Fallout 76 is the score it wishes it had on metacritic

jawa wrote:I think I'm out of this game now.

I've bloomin' loved it for the past year; I have put a lot of time into it and thoroughly enjoyed playing. Even so, the enemy / level changes (as mentioned recently in this thread) and the subsequent tinkering of these elements just hasn't gelled with me and I feel that the game no longer supports the more casual style of format that I employed with it.

I'm disappointed that I'm gonna give it up but, hey, there's plenty of other games out there. I recently started Fallout 4 and I'll give that a go instead. Fallout 76 has, for me personally, been a favourite game during this gen but nothing lasts forever.

(Tears).

You've been in on this game with both feet since it launched (and vocal!) so it's kind of surprising to hear you say that, almost philosophical. It brought you joy but now it's over you're ready to let go.

Venom wrote:You've been in on this game with both feet since it launched (and vocal!) so it's kind of surprising to hear you say that, almost philosophical. It brought you joy but now it's over you're ready to let go.

It sure does feel a bit odd not to be playing it, Venom, as it's something that I've put a lot of time into over the past year. "Live" games can quickly change and so I wouldn't say I'll never play it again but, right now, it feels like time to break from it.

This is a very sad downside to this type of service. A game you paid for, love and have put a lot of time in to has been changed outside of your control. You didn't buy a DLC pack to do this, it's been done for you and fundamentally changed the experience to the point you're forced to stop playing, souring you on the game.

Victor Mildew wrote:This is a very sad downside to this type of service...

Definitely, Ad - "live" games can, and unfortunately do, change. Tbh I probably should spend a bit more time checking out the changes and seeing if I could adjust... but I just don't feel like doing that. It is, IMHO, a mistake to bring in "all enemies scale to your level" in all areas of the map and I don't think the developers will go back on this approach now that they've introduced it. I'll keep an eye on the F76 forum over the coming months to see if changes are made.

In contrast here, they’ve toned down the difficulty for a level 28 player (me) to a point where the game isn’t actually teeth-gnashingly hard...well, in the few locations I visited yesterday anyway. Enemies do take fewer hits to drop.

I love the updates tbh, not having NPC's made it feel weird and now they are everywhere, not just quest givers either. Wander into a house and you'll have a few conversations if you want.

Also - was this always a thing?

Buffalo wrote:In contrast here, they’ve toned down the difficulty for a level 28 player (me) to a point where the game isn’t actually teeth-gnashingly hard...well, in the few locations I visited yesterday anyway. Enemies do take fewer hits to drop.

Buff, yeah, further adjustments to some enemies were made as part of Tuesday's update and this amended some problems (such as hoards of high-level molerats!). Wandering around in the Forest yesterday, things like feral ghouls had been toned down from the original update (still matching the player's level, but requiring fewer hits to take down - which is odd).

Photek wrote:I love the updates tbh, not having NPC's made it feel weird and now they are everywhere, not just quest givers either. Wander into a house and you'll have a few conversations if you want...

Oh, absolutely, Photek - the Wastelanders update introducing new characters and locations was (and is) excellent! The more divisive point is patch 22 (circa two weeks ago) which introduced "one Wasteland" and enemies being synced to player level across all zones. Some folk are cool with it and others not so much; it has more of an impact on lower level / newer players in terms of increasing the grind for materials (as more bullets are needed to take down enemies) and on those who favour the exploration / camp-building style of play rather than being mission-driven.

Photek wrote:...Also - was this always a thing?

The drops? Yeah, they do appear sometimes; I've often seen them in the airport and near Sutton Railway Station. I think you can request them, too, although I have not done this myself.

You can call in supply drops from radio station consoles with a supply request holotape (you probably have loads of them).

OrangeRKN wrote:

jawa, in the 'Obsessed' game thread, wrote:...and the move towards pre-built camp styles rather than pushing the previous more creative self-build styles.

I missed this also, what's this about then?

To be fair it's probably me being a bit grumpy about the One Wasteland stuff rather than anything too bad.

But... in past months there have been several pre-built buildings available to purchase. You can add them to your camp and place stuff in them (even though, so far, they've been fairly small). They look pretty good but, of course, everyone's looks pretty much the same. I haven't bought any myself as I prefer the "build your own" camps; the creativity gives me a buzz.

And... later this year, underground camp expansions will arrive. I was hugely excited by the idea but, looking at the recent previews on the test system, they're not how I thought they'd be. Similarly to the above "ground level" pre-built stuff, you purchase pre-built rooms and you just decorate them. Everyones' rooms will look pretty similar but just with different furniture arrangements.

The camp building in Fallout 76 was incredible in terms of being able to create your own building virtually anywhere on the map and I feel it's now moving towards generic, pre-built stuff. Of course, an alternative viewpoint would be that folk who didn't get on with the building - or just had no interest in that aspect - are now able to plonk down pre-built stuff instead.

