Author:
Simulacrum
<
nub
>
107.201.120.172
Use
this link
if you want to link to this message and its entire thread of discussion.
Date:
6/18/2018 7:49:04 AM
Subject:
RE: Moar thoughts on Fallout 76
The text in that post was in Roger Moore secret agent script. Here is the public version:
Omitting for a moment the glaring problems I see with settlement building, this project will probably cull some idle Zenimax employees for the online framework. Since I don't imagine FO76 will be a discrete Fallout game in the tradition of FO3 and F04, it will most likely be a grafted cash-in on F04 with the features everyone is enthusing over. The West Virginia land mass will probably be mostly empty, and I don't expect may players will be on a given server or server shard or whatever, which is probably a good thing since I do not count on the Zenimax B-team to do much serious QA.
It's clear that Bethesda (or whatever former mod team they've employed to do the heavy lifting) is using the same engine, so you can expect the same AI dumbassery, floating, and broken pathfinding. You can also expect lots of cell-loading with lots of staring at loading screens, despite your uber master race setup with the fastest SSD on the planet, because this will be first and foremost a console product -- as always.
Apart from all the abuse and griefing that is certain to occur, there will be manifold bugs which will never be fixed. Bethesda's usual MO of relying on modders to fix things will be problematized by a marked absence of what we think of as mods. This, I believe, is why the Creation Club exists. Any modding will need to be vetted by CC, and it will cost money. I don't see how Bethesda can allow the present Nexus/Bethesda.net modding culture to function in Fallout 76. The two things are incompatible.
Which brings me to settlement building. It's fairly clear that I will not be able to construct my sprawling hobo towns in FO76. Instead of settlements, there will be camps or bases. These will be small and very limited in functionality, as they will need to be reconstructed when the aforementioned griefer assboats (or random dragon/cliffracer monsters) blow them up. I'm 100% sure that the game will not allow me to turn something like my giant shack towns into a blueprint for re-assembly elsewhere.
In brief, Fallout 76 will be little more than a FO4 DLC on a large scale with a half-baked multiplayer element. It will be rife with Creation Club microtransactions, which inevitably will include pay-to-win contributions. A very large community will be reduced in short order to a small population of die-hard clownhats who will run everyone else off. Then Fallout 76 will undergo the usual MMO life-support conventions, eventually becoming a free product with more reliance on microtransactions. It will take a long time to die. Actually, it will probably never die. It will just be converted into the usual iron-lung online travesty that prolongs its agony indefinitely.
