Fallout 76 B.E.T.A.: Impressions

IMPORTANT: I DON'T BELIEVE IN RETRACTIONS OR DELETION OF INFORMATION, AND I OWN UP TO WHAT I WRITE.

HOWEVER.

FALLOUT 76 IS AN ABSOLUTE PIECE OF SHIT AND I WAS SO WRONG IN WHAT I WROTE BELOW. I REGRET IT IMMENSELY.

PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING NOT AS AN ACCURATE ASSESSMENT OF THE GAME, BUT RATHER AT HOW BLINDED SOMEONE CAN BE WHEN THEY REALLY WANT SOMETHING TO BE GOOD. FEEL FREE TO MOCK ANY AND EVERY PART OF THIS.

SINCERE APOLOGIES TO ANYONE WHO READ THIS AND SUBSEQUENTLY BOUGHT THE GAME.




Last night I was able to play the Fallout 76 Break-it Early Application Test, or B.E.T.A., for a whole 4 hours (I think I was one of the first people to log on, and I got booted only once the servers went offline). A few among you, Beautiful Readers, have asked me to do a write-up of the whole experience, so here I will outline my impressions of the game. Keep in mind that this is the B.E.T.A., intended to weed out bugs and performance issues, but I will be treating my experience as if it were the final game.

MTXs: The Power of Atom

Let's get the elephant-in-the-china-shop out of the way: the microtransactions (MTXs). The game features two kinds of currencies; caps (as in bottle caps) and atoms, a currency you obtain through various in-game achievements (collect X resources, kill X of enemy type Y, etc.). Like many games before it, the B.E.T.A. chose to omit the inclusion of a marketplace using that alternate currency. Therefore I am left to assume the worst, and although Bethesda Studios claimed that all items purchased through atoms would be cosmetic, I cannot say whether or not Regular Gameplay for an Adult with Limited Possible Playtime (RGALPP) would be enough to obtain those cosmetic items without purchasing the aforementioned currency with money. Throughout the play session, I accumulated a total of 580 atoms through various challenges, but without an idea of what I can purchase with those, I am left high and dry. Time will tell whether this drip-feeding of atoms is enough to purchase something of value, or heaven forbid seasonal or holiday items, but unfortunately, here, I am left to assume the worst.

Game Performance: Kinda What You'd Expect

Those of you who have played online games à la Rust, or Arc: Survival Evolved, know the kind of game performance and issues you might expect from an open-world online survival game; button presses occasionally registering awkwardly, some frame-rate stuttering issues, uncomfortable game models "teleporting" around, etc. I have to admit that this game doesn't fix those issues, but it's not worse than other games either. I only began noticing performance during combat, where the models would rarely jump from one place on the server to another (5 meters to the left, for example), I assume because of latency issues. The game really starts chugging once there are multiple people in the same vicinity, but never to the point of unplayability (a drop to approx. 20FPS is the worst I've seen). That said, never does the game feel broken or unplayable because of those issues, and they never affect gameplay in a significant fashion, but they're just enough to be noticeable, which can rip you out of immersion.

It should be noted, however, that when playing, I myself never teleported around the map, or felt that my input was not registering. There was this one jumping section (which I failed at miserably and broke my leg) where I never thought that latency was holding me back. In fact, when not in the presence of enemies or players, the game might as well be offline.

Controls: I DID NOT WANT TO USE THAT STIMPACK

They remapped the stimpack button on the keyboard to be a button I usually mapped to my pistol, so I ended up using most of my stimpacks by accident. At least the game doesn't consume them when you're at full health, but damn.

Online: Them Hoodlums Stole My Bucket

The thing with Fallout 76 is that you tend to forget it's an online game, and in fact during the 4 hours I played I can only say I had "online interactions" for a total of about a half-hour's playtime. I was walking along, minding my business, when out of that orange-coloured sky I see three players blocking the road, wearing weird jumpsuits and wielding baseball bats (one of them had a pistol, too). They made the in-game sign for love (a heart with their hands) to which I responded in kind with my own heart. I had turned my back, walked three steps down the road, and all three rushed me, shooting and beating me up.

