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paulruskeaton · 6 years

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13 tips for future Fallout 76 players.

Fallout 76′s B.E.T.A. has given me a taste of what to expect from the full game. It has also given me a heads up on some of the mechanics and changes the franchise has introduced, for better or for worse. This post is written for those who already decided to buy 76, but chose to pick it up later, and to opt out of the B.E.T.A. Here’s some tips to make your first few hours with the game less frustrating.

More after the break.

(These notes are based on version 1.0.0.6.; the last update released during the B.E.T.A..At time of writing, the game has not had its official release and the issues named here may have since been addressed by the development team. This post may be edited down the road for corrections and updates, if need be.)

1. Trading with party members is not the same as trading in general.... or trading as you have come to know.

In the current version, you have the option to trade with anyone on a server by walking up to them and holding down the key/button that prompts the trading screen. However, they’ve changed the up how the trading system actually functions.

Instead of selecting what you want to buy and sell first and then confirming it all at once, you are forced to sell/buy each item individually. Pretty much, it’s less about item value and more about how many caps you have on hand. Caps are given more function in this game, as you need to them to fast travel long distances and move your CAMP around. Okay, sure, but once you get to the real-life players involved with this system, things get... complicated.

Say you see a cool baseball bat in someone’s inventory and decide you want to have it. Here’s how you go about getting it. First, you select it, which marks the item as something you are interested in. Then the seller needs to select the item as well and then set a price. Once the price has been set, the buyer can then select the item again to purchase it.

Sounds simple on paper, but no one in the parties I was in understood this system: me included. In fact, if you are in a party and want to swap gear, you are much better off dropping each other’s items---which appears in a bottomless paper bag at the moment---and pick it out of there. But if you’re looking to be a merchant, it’s still an awkward system. Again, you can’t purchase en mass or just swap items without getting caps involved. Okay, that’s not completely true: you can set the cap value to zero, but you still have to do this for each item you wish to sell/buy.

Oh, and additionally, be sure to use the “offers” filter often, or at least if you get stuck with a person who isn’t talking. Which brings me to the next tip....

2. Your mic is either always on, or always off.

There is no mic button; nobody likes this.

In most online games I know, if you want to talk, you hold down the button/key bound to that, which opens your mic. 76 does not have this. There are four options, toggled in only in settings: “Off, “Auto,” “Team,” and “Area.” The people I hung around with usually had it on “Team”, since that filters out everyone else on the server: who are the ones who have it on “Auto”. “Area”, which only broadcasts your voice to... eh... the nearby area, ended up being kind of useless, since not everyone wants to hear you all time: which will happen because Bethesda, again, made sure of that.

You mic turns on whenever it detects a noise higher than a pin drop. So if you’re chatting with someone on Discord, have a dog, tend to breathe heavily, or if you’re pretty much in close proximity to anything that makes a noise, you will be heard unless you turn off your mic completely, or are muted. Additionally, while there is an icon that displays next to the name of the player who is talking, is is super tiny, so unless you are standing right in front of them or have a very distinct voice, you may not actually know who is talking. Speaking of things that are hard to shut up...

3. Audio Logs

In the first few missions, you are tasked with finding audio logs of the old Overseer and some groups that used to operate in Appalachia. Last time I checked, once you pick them up, they play automatically. So first off, they moved the holotapes menu away from “data” to its own menu under “inventory”; you go here to play/stop a tape. Second, if you’re playing with a team or just some unmuted folk, you’ll need to turn on the subtitles, so you can actually hear what you’re supposed to do. This comes in handy because...

4. Objectives are super vague, super cluttered, and super fickle.

You know that old problem with Bethesda quests where the compass will keep leading you inside, then outside, in then back out again for one marker? Well, that’s back: with a vengeance. At once point, a teammate and I decided to fix up a nearby power plant. The objective was simple: fix up the generator, reactor, and cooling towers. How, may you ask? Well, i’ll tell you right now, because the game sure doesn’t. You find leaks and broken yellow control panels. That’s it.

Simple enough, right? Yes, but then the aforementioned marker problem comes into play. These leaks and panels are never in the same building and seem to use the same marker icon as everything else, so if you’re in a labyrinth of a building, and power plants tend to be here, expect to run around in circles. A lot. Additionally, unless you shut them off, you will see your teammate’s open objectives on your screen as well: cluttering up the HUD pretty quickly.

Oh, and some of these quests are on a timer. Yep.

Some quests are called “events”. They pop up on the overworld map whenever a player starts them and anyone on the server can join in to assist. (Though they may not always get the XP... I haven’t figured out why yet.)The event ends either once it’s completed, abandoned (leaving the area) or after an allotted time. Why for the latter? Other than to annoy me, I have no idea. I do know that my friend and I failed that power plant objective, right near the end, because the game got impatient with our running around. Hardly our fault though: we kept dying. Why?

5. Because dragons.

Surprise! It’s Skyrim after all!

Okay, technically no, but it’s an action RPG where you fight dragons so I’m making the joke now while it’s still a living horse. They’re actually “scorched beasts”, and they shoot nothing but radioactive murder plague death from their mouths. Don’t fight them until you are ready, and you won’t be for awhile. Don’t be like my idiot teammate and try to bring one down “for the XP”. You’ll just die. Over and over. Speaking of death...

6. You “lose” items when you die.

But don’t worry, you can retrieve them. But balance that choice wisely. You can respawn near your last death point, but do take a moment to ask yourself a few questions. “Why did I die?” Was it because of something manageable, like a ghoul or mutant that got the jump on you? Or was it a marauding player--who probably already picked it up--who now has a bounty on their head? Or was it because of the aforementioned murder death dragons? Take these into consideration. Also consider what you left behind. When you die, you only drop whatever junk/scrap you had picked up and haven’t stashed away yet. (More on that later.) Ask yourself, was it something kinda common like steel or cloth? Or was it something absolutely essential, like....

