Fallout 76 - Post E3

With the official announcement of Fallout 76, Bethesda Game Studios has put forward an online only, multiplayer (max. 24 - 32 people) game with multiple servers hosting different maps.  In addition they are saying that they are in this for the immediate future (out to, possibly 5 years) and will use microtransactions to fund the sustainment of the game, update it and keep the servers running.  The stuff being sold will be 'cosmetic only' in nature, which means nothing that will change game balance.  With that said there may be some paint jobs or other cosmetics that will add camouflage or other means to help individuals blend in with the background which, while totally cosmetic, does effect game balance. While 'cosmetic only' skins are the least worst way of handling microtransactions, they still aren't all that good due to human nature and the wish of some people to 'collect them all'.  Even when they are available for purchase with in-game funds or time spent, or as quest rewards, a tiny fraction of any player base will opt for purchasing such items.

Do note that if this concept had been rolled out with Skyrim Special Edition or Fallout 4, in that microtransactions would keep a bug-fix team on those games for as long as people purchased stuff, this would not have been a bad thing as those are single-player only games.  Yes some people will automatically purchase what's new in the 'ooo shiny!' or 'collect them all' mentality, it would not be that bad.  As it is there are unofficial patches made by modders who collect all the problems in game play, consistency and details that were just missed at the end of the bug-fix cycle for BGS in those games.  This concept is, overall, not a bad one and if it was expanded to older but still played and popular games it would show a corporate dedication to those games and the player base for them.  Letting the players purchase to invest in updates, bug fixes and general smoother game play with fewer crashes would go a long way to keeping a dedicated fan base for those games.

After that the movement to an online, all the time system of a multiplayer game goes against everything that the Fallout franchise was founded on.  Thus by making Fallout 76 BGS has decided to step away from a popular, award winning formula and into the brand new territory of online work.  Note this is BGS, the Studio, not Bethesda Softworks which oversees Zenimax Online Studio which hosts the Elder Scrolls Online.  What has been shown and talked about in interviews and a recently published documentary all demonstrate that BGS has decided that shooter-based action without RPG elements is the direction they are going for in Fallout 76.  As Todd Howard put it a few of the members of the design team for FO4 read some reviews by individuals who thought FO4 might have been a bit better with a multiplayer mode.  That is a mode between individuals with one hosting the game either over the internet or on a LAN.  From what code has been left in Skyrim and FO4 there are indications that BGS tested a multiplayer mode for each of those, but shelved it so as to concentrate on making the game playable and stable.

Todd Howard did joke about the stability, or lack thereof, in BGS titles and it is a point to consider in that Fallout 76 is using a blending of the FO4 game engine along with net code from Doom.  The entire structure of the game engine had to be changed away from a single player game to one that is multiplayer, persistent and the entire map available at all times.  Additionally a dynamic weather system and mode for predators and localized phenomena are also involved which means the days of loading a new cell or interior have to go away in order to make the entire game seamless.  This is not a bad thing, per se, yet the track record of BGS has not been stellar in the game engine arena.  A main reason to use the Creation Engine was that all the assets were already available from FO4 which meant cutting down on making their meshes, skins and even not having to redo their scripts all that much.  What has been shown is that the things that are in-world are destructible, which means they suffer damage and can be destroyed by taking damage.  Many of the structural mechanics from the FO4 Creation Engine had to be modified or scrapped entirely to allow this to happen, so this is also a brand new feature of the game engine.  No software ships without bugs and that will apply to Fallout 76.

In 'the future' there will be: private servers, 3rd party mod support and invite-only systems for friends to play together.  This is not at launch but 'in the future', with BGS hosting these games on their servers as opposed to individuals running the game on a truly private server owned outside of BGS for their friends.  From this information it can be gathered that Fallout 76 will be under the tight control of BGS.  Absolute control and power does not bestow skill or competence, however, and how long they will be custodians of this game will be determined by the number of long-term players who find this appealing in an already full multiplayer shooter game market.  The hassles that all multiplayer games face with overhead, sustainability, and then having a player base that must be kept interested through new content is something that BGS has not done before.  Indeed it has no demonstrated skill of understanding long-term play balance  so that a year or two down the line a newcomer to the game (if it survives that long) will still have a meaningful experience.