I'm just git a bit itchy from all the recent changes. I've stopped playing (and paying) and I've got to decide whether to suck it up and try to get into the new ways of playing or move on. I dunno what I'll choose.

Jawa, I think I read somewhere that The Forest only scales enemies to you until you reach Level 50? Not sure now accurate that is, but seeing as that's the main area you play in, and you're level 43 or so, you should try an level up past that and see if that improves things.

I went back to the game the other day (Fallout is my go-to autumn series) and actually it's made things much easier for me at level 17. Enemies aren't bullet sponges and I'm not having to stimpack constantly. Have they also changed how quickly hunger and thirst decrease?

I'm hesitant to go back into it in any depth for two reasons - one is that I've had Fallout 4 since being drunkenly peer pressured at launch to buy it, and only played it for about 15 hours, so want to get through that. The second is that the frame rate can still be a bit choppy on a base PS4, so I'm tempted to leave it until I get a Series S/X and play it for "free" on Gamepass.

jawa wrote:But... in past months there have been several pre-built buildings available to purchase. You can add them to your camp and place stuff in them (even though, so far, they've been fairly small). They look pretty good but, of course, everyone's looks pretty much the same. I haven't bought any myself as I prefer the "build your own" camps; the creativity gives me a buzz.

And... later this year, underground camp expansions will arrive. I was hugely excited by the idea but, looking at the recent previews on the test system, they're not how I thought they'd be. Similarly to the above "ground level" pre-built stuff, you purchase pre-built rooms and you just decorate them. Everyones' rooms will look pretty similar but just with different furniture arrangements.

The camp building in Fallout 76 was incredible in terms of being able to create your own building virtually anywhere on the map and I feel it's now moving towards generic, pre-built stuff. Of course, an alternative viewpoint would be that folk who didn't get on with the building - or just had no interest in that aspect - are now able to plonk down pre-built stuff instead

Ah, ok! As you know I also love the camp building, so I'm glad none of what was there has been compromised. I get the disappointment of other camps being cookie-cutter clones, but it's probably better than them just being an ugly jumble of turrets and work benches that people who don't care about builds would previously default to I guess!

The underground stuff was always going to have to be limited to certain room shapes I think, but I haven't seen how much freedom you have in picking between different rooms. Knowing the engine I'm guessing you can't combine different rooms together as you want unless there are loading screens between them.

Parksey wrote:Jawa, I think I read somewhere that The Forest only scales enemies to you until you reach Level 50? Not sure now accurate that is, but seeing as that's the main area you play in, and you're level 43 or so, you should try an level up past that and see if that improves things...

Yeah, Parksey, the Forest zone scales enemies up to max level 50. So if, you're level 5 then most enemies will be level 5, if you're 43 then most enemies 43, and if you're level 232 then most enemies will be level 50. Initially the changes also involved the player giving less damage and the enemies taking more hits to defeat, so it was kind of a "treble impact" from how things where before. A subsequent hot fix reduced this but it's still significantly different to how the Forest was before. Mid level players (say, 25 to 45) are affected more as they're facing groups of, say, four ghouls at level 40 rather than four ghouls at level 5; thus more bullets are needed and you require more materials to replace those bullets. Higher level players don't really mind as they're often over-powered and the Forest zone remains pretty easy for them.

Parksey wrote:...I went back to the game the other day (Fallout is my go-to autumn series) and actually it's made things much easier for me at level 17. Enemies aren't bullet sponges and I'm not having to stimpack constantly. Have they also changed how quickly hunger and thirst decrease?...

I suspect that you may be playing after the more recent hot fix and, I agree, the sponge effect has been dialled back from the initial update. Even so, in my eyes the Forest was a "starter" zone and there wasn't really a need for enemy scaling there. Across the rest of the map, cool... I guess I just preferred the "different zones need different skill levels" approach rather than the "enemies scale across all zones" approach.

For hunger and thirst, opinions seem to vary! Some folk say the effects have decreased whilst others say they have increased . It is expected that they'll son be adjusted to only have positive buffs rather than negative ones; I.e. you won't die from not drinking but you will get a temporary benefit for doing so.

Parksey wrote:...I'm hesitant to go back into it in any depth for two reasons - one is that I've had Fallout 4 since being drunkenly peer pressured at launch to buy it, and only played it for about 15 hours, so want to get through that. The second is that the frame rate can still be a bit choppy on a base PS4, so I'm tempted to leave it until I get a Series S/X and play it for "free" on Gamepass.

