Hello and welcome to Rock Paper Shotgun.
Today we're looking at Fallout 76 - a game that, coincidentally, has a lot of rocks,
paper and shotguns.
The bombs have fallen and what is left of humanity is about to leave its underground
home.
What does this mean for the outside world?
Well, a lot of things are going to get shot.
These mad robots probably deserved it.
This chicken, however, did not.
It also means we'll be doing lots of classic Fallout things: praying our hairpins don't
break in a lock… finding skeletons next to conveniently placed props…
Or just running like hell from Deathclaws.
The big difference is that there are now other people to run like hell with you.
And this is where it gets bumpy.
You see, online Fallout wants to capture the manic fun of social play, but somehow do it
in a post-apocalyptic fiction famed for its isolation and storytelling.
Can you have one without compromising the other?
I've been trying to play the current beta as a solo game, to bring you these PC impressions
and see if we can find the DNA of the older games away from the crowds of people.
I'll be looking at how it handles quests, other people, survival and world building
- but let's kick off with one of the few things I really did like.
Before we go further, I wanted to answer a question I've seen many people asking: can
you fight a monster with a giant beehive for an ass?
As you can hopefully see under the cover of night: yes, there is a monster with a beehive
where it's ass should be.
It's called the Honey Beast, which I think is distant relation of the Honey Monster - another
sugary abomination that gave me nightmares.
The honey beast guffs out swarms of bees, which is pretty funny when they're attacking
ghouls, but not so funny when the ghouls are stung to death and they come looking for a
new victim.
If you do kill it, you get a load of sweet honey at the end.
Or should that be, from the end?
While we're on the subject of new monsters that I like, here's the Grafton Monster.
This is a creature from West Virginian folklore, although the folk story doesn't mention
it being stuffed with sweet, sweet loot.
As with the Honey Beast, I enjoyed watching this hulking brute fight my enemies for me.
If there's something Fallout 76 does well, it's big crowds of monsters picking fights
with other crowds of monsters.
I want to know how many radroaches could take the Grafton Monster.
Of course, when it ran out of super mutants I had to hide in a nearby cafe and throw molotov
cocktails at it.
I just thought it would be good to start with these beasties before I look at the real monster:
your fellow humans.
Back at E3, Todd Howard said it didn't matter that the game has no NPCs, because "every
character you see is a real person".
And yes, at moments there's a thrill in knowing that it's a fellow human coming
to your rescue as you tag-team baddies in an abandoned water park.
Humans are certainly better at keeping themselves alive then Preston Garvey ever was.
But it comes at a cost: people are weird and unpredictable, and weird and unpredictable
isn't great for building immersion.
Take my first interaction in the whole game.
When I stepped out of Vault 76 I wanted to drink in the awesome sight of the vast West
Virginia landscape; but all I could focus on was the name 'Cocktimus Prime' floating
on the screen.
We are the last remnants of humanity and one of us is called CocktimusPrime.
We are doomed.
If it isn't the gamertag, it's the body the gamertag is attached to.
It's very hard to buy into the mystery of a deserted camp when you've got this idiot
jumping around in it.
Even worse is the endless parade of survivors on the same quests as you, all using the same
computers and following the same routes.
One mission asks me to play detective and track down a missing kid, but it's impossible
to take it seriously when I can see another detective doing all the same work a couple
of seconds ahead of me.
This behaviour isn't distinct to Fallout 76 - human weirdness is something you need
to overlook to buy into any MMO's world - but the Fallout universe isn't just any
MMO world.
It's a place that trades on loneliness and a sense of discovery - both of which are much
harder to find when you're hanging out with CocktimusPrime.
Put aside other people and you're left with that massive hole where Fallout NPCs should
be.
The decision not to include NPCs, instead using robots and computer terminals to share
information, is one of the more damaging in the game.
However you feel about Bethesda's characters and writing, they gave your missions emotional
context - it's bleak exploring a world where everyone is dead.
Worse, it's too predictable: any quest that involves finding someone?
Spoiler alert: they're dead.
You can tell, because /everyone/ is dead.
It puts huge limitations on what missions can actually involve.
With no characters to challenge your actions or conjure moral dilemmas, the missions can't
go beyond 'go to a place and look for an object or kill the monsters'.
And it's so hard to create drama when all you have is text documents to set the scene.
Take that search for the missing kid I mentioned - I normally love detective missions, but
this case is solved by going to a computer in a theme park that tells me to go to a computer
in a post office which takes me to the killer's house where he confesses… on his computer.
It's like browsing my google documents with a bit of molerat shooting in-between.
There are also Holotape audio logs - in other words, a text document you don't have to
read.
I'm in two minds about these: they're well written and performed, and bring much
needed human voices into this otherwise silent world.
But man alive, they are so long and cumbersome to listen to.
A radiated hell world, full of very loud gunfire, is not a good place to listen to a radio play...
That happens so many times, and people monologue for so long I can't bring myself to start
the tape again.
Honestly, by the time I got to the second beta session I was skipping them entirely.