There are 'quests' in Fallout 76, with the Overseer giving the first one out and then others arising through 'the environment'.  The major part of the game play is exploration, finding crafting materials, making bases, taking over workshops, and then wash, rinse and repeat.  As given there are no NPCs in the game, period.  No human vendors.  No human survivalist groups.  While this may change at the governmental shelter (to a degree) as given the idea is an absolute 'everyone you see is a player'.  Yet the reason for choosing West Virginia was that it would be untouched by the Great War, which would mean areas where humans can and would survive the Great War.  The idea that all of the people will only come from Vault 76 flies in the face of all prior Fallout games that had families, religions and other groups that not only survived the Great War but were able to then repopulate areas separately from the Vaults.  In a rural region with cave systems, small towns and many off-grid individuals and families, to say that none of them survived is absolutely insane.  This is Appalachia and the number of small communities and families that prepare for problems are numerous throughout the region.  A nuclear winter might have been enough to kill of the vast majority of survivors, true, and yet there are also the cave systems to consider as natural shelters and place to grow minimal survival necessities and get clean water filtered by the soil and rock structures.  And as has been seen in prior Fallout games not all ghouls go feral (indeed many are transitioning to that state in Fallout 76 and retain the ability to use firearms and other weapons), and while these individuals are ghouls they are also NPCs.

Yet game mechanics and the wiping out of NPCs requires none of these people to have survived, because this is not an RPG but a multiplayer shooter game.  Without living individuals to carry lore onwards, it is lost, and that includes the lore of families and even the way of life of entire communities that didn't get into Vaults.  Yes there will be notes, journals and terminal entries by those that did survive for a time, but that is far different than getting the story first-hand from a survivor.  Fallout 76 breaks so hard in 'a new direction' that it has broken itself off from the franchise and has become merely a new multiplayer shooter game with a Fallout skin and equipment.  Such games depend on their players to find reasons to play and continue playing, and when they find content, creativity or even basic game mechanics lacking, they quickly move on to the next latest and greatest game.  A few game companies interact deeply with their communities, listen to feedback, hold livestreams that are interactive, bring developers out looking for feedback...all things that are not part of the way BGS has ever worked in the past.

The setting of Fallout 76 is fascinating if it was kept in the lore of the Fallout franchise with a Control Vault and perhaps even a Garden of Eden Creation Kit in it to start retaking the wasteland.  Seeing a GECK in action would be a truly new way to go for the franchise, as it has never been witnessed first-hand (you pass out in Fallout 3 when it is turned on as a part of Project Purity), and would have been a grand opportunity to go in a fresh direction for a game in the franchise.  Lore-wise there are problems with the outcome of Vault 76 as there was no presence of the descendents of the vault encountered by the Brotherhood of Steel on its eastward trek to the Capital Wasteland.  A thriving or even surviving community in the West Virginia region would have been noted by others and remembered by them as a background consideration.  As it is we don't know exactly where the post Great War survivors who populated the Capital Wasteland came from as the Vaults in the region never yielded a proper survivor contingent to begin rebuilding.  If those people came from Vault 76 the records would be heavy with references to them as the pioneers rebuilding after the Great War.  Those Vaults that did survive to do this were  remembered in other games and as those founding communities would leave some record of who founded it and where they came from, a successful Vault would have had some records, somewhere in the Capital Wasteland communities.

Fallout 4 in the Commonwealth has the exact, same problem, in that none of the Vaults in the region started the rebuilding process there nor even contributed a community to the wasteland to rebuild.  Vault 75 might have yielded enough for a family or two, once the children overcame those conducting the experiments on them, but they were not prepared to deal with the post-nuclear wasteland mentally or with basic survival equipment.  As the local accent and dialect of the Boston region is retained in FO4 that means there were surviving communities or families able to continue on after the war to retain those cultural artifacts.  If they had all died you wouldn't get that dialect and accent as it is part and parcel of a living human culture.

With that being the case the only result that can be gathered is that the Vault 76 members did not succeed in their efforts to establish a new community or set of communities in the wasteland.  Given a prime location for doing just that, the only conclusion is that something went wrong there.  Perhaps that is the real upshot of the multiplayer game: a bunch of individuals with access to nuclear devices will use them with abandon and destroy their own homes and homeland just for the fun of it.  Some people do just want to see the world burn, after all.  Trying to make the use of such devices as the ONLY way to remove environmental threats goes against a great tradition in gaming of allowing players the agency to figure out other ways to remove the threat via ingenuity, skill, planning or just getting lots of ammo together to get rid of a nest of creatures. 

