#the thing’s helmet is still on the ground tho lol (my inventory is full)

[phantomdecibel]

I thiunk minecraft purposefully tries to kill you when you’re getting close toyour one year hardcore anniversary(baby zombie glitched its way out of my mobfarm to try and kill me)

[proteusspade]

On the debacle with Fallout 76

 I feel like the debacle with Fallout 76 has become a testing grounds for a lot of the dominating theories and myths about video games and video game consumers in general, as well as more specifically about Bethesda studios and Bethesda gamers. I apologize for the LONG post ahead, but there’s a lot to unpack here and I want to make sure everyone’s on the same page before I try and make any big points. For those not in the know, I will attempt to summarize: - Bethesda released Fallout 76, a multiplayer installment in the Fallout franchise, with a set release date of November 14, 2018.  - The game was announced with the marketing that it would be playable and enjoyable as singleplayer, that every person you ran into would be a real person, that it was a new Fallout experience, that its graphics would improve upon Fallout 4′s graphics by 16 times, and notably, one collector’s edition which cost $200 was marketed as coming with a wearable helmet and a canvas bag.

The beta was shaky and riddled with bugs, and upon release, the game itself was still pretty much broken -- far moreso than other Bethesda titles, and this coming from a company where the running joke since Oblivion has been that the bugs are so prevalent that they are a feature, not a flaw. An enormous patch was released shortly after launch, which was larger in size than the game itself, and which not only didn’t fix almost any of the bugs, but created hundreds *more* bugs, as if they didn’t playtest the patch at all.  For players like me who can go a surprisingly long time in a Bethesda game without seeing any bugs at all, I will note that these bugs include: - T-posing enemies which either spontaneously assume their correct animations only when you get close, or never do, or which teleport suddenly into you to try and display their attack animations - Horrendous enemy A.I. where a lot of them will just stand in one place looping an animation - Enemies spawning out of thin air directly in front of you due to slow loading - A bug where enemies spontaneously heal the exact amount of damage you deal to them, making them invincible - Falling through the ground out of nowhere - Clipping through and getting caught in the world - Frequent server crashes, often due to in-game happenings (the game eventually gives you access to nuclear bombs, but the same bombs can crash the server if you drop them) - Frequent disconnects - Frequent game crashes (with no ‘save game’ function) - Body horror bugs like the Wendigo Bug which have been present since Fallout 4 and haven’t been fixed by Bethesda yet, even though modders were able to fix them weeks after Fallout 4 came out. Three years ago.  Moreover, the game directly ported over most of its visual assets from Fallout 4. Most of the landscape elements come from Fallout 4, almost all of the weapons come from Fallout 4, almost all of the outfits and armors come from Fallout 4, most of the monsters come from Fallout 4, the physics and gunplay is directly ported over (minus the ability to pause the game to open your inventory, of course, and minus the time-slowing aspect of V.A.T.S, which makes V.A.T.S almost completely useless), the character creation is ported over, the loot is ported over, the base-building system and all of its assets (walls, floors, anything you’d use to build a base) are ported over. Basically, other than trees and certain monsters unique to West Virginia, you’ll have a hard time spotting content which isn’t directly ported over from Fallout 4, often without palette swaps. Is the promise of better graphics fulfilled?  Well, the lighting is significantly improved, and even very pretty and atmospheric -- though occasionally light will shine through solid far-away objects, like mountains. Modders had done this almost immediately with Fallout 4, too, though, so it’s not really a huge achievement. And the landscape is much more colourful than in any other Fallout game, which is admittedly a nice change of pace, even though it makes no goddamn sense why the trees would survive while everything else dies around them. But other than those two elements... yeah, it just looks like Fallout 4, but usually doesn’t render as well due to being on a multiplayer server and due to the graphical glitches. How about the promise that every person you run into is a real person? Well, that was true all right, but how anyone thought that was a good idea is beyond me. It’s one of those things that sounds really cool and innovative until you think about it for literally any length of time at all. Why would that be a good thing? Unless you have quite a lot of friends who you’ve somehow got onto the same server (which, by the way, I don’t think has much functionality in Fallout 76), you’re not going to be very interested in those people, and you have no reason to be. They’re just big lumps of immersion-breaking, as I seriously doubt many people are going onto the game to vocally roleplay their way through the game experience.  