It's a shame that the quests lack that spark of life, because West Virginia itself is a
fun place to have adventures.
It's a much more vivid world than Bethesda have made before, with its burning orange
leaves of the opening area making way for regions where it's hard to tell anything
bad has actually happened while you've been in the vault.
Well, zero population aside.
Even the Toxic Valley - not a name that fills you with hope - is quite an unusual take on
poisonous swamps, with the ground bleached white by chemical spillages.
Where previous Bethesda maps could blur from one charred hillside to the next, there's
a tangible shift here.
It needs it, of course, what with the map being their biggest yet.
It's the lumpiest map too - with rolling hills and giant mountain ranges carving the
map into distinct regions.
I'm a big fan of hills in games - I like terrain where navigating it is a bit of a
puzzle in itself and where it rewards with you a stunning view when you get to the top.
And for all its changes, I do think Fallout 76 delivers on the core exploration I want
from a modern Fallout game.
I'm a huge sucker for the compass bar, which still shows the outline of a landmark that
then pops into life when you finally reach it.
I love seeing just what pops into view as you head towards these ghostly icons - often
it's just another boring farm (although I will take those handy wood supplies, thanks),
but when it's a pumpkin party with a free clown costume, it's worth the trip.
My best hours with the game have definitely been the ones where i walked in the opposite
direction to the other human dots on the map and started to see what the world looked like.
And I definitely want to see more.
Being online also changes how Bethesda's traditional auto-targeting combat works.
In the older Bethesda fallouts, you could freeze time and see hit probabilities for
every potential shot.
Time can't stop in a shared server so it's replaced with a real-time VATS.
This version still removes the need to manually aim, but does asks you to position yourself
to improve the hit odds in real-time.
It's really just an over-zealous auto aim, especially if you equip the character perks
that let it target limbs or heads.
It's still limited by action points, mind you, so it's not the instant-win aimbot
that it might sound like.
I don't hate it as a system - I've always found it useful to have something to pick
enemies out from Fallout's cluttered settings, and to track small and fast enemies.
Slow mo or not, it's still useful for sniping buzzing pests.
The bigger combat change is actually the number of enemies that get thrown at you.
In order to give teams a run for their money, you're constantly facing down gangs of ghouls
or the new Scorched enemies.
It's a pace I just don't expect from Fallout - pushing a big focus onto melee combat as
you desperately swing at creatures grabbing at your body.
I traditionally play Fallout in stealth mode, but it just doesn't work here - once one
enemy is off, you've got a manic punch-up on your hands.
Swarming enemies make more sense in events, which are communal missions that task any
nearby people to fight off waves of attackers or protect a robot or machine while it finishes
a task.
They're big, broad punch-ups, but it's good to see a normally chaotic crowd of people
work to a common goal.
I also enjoyed the hints of tower defence in combat tasks that give you a few minutes
to place turrets and defences to protect a workbench I take control of out in the wild
- plopping down guns is about all I can manage with the impossibly fiddly building interface.
I also like that the survival elements of the game are quite generous.
Normally when I see a thirst or hunger meter my own disinterest meter begins to rise - I
play games to get away from the hideous toil of existence.
Fallout 76's food and water needs are gentle as far as the genre goes.
Both deplete slowly and when they are down, it only saps your action points, which is
Fallout's answer to stamina.
It's a background concern, and easily managed.
Dirty water and raw meat is everywhere and just needs heating - you'll find big piles
of wood in most rural locations.
You don't really need to worry about building cooking facilities either, as they're all
over the country or you can just fast travel back where you get your cooking tutorial.
Oh, and make sure to use a meat spit while wearing a clown outfit if you want to give
yourself nightmares.
In fact, it's pretty generous across the board - although fast travel comes with a
cap cost, it does mean you're quickly able to make in-roads across the vast map.
As long as you reach and activate the next landmark - never more than a minute or so
apart - you've got a handy respawn point.
And death really isn't a big deal anyway - it dumps your junk items in a bag to collect
where your body was.
And if there's a high level enemy still lurking about?
It's not the end of the world to lose a sack of junk.
I mean, it's called junk.
Of course, there's lots I've yet to really dig into I've only started tinkering with
the perk cards - a revamp of character building that lets you rewire your hero on the fly
based on collectible ability cards.
Or the PvP aspect that sees rival gunslingers get caught in a war of escalating revenge
kills - I've stayed away from other people and so their bullets can't get me.
And I've yet to play with the building - I built enough to plant a stash box to dump
my junk and haven't looked back since.
Short four hour beta bursts are not the way to discover a world of this size, and I imagine
much of it won't make sense until it's out in the wild.
But I do struggle to see how it'll overcome the big storytelling problems at the centre.
Of course, if you've been playing the beta I'd love to hear your thoughts.
And if you have any questions about the game, do pop them in the comments below and I'll
try my best to find answers to them, too.
I hope you found this Fallout 76 tour useful - I'm still clarifying some of my thoughts
and we'll be doing more thorough analysis over the coming weeks.
Why not subscribe to Rock Paper Shotgun so you don't miss out on that.
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