(Honestly I should've seen it coming, they really looked like a street gang.)

Here's the thing; they were barely doing any damage to me - definitely less than what their weapons should have been doing - and I could have easily ran away if I hadn't thought "f*** it, let's roll" and retaliated. I had grenades and a nice hunting rifle, after all. The moment I shot back and hit one of them, that person began doing full damage to me, and only then were they a real danger. We were now hostile to each other, and unfortunately the grenade I threw damaged all three of them so it was now three versus one. I took down (not killed) two of them before the third one smacked me with their bat, revived her friends, and killed me off for good.

(This is the first and only bug I encountered, by the way; I was supposed to be able to recover my junk (the only thing you lose upon death is your "junk" items) but there was nothing where I fell, so either they stole those items or it was a bug. It wasn't a significant loss, however.)

When I respawned I was suddenly surrounded by about 5 other players, one of which had fallen into the same trap, and we each sign-language-ed ourselves the same thing; let's form a posse and hunt down those raiders. We ran up to the site they were at, and shot down those bandits, netting each of us a small bounty reward. This whole interaction of getting robbed and then tracking down the offenders was the largest online interaction I had throughout the B.E.T.A., and it was fun, the kind of "radiant" experience I wish other games had.

Atmosphere: Almost Heaven, West Virginia...

So here's where the game really shone. Fallout 76 takes place in the Appalachia mountains, and I must admit that the game studio has done an amazing job of recreating the forests and hills of West Virginia. The moment I stepped out of the vault I was greeted with lush forests and nature trails, birds chirping in the day and cave crickets screeching at night. Fallout 76 takes place only 25 years after the Great War, and was not a direct target of the nukes, and so the wonders of the Appalachian forests are preserved here. I remember walking around and noticing a nature trail, and just following it to wherever it lead me. Once at the top I came upon a nice little picnic area infested with ghouls, and the whole time it felt like I was playing a Fallout game. In that regards, the game did not disappoint; at first I walked around with the radio blasting music, but I eventually turned it off and wandered the wilderness in eerie silence, soaking in the world around me.

I was personally afraid that the game would focus on the MMO grind instead of on world building and exploration, but that is absolutely not the case; in fact, one of the first small towns you come across, Flatwoods, feels so much more vibrant and alive (despite everyone being dead) than any of the Fallout 4 locales.

That is not to say that the game world is peaceful, far from it. The artfully recreated North-Eastern American towns hide all manner of dangers and tragedies, and the woodlands in-between which I explored were no safer. Roaming packs of ghouls, feral animals, and Scorched (a new enemy type of insane mutated people) lend a sense of danger to the whole experience, and you never truly feel safe.

The only time I felt truly safe and relaxed during the BETA was while I was building myself a small cabin on the side of a mountain, just a small temporary place I could call home until I could setup a more permanent cabin somewhere else, and that only lasted until this random low-level player stumbled upon my abode, a horde of ghouls following her. Together we barricaded ourselves in my shack (closed the door) since I was low on ammo and she only had a small hatchet with which to defend herself, but my defenses (door) were no match for the ghouls, and it wasn't long before we frantically had to defend ourselves, myself swinging a machete I had recently built.

When we had overcome the danger, the player thanked me with some water and a stimpack, and that's when I realized the core truth about this game: Fallout 76 is a true-to-form Fallout game in every way that matters. I would argue that no other 3D Fallout game has that sense of survival in a hostile world down as well as Fallout 76 does, even when you're low-level in previous entries. Fallout 76 does this better than any other Fallout game, perhaps better than any other survival game.

Also, you get to eat three-headed opossum meat. I thought that was worth noting.

Overall Impressions

At 11pm, when the servers were shut down, I was left with mixed feelings; I wanted to play more of the game, and knowing that I will be unable to do so for some time leaves me a little sad, but overall I am looking forward to sinking hours upon hours in West Virginia. The MTXs are definitely worrisome, and something to keep an eye on; we'll only know how nefarious they are upon release and subsequent updates (see Guild Wars 2 on How Not To Introduce MTXs In A Game) - but I am looking forward to relaxing with my fellow Vault Dwellers, sipping beers and killing robots, in Fallout 76.