Moreover, this means no NPCs besides monsters and robots. No quests from anyone but robots and holotapes. Now, I like holotapes. I’m one of those unbearable players who listens to every holotape and reads every computer terminal. My favourite part of Fallout games is usually finding out the big stories behind Vaults or unusual locations. But when you are doing this quest for someone you will never meet, and have complete certainty of this fact, the reason to do quests in the first place starts to ebb away. You just get holotapes or robots telling you to go to a place, kill something there, rinse, repeat. That’s the entire game. Nothing is achieved; everyone who recorded those holotapes is dead, or a monster now. You’re not doing anyone any favours. There’s no one to help, there’s no one to hate, there’s just you (and whatever people you’re playing with, who, again, aren’t really part of the story as multiplayer gamers don’t typically roleplay). The main quest of the game revolves around trying to find the previous Overseer of the vault. There’s zero suspense, interest or urgency, because as a player, you know with complete certainty going in that if you find her, she’ll be dead or a monster. When you remove the NPCs, you remove all our reasons to care about quests. You also remove all interactions in the game besides “kill thing, loot thing, make stuff with loot”. And killing monsters with such laughable AI and glitches, AI designed for Fallout 4 where V.A.T.S could pause the game and dropped into a game where it doesn’t, isn’t nearly enjoyable enough to make that game loop anything but ghastly. How ANYONE thought this was a good idea is beyond me, and I’m pretty sure at this point that they didn’t do it because they thought it was a good idea, they did it because having NPCs function like they would in a singleplayer game, while in a multiplayer server, is an incredibly daunting task. When literally no one asked for the game to be multiplayer in the first place, but hey. Is the game fun to play alone? Not from literally anyone I know who has, no, and this is due to the above factors. Is the game, as the marketing said, more fun to play with your friends? Well, yes, but the same could be said of cleaning out a moldy garage alone versus with friends. Being with friends makes anything more enjoyable. The game does not cease to have all its serious underlying problems when you play with friends, you just have someone to commiserate with and witness this bullshit with you. Is this a new Fallout experience? Not really. It’s Fallout 4 with a prettier landscape, story constrained to holotapes and therefore constrained to the past (and not the present the player is actually playing in!), and it’s arguably not even a Fallout experience at all. It wears a Fallout skin but the core roleplaying, choice, and narrative features of the game are gone, and all that’s left is a world that’s much bigger, but where all the new space is pretty much empty anyhow.  Oh, and the canvas bags for the collector’s edition were cheap vinyl when people got them, Bethesda just went “yeah canvas was too expensive lol, u can have five dollars’ worth of the game’s microtransaction money for free tho if you want, just file a complaint”. The amount of the microtransaction digital money wouldn’t even buy a virtual canvas bag, mind. Then someone threatened a lawsuit, and it looks like people are going to get their actual canvas bags. But they still need to file a complaint, and WHOOPS! They accidentally doxxed everyone who filed a complaint, to some other people who filed a complaint! The absolute cherry on top. (Yes, it really was an accident, it’s even stupider than it sounds.) So what can we take away from all this? Well, I wouldn’t take away much hope for Fallout 76 as a game, for one. It’s a dumpster fire, and they keep pouring gasoline onto it. But the game has scored abysmally low basically everywhere. People have noticed, and they’re not pleased. The game’s price has dropped 30%, and that’s in the first couple weeks after launching, which is completely unheard of for a AAA game. Returns are going wild. Youtube is FULL of videos taking Fallout 76 to town. So clearly, gamers won’t lap up whatever you give them just because it’s a sequel to something they love. The sunk cost fallacy hasn’t run that deep, and people are suddenly extremely skeptical of whatever Bethesda releases next -- which at this rate, is going to be either The Elder Scrolls: Blades, or their new sci-fi game, followed by The Elder Scrolls VII (title as yet unannounced).  