7. Wood and Aluminum

You need these. Always. Never walk pass them. Ever.

In Fallout 4, adhesive was the precious commodity. Now you can find that near everywhere. Meanwhile, in a video game literally set in an enormous forest, wood is hard to come by. Why? No idea. You can’t “scrap” your environment like in 4, and for some reason, axes cannot cut down trees. (Yes, they never could in these games, but I feel like there’s some serious cognitive dissonance going on here) You need wood to build shelters, crafting tables and make “boiled water”; all key for early survival.

But you can scrape up enough wood for this if you know where to look: scrapping common weapons is the main one and some areas have lumber in small piles. The bigger headache is aluminium. Aluminum is much rarer and you need aluminum. Why?

8. Because weapons/armor can now break again.

Unpopular opinion: I actually liked the repair system of past Fallout games. Having to do equipment upkeep felt, I dunno, appropriate for a series about survival? It was also aided by the fact that you can do repairs on the fly with similar items, or the Jerryrigging perk. This time, not so much. When your equipment breaks, you need to find a workbench to fix it, and you need materials to do so. Once again, this is why you need as much aluminum as you can carry because most repairs need them. But what about...

9. Being over-encumbered.

So having to carry so much junk... well, you know what tends to happen. But the over-encumbered penalty has been tweaked a bit: while you will still slow to a crawl, it’s only after your AP meter has been exhausted.

Luckily, they made junking more convenient: you can break down any junk, armor, and weapon at any workbench and some early perks allow you to carry more by cutting the weight of various items. Stock up on ‘em early if you can; it’ll make the trek back to your stash box easier. That said...

10. Your stash box is not bottomless.

Hoarders beware: use it or lose it.

Your stash is always with you as long as you have a CAMP around, but as I learned, it does have a limit to what can be held. Pretty much, you’re forced to craft and trade often; to not just pick up anything you find lying around because you’ll probably have use for it later. (After all, your priority is wood and aluminum anyway.) Unfortunately, I have no way to trump this system. The closest thing I found is to craft ammo: a much more precious commodity than caps. Come on, Bethesda, just because Metro uses a bullet currency doesn’t mean you’re prohibited from implementing it! That said, you may conclude that you could take the old Skyrim approach and just trade a high volume of useless crap for the good stuff. Well, guess what.

11. You cannot “print money.”

They actually nipped this one in the bud early on. Yes, you can craft things if you have the ingredients and recipes to do so. But that’s not for everything. I saw that craftable hatchets and knives can no longer be traded at the handful of NPC merchants in the game. Same goes for bullets: you’re better off just shooting your surplus ammo into the air, like a “true Appalachian”, than setting on them, waiting for value. Unfortunately, you cannot scrap bullets either, which is a shame and I hope the add the option down the line, around the time they further restrict our trading options.

12. Oh, yeah, I also said “recipes.”

There are more things in this game that require “plans” and “recipes” before they can actually be crafted. I was into this for the sake of immersion: how your character in 4 readily had the knowledge to build a small house with complete furnishings was something I found silly. But as I stated earlier, 76 has a very questionable view of reality, so it may void that a little. Regardless, you earn plans and recipes through various means. The common way, for armor/weapon modding anyway, is to scrap items, which gives you a chance to learn a new modding recipe for that item. You also earn some by completing quests and events, and can sometimes buy them from merchants. (Can’t sell them though.) On top of that, some still need the right perks to use. Oh, I should actually close on that one...

13. Perk Cards and Leveling

They brought back perks for 76, in the form of cards you unlock at every new level. You combine duplicate cards to raise thier levels as well. When you level, you are asked to put a new point into any of your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. attributes. The total number of points in your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. dictates what perk cards you can swap in. For example, if your Strength is 4 and you have a perk card that's upgraded to level 3, you won’t be able to slide it in if you have three level 1 Strength cards in the deck. Oh, and your choice of new perk card is NOT limited to what perk you decided to level up.

---

And.... pretty much those are the key things I want you future players to know. But here’s a couple other tidbits to know.

You need to be a special level to use Power Armor and some high-tier weapons. You can still use the chassis at anytime though, providing you have the cores.

Food rots. Don’t overpack with perishable meals that you won’t use, unless you plan to make fertilizer later.

You can make diluted Stimpacks, RadAway, and Rad-X, which means it’ll double your medicine supply, but will be less effective.

You can save structures to blueprints to be built later, but you will still need the materials!

ALUMINUM. WOOD. ALUMINUM AND WOOD.

And one last thing before you take off on your new wasteland journey:

Bethesda made a lot of questionable decisions here, not just in gameplay but in world building. Once again, you will find that a lot of lore has been glossed over and/or ignored by committee. You may be tempted to get very emotional over what can be perceived as a gross disregard of canon and that Todd Howard is satisfied with slapping the Fallout brand on anything he wants.

I have come to accept this as fact and have chosen to still have fun with the game regardless.

It’s a big functional mess of a timesink that is, once again, more about making a profit than paying respect to a classic franchise: the norm of the industry. For all we know, this may become the installment that “kills” the franchise. But so far, I’ve been having fun and accepting it for what it is and prepared for whatever direction it chooses to goes in next.

As for you, I hope to meet you on these country roads very soon!

#fallout 76 #fallout #tutorials #gaming #long reads

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