Chronicle of Fallout 76: Almost Hell, West Virginia

And stripped of this semblance, most Fallout 76The quests fall flat. It's a lot of "finding that object" or "killing that enemy" without the motivation that usually comes from a well-written adventure. You are not trying to save Nick Valentine to get ahead of your son, nor to speed up the growth of a tree-man to reforest the Capitol Desert. In Fallout 76 you are only chasing ghosts, and finding them only creates more ghosts.

The post-nuclear West Virginia is filled with collectible terminals and holotapes, but none of them seems important or even particularly interesting. They are well written and the holotapes well played, but that does not replace a real conversation.

The saving grace is FallThe talent for environmental storytelling, but even here, the game falters. Some locations are prominent Fall, including an abandoned water park, a state capital adorned for Christmas, the Mothman Museum and a re-enactment of the Green Bank telescope. These are largely generic, Nuka Cola plant retreaders or Mama Dolce or other.

previous FallThere were also such areas, but they were a counterpoint to the current one. You have plunged into the past to build a better future. Fallout 76 is all gone. There is no future, and there is nothing to work for except your own survival.

For this purpose, most of your time in Fallout 76 went to pick up garbage. In appearance, the goal is to make a base similar to Fallout 4The rules. This time, you can build just about anywhere, courtesy of your C.A.M.P. or Mobile platform of construction and assembly. You can even move your base into a new area if you find a particularly scenic lookout.

But why? Those who were in Fallout 4The building of the base could take a kick. I find this extremely tedious, especially because the interface is still clumsy on PC. WASD to move, Z and X to change category, the Directional keys to edit items, then the mouse to rotate and place an item? Yeah, very intuitive.

IDG / Hayden Dingman

Unlocking the elements to build is also very slow. After more than 30 hours, I've unlocked maybe a fifth of the possible items, none of them very entertaining or interesting. And none of this has a functional function beyond the various craft benches and the player's reserve. For a long time, I moved my base every 10 or 15 minutes, placed a craft table and stockpile, and then unloaded my accumulated garbage. This is another annoying aspect: if you move your base, you have to rebuild it. Bethesda allows you to "draw" your drawing and place it in a big block, but I had moments where the plan could not be built in the space I had chosen – and so none of my tables confection was not accessible. Finally, I just created duplicate tables to work around the problem.

At this point, I mostly build things to free up space on my reserve. The limit of your reserve is comically low, at 400 pounds in play. Those who played any match of Bethesda Fall The games know that you can complete this task in about an hour and that it does not go far. At this point, I have a power armor, two weapons, a handful of Stimpaks, bobbleheads and a bunch of craft stuffs in my stash. That's all. I started throwing fusion hearts, missiles and other precious but heavy objects to save space, and I estimate that I spend about a quarter of my time Fallout 76 in the menus, trying to empty the weight.

But if the loot is bad, the lack is even worse. During the first half of the game, I grumbled about the collection of unwanted material, vacuuming the lead pipes, Abrexo Cleaner and other alarm clocks, to break them down into components. # 39; crafts. Then I exploited my stock to the fullest and realized that, aside from garbage collection, there is not much to do in this world. Just the missions, and these (as we have already said) are not very attractive either. Without impulse to explore, no single particularly important or important element to find, there are even fewer reasons to enter the different generic buildings that dot the landscape. You go directly to the goal of the mission, take the holotape or read the terminal, and then quit, again and again.

And of course, hope that someone else has not already interrupted the quest.

IDG / Hayden Dingman

Bugs. Let's get back to talking about bugs. At least four or five servers have been disconnected. Each time, I lost a package of progress when I reconnected and found myself one kilometer from the place where I had been abandoned. One of my quests was reset to an earlier step when I stalled, losing half an hour of work. I never went back to finish it. I logged in once to find myself trapped in someone else 's base, all the outlets requiring a higher picklock skill than mine, which meant I was stuck forever or until I log out and log in to another server. Another time, a wolf appeared underground. He could attack me, but I could not attack, so I'm dead. Once, I took a comic and the texture file was apparently missing.

The performances are abominable, but inconsistently. Sometimes you'll hum at a steady 60 frames per second, and then without warning, you fight at frame rates below 30, your weapon swinging wildly when you try to shoot a pearl on the ghouls. I did not have so many swear I shot you! "Moments in more than a decade, some of my bullets passing through enemies with, I have to assume, the magic of the bad netcode. A thick, petrolatum-like smear makes everything more than 100 feet fuzzy, but the pop-in object is still ubiquitous. And my favorite is enemy pop-in, where a corridor seems deserted until three bad guys suddenly appear.

These meetings are particularly frustrating because Fallout 76The fight is terrible. I mean, everything modern FallThey have had some poor shooter games, but they have already worked around this problem with V.A.T.S., the pseudo-turn-based targeting system that slowed down the action and allowed you to unleash many targeted shots. Fallout 76being an online game, you can not stop or slow down, so V.A.T.S. is a glorified automatic goal with a hitting percentage modifier that fluctuates wildly. On PC, it is much easier to take out a shotgun and destroy everything.

IDG / Hayden Dingman

No pause also means that all menu navigation is done live, which is even more frustrating. Have fun trying to equip grenades while shooting at them.

And then there is the leveling system. Fallout 76 abandons the traditional system of awarding points for some sort of benefit arrangement based on cards. After more than 30 hours of work, I still did not understand how it worked and who I talked to. I think every card you buy gives you a matching skill point, except that sometimes it's not true? Or at least sometimes I bought a card and found that I could not use it anymore. So yes, add "Unintended Leveling System" to the list of complaints.

Bottom line

I must finish on this question, although I could talk a lot more about it. I've talked about it partly in the beta, as voice chat is always on and automatically turned on, so you're stuck listening to people chatting about "My controller's batteries just died!" above holotapes and other key rhythms. Other aspects are only annoying quality of life problems, such as requests from friends who are not friend requests. You must add each other, otherwise any "friendship" is one way.

I could talk about the total lack of reason for interaction between players, which begs the question of why Fallout 76 is a multiplayer game to start.

But let's finish here and close this chapter. I'm done with Fallout 76. Maybe like Elder Scrolls OnlineBethesda can make a decent contribution to this foundation in a year or two. This will require lively discussions about what Fon all 76 want to be however, and what players want out of a multiplayer mode Fall game, because I do not think that's it. We'll see if Bethesda can do the pivot.