Yeah, I play on a PS4 Pro and performance seems okay; detail visibility really improved when the Wastelanders update arrived. It may be worth playing through Fallout 4 before properly tackling 76. They're different games sharing similar tech and each has positives and negatives. If I don't continue playing F76, I'll be returning to F4 (which I haven't played too much of!).

I think F4 had a big update for settlement building a while back so that's something of a draw.

OrangeRKN wrote:Ah, ok! As you know I also love the camp building, so I'm glad none of what was there has been compromised. I get the disappointment of other camps being cookie-cutter clones, but it's probably better than them just being an ugly jumble of turrets and work benches that people who don't care about builds would previously default to I guess!

The underground stuff was always going to have to be limited to certain room shapes I think, but I haven't seen how much freedom you have in picking between different rooms. Knowing the engine I'm guessing you can't combine different rooms together as you want unless there are loading screens between them.

Hee! Yeah, it's funny how different folk have different approaches. I've seen many high-level players with extremely basic camps (it's obvs just not their bag!) whilst some lower-level players have lovely camps .

Currently there are three types of underground room (small, medium and large) and you can use each of them in your camp if you wish to. Each one has it's own (big!) build budget, too. The three access doors vary; the small and medium ones look okay, but the large one is a *massive* vault door that looks a bit odd sitting in a camp! There are loading screens to access them but they don't seem to be too long.

I haven't even bothered with building a camp.sp far. The settlement part of F4 doesn't hold my interest, so I'm just playing 76 as a "shared world" single player game, if that makes sense.

The quests are pretty simple MMO affairs, though you can tell which ones are from The Wastelanders as they are a step above the base game ones. I didn't actually play the base game, as I tried the game with the free trial back in early May, after Wastelanders had come out, and then picked up a cheap second hand disc for a fiver after that.

As I said before, it's still got problems and I'm not sure these can really be ironed out, as they've restricted themselves to using the F4 engine (for a single.player RPG) and making it an MMO/online game.

The game convinces me that an online Fallout game *can* work, but I think it needs to be built from the ground up, rather than taped on to F4's skeleton.

Still, the map is really good so far. I probably prefer it to F4's Wasteland and maybe, whisper it, the Capital Wasteland, which to be honest, wasn't all that interesting really was it?

The map itself is genuinely great, the verticality, variety, more realistic scale and interconnectedness makes it easily the best of the 3D fallouts. Of course the map isn't everything - New Vegas probably has the worst map and yet it's the best game.

The capital wasteland was great in DC itself, the atmosphere in the subways and being forced through them to get about the city is fantastic. Outside of the city it sort of falls into drudgery I think.

4 I think has a pretty decent map, especially when you get into Boston itself and have the verticality in moving from the streets up to the flyovers and rooftops, and I thought the glowing sea was a cool area for its harshness (especially for extending past where you expect it should from the map). The settlements were a big disappointment though, especially diamond city. Probably a benefit of not generally having NPCs in 76 was that they could more easily make things more believably sized without worrying about actually populating them with people and quests.

Parksey wrote:...Still, the map is really good so far. I probably prefer it to F4's Wasteland and maybe, whisper it, the Capital Wasteland, which to be honest, wasn't all that interesting really was it?

I'd go along with the idea that the game map in F76 could maybe be better than what we saw in Fallouts 3 , Vegas and 4. I'm a fan of those games but the scale and content of the F76 map is a step forward.

I think I'm gonna give the game another go. I am frustrated with some of the recent changes and the game is buggy; but I have to accept that "live service" games do constantly change and evolve. A month-to-six-weeks ago many players (camp builders) were raging 'cos the ability to place walls back-to-back (and thus wallpaper both sides) was stopped. Bethesda quickly corrected the "error", though. I'm hoping that they will further refine the enemy levels in the Forest area; the map is surely big enough to allow for areas catering to all player levels and play styles.

OrangeRKN wrote:The map itself is genuinely great, the verticality, variety, more realistic scale and interconnectedness makes it easily the best of the 3D fallouts...

Definitely, Orange - it's great to be able to venture over the mountainous areas and the terrain really is varied.

I also really like the weather lighting in the game; sure, the detail isn't the "16x" meme, but the lighting makes for some great effects. For example, when a rad storm hits the yellow-grey sky is magnificent. I've seen vids and screenshots of the Cranberry Bog and the light coming through the dense trees looks lovely... I'm not strong enough to venture there yet, though!

twitter.com/Fallout/status/1316038526618796040

... . I'm not sure if Bethesda meant this to poke a little fun at themselves or not; it has certainly given some Twitter users a reason to dig 'em out. But, hey, fair play, Bethesda!

jawa wrote:I think I'm gonna give the game another go. I am frustrated with some of the recent changes and the game is buggy; but I have to accept that "live service" games do constantly change and evolve...

I haven't. I *think* I've moved on.

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