The promise vs Reality



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In the week since Fallout 76since its release, it has since become one of the most controversial games of 2018. Its Metacritic page is a horror show; its official forum and its subreddits are battlegrounds between those who have found something to love in the online survival game and those who think that Bethesda has removed the series from a cliff.

Although there is a lot of hyperbole on both sides, the disappointment of many players is reasonable. Fallout 76 was presented to them at its first revelation at this year's E3.

In an intelligent article on the subject at Forbes, writer Paul Tassi compares how the game was revealed to the way director Todd Howard described it at the Bethesda presentation at the E3 in June. Howard spoke about the "all-new" rendering technology of the game, but Fallout 76 does not look much better than previous games in the series, with a few exceptions. Howard said 76 The launch of the beta would have occurred just before the release, which would make it look more like early access for those who ordered in advance and not a real test period where Bethesda could take into account the comments received and use them. this to improve the finished product.

Most importantly, Howard described a game in which the interaction between players would be a world filled with interesting dramas. "When we think about games, we think of the worlds and choices you can make, the stories you create and tell yourself," he said. "We have a game, more than any other game we've ever played, where the choices are yours, where you decide what will happen. You will decide heroes and villains. "

Todd Howard at the Bethesda E3 Showcase 2018 showcases how players will create stories in Fallout 76.
Screenshot: Bethesda (YouTube)

In his article, Tassi rightly notes that at least until now, none of this has failed because there is no sense of permanence in the world that the players live in. In fact, there is a lot going on Fallout 76 I like it enough, especially when I play it as a single solo game. But it's also clear that it lacks the strong character-based stories of previous Bethesda games and unlike Howard's talk at E3, players do not have the tools to create their own interesting stories.

Whenever you connect to Fallout 76you are randomly placed on one of the game servers with a group of strangers. Your gear, your story progression, and your encampment all come with you, but everything you do in the world outside of pre-structured quest lines disappears once you leave the game and return later. Even if you can team up with friends, the map you are exploring and on which you build your bases will never stay the same. You may meet another vaulter somewhere in the hills of West Virginia, decide to exchange items and explore a nearby factory, or even kill a high-powered Death Claw. shootings during the process, then split after looting the corpse. However, unless you go out of your way, you will never see this person again, because the next time you log in, you will be on completely different servers.

Howard alluded to this solitary future in his original remarks at the conference. "Your character is not tied to a server, in fact, you will never even see a server when you play," he said at the time, but many, including myself. , thought that associating with friends of different servers would be easy and transparent, not that the world of Fallout 76 it would be ephemeral and impossible for people to leave their mark. Even nuclear weapons launchers have no lasting effect.

One of the information trailers shown at the E3 presentation explained how actors rebuilding civilization would be a key element of Fallout 76. According to the trailer, the "desire to build" separates the man from the beast, before showing to groups of players who stand in outposts fighting together hordes of super mutants and sometimes Scorchbeast. In fact, player campsites look more like studios than towns. Players can not build them together, and they disappear when the person they belong to is not connected. And since it is impossible for several groups to play together on the same server, creating rival camps and engaging in complex processes. In role play, there is no real way for players to become the heroes and villains of a larger and self-taught drama.

On the map, there are public campsites that people can control and operate for important resources. But because they are unique to each server, everything you build will disappear when you log out and never come back. Like personal campsites, they can only be controlled by one player at a time, preventing groups of people from collaborating to create and defend the sites together for mutual benefit. While Howard had previously argued that players would be the characters of Fallout 76, they can not do what nonplayable characters could do Fall games: they can not open stores, give themselves quests or engage in political intrigue.

I even became suspicious of building my own campsite in the game, given how buggy everything is, despite the 47GB patch that went online earlier this week. Campsites are supposed to be perfectly portable, not only between servers, but between different instances of the map. Individual segments of your camp – a platform with defensive turrets or a bench-making station – are supposed to be "stored" when you move, allowing you to replace them later, if necessary. So far, this has proven to be the exception rather than the rule. Most often, when I was trying to transport the camp, I was building another place, most of it's gone.

As a result, while I explore Fallout 76At the end of the game, I started using an extremely base-free camp to make the loss of resettlement even less painful. Rather than feeling emboldened in my apparent mission of helping to forge a new society, nuclear fallout, into the hills of West Virginia, I often found myself crying Vault 76, which turned out more hospitable and permanent than any human being. -abris built that I've met in the wild.

"We have built a 100% dedicated server platform that will support this game now and in the years to come," Howard said during the E3 demo. Assuming that this last part is always true, it is possible that Fallout 76 could still become the story-rich online game, originally described by Todd Howard. What Bethesda sent out last week is not that game.

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