premise of an online fallout game when their singleplayer games barely work as it is, you're a retard