I would also suggest that studios may finally have been given a good indication that clumsily slapping multiplayer on something that had success as single-player isn’t the greatest idea. This is a lesson that probably should have been learned years ago, but better late than never.  I would also hope that game studios, Bethesda especially, develop a touch more respect for their fanbase and realize that player bases can be lost. Bethesda has relied upon their fanbase to mod away their bugs, laziness, and incomplete content hampered by release dates for many years now, but faced with a multiplayer game with no mod support, they are put in a position where they have to realize how heavily they’ve been leaning on those mods. But there’s another part of the story that isn’t being covered so much -- one which challenges the assumptions which has led Bethesda and the players to such a disaster in the first place. Red Dead Redemption 2 has been in the makings for a long time now, but was released something like a year late in comparison to its originally announced release date. The new Kingdom Hearts has been repeatedly delayed. I’d expect the fans would have reacted with nothing but outrage! But they ... haven’t, for the most part. There’s been some frustration and groaning, especially with people who have pre-ordered the games, but for the most part, the fans have been pretty understanding. It turns out they’d rather have a game come out finished than come out on time.  That seems simple, and even obvious, but for close to twenty years, it has been the prevailing logic that for a game to sell well, it has to come out at a pre-defined and specific date, and if it isn’t done, that’s just how the process of making games work, and we’ll fix it in bug patches, or wait for mods to fix it. This is such an assumed phenomenon that it shows up repeatedly in Extra Credits, a show which talks in great detail about the production of video games, and I’d be hard-pressed to name a game that I own or play which doesn’t have unfinished content, even if it’s fairly bug-free. But here we are, Red Dead 2 is out, and it’s a roaring success, despite considerable delays. The conventional wisdom is simply wrong. And it gets even better. This is the trailer for The Outer Worlds, a game made by Obsidian. I urge you to watch it. First of all, the game looks good. The graphics are good, the human characters are expressive and dynamic while still looking realistic. The backgrounds are great. The humour is great. The world-building, what we see of it, looks very promising. And oh my god, the shade they throw at Bethesda is gorgeous. Not only does Obsidian highlight themselves as the creators of Fallout and Fallout: New Vegas -- that is, the two most-loved Fallout games -- they play with the concept of a cryogenically frozen player character (possibly lampshading the use of the same concept in Fallout 4), and they point out that player choice isn’t just about a binary “who do you shoot” moment -- another moment from Fallout 4, and one of the few real choices you get to make in that game -- and implies that variety of choice, including non-combat choice, is going to be a Thing in this game. Look at the comments section for that video. You will see hundreds, nay, THOUSANDS of comments praising the trailer, talking about the shade it casts on Bethesda, making New Vegas meme jokes, praising the music, lauding the humour, wondering about the characters it shows us. You know what I didn’t see? Even one single, solitary comment complaining that there’s no definite release date shown anywhere in that trailer. Seriously, watch it again. It doesn’t say exactly when it’s coming out. Just 2019. No month. No date. Just sometime next year. You know... when it’s done. What you might not have known was that The Outer Worlds was originally estimated to come out this year. You didn’t know that because they didn’t release the trailer until just recently -- when they were far enough in production to produce such a great trailer, for one, but also once they were far enough to be certain they would be finished with production within a year.  No one cares when it’s coming. They care that it looks like a good game with so much original effort put into it. That’s what matters. And maybe if the game studios can realize this, we’ll finally see an end to the exploitative bullshit that happens -- exploitative of not just the gamers, but of the thousands of overworked employees it takes to make a AAA video game -- in the service of an absolute deadline above the game itself. God, now that’s a thought. So don’t be discouraged by the failure of Fallout 76. There’s way better on the horizon. The myths that studios need a firm deadline to put out a good game, the myths that players in some way demand a firm deadline, the myth that players will sit there and take any level of bullshit, they’re all being thoroughly, publicly debunked. Feels good, man. Feels good.