If there is no better way to do these jobs and players are, in fact, rewarded for destroying the landscape, then BGS has decided to thoroughly walk away from the distaste for nuclear weapons seen in the early part of the franchise.  They did walk away from that, in part, when they put out Fallout 3, then allowed for the destruction of The Institute in Fallout 4 as the ONLY means to stop that faction and cause a nuclear detonation underground to do that deed.  Why bother trying to make a complex method of dealing with a problem when you can just nuke it?  Fallout 76 makes this a FEATURE and one that the studio PUSHES since it will be FUN.  Say, if it is seen as so much fun by those who survived the Great War, then why were Vaults made in the first place?  Would a good old nuclear war be welcomed by the people and voters?  Given the mentality pushing this out in Fallout 76, it would seem that people are more than ready to nuke any threat or hazard without giving a care about what they are actually doing to the entire region.  Of course to make it 'interesting' the entire area that was nuked will abate very quickly as that makes it even more fun, and only those prepared to go in early get the rewards.  Isn't that nice of them to downplay the use of nuclear weapons in a world ravaged by nuclear war?

This may be a variety of 'fun' to have a great social get-together shooter with nukes available and encouraging players to take on the 'roles' of Raiders, bandits and such...and even put in a 'bounty' system.  Are 'bounties' permanent or are they the quickly declining sort to allow for player 'fun' of griefing other players?  And if players are encouraged to take up the Raider lifestyle, then the disdain for Raiders as seen in Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 is lost entirely, even if the PC goes with the Raiders in Nuka-World in the Fallout 4 DLC, there is much scorn heaped upon them by the locals.  Ye  ah, I guess it is fun to intimidate NPCs and get their reactions...now imagine those as actual players that are being griefed by other players acting like 'Raiders'.  If this is the direction that BGS really wants to go in, then why wasn't it allowed in Fallout 4 before Nuka-World or Fallout 3?  It isn't like there aren't some upsides to being a Raider or wasteland warlord, save for every other Raider gang hating your guts and every caravan and civilian taking a 'shoot on sight' mentality towards you.  Raiders live via instilling fear and using intimidation, threats, destruction and murder to get their way: this is something BGS WANTS PLAYERS TO DO.  Remember that.  This is all part of the fun, social shooter concept, right?  The thing every player wants to face is intimidation and griefing from other players.  I'm sure that BGS hopes that the bounty system and a few other bits and pieces of twiddling behind the scenes will keep this to a minimum.  Even though they encourage it.  Great way to mix signals there, Bethesda!

As I've said before this game will not be a Day 1 purchase or pre-order for me.  As an individual I am not a fan of online shooters nor do I seek the 'social' aspect of gaming outside of face-to-face types of games.  Having run RPGs in multiple genres and mixed genres, then becoming a player in single-player RPGs, I enjoy exploring the stories that unfold in those games as they represent a high level of game design.  No matter how good the 'story' is in multiplayer games, it must be scaled down and factored down to suit a target number of players to keep a variety of them interested in it.  Great and personal stories with depth and emotional involvement are suited to the single player game environment.  Trying to keep a compelling story to keep the interest of a few players requires a different sort of game world crafting that can be enjoyable:  I know, I've had to do that as an individual.  My concept for those worlds I ran was to figure out the background, lore, environment and social setting and then take part not as a 'game master' but the person who ran the world for players to experience.  Quests, as such, weren't the sole object of the game.  Jobs, working, and having sub-groups of players go off when they felt ready to break off from a story thread because they wanted to investigate another story thread - that was my job as the person running the game.  And as I knew the players as individuals, I could craft those stories on the fly by utilizing the materials present in the game given the history, lore and people of it.  Remove the people and much of the history goes along with much of the lore.  Players learned to keep notes, voluminous notes, as they started out as just everyday people who had decided to become adventurers: they had some background knowledge but it was suited to their situation as a PC.

Removing NPCs and relying on static terminals, books and such for a game, as in Fallout 76, is a challenge, yes, but one that is made stale by the game mechanic involved.  Audio logs will, by necessity, need to take the place of NPCs, and they can be very compelling as a story telling device when it is used sparingly.  The same with terminal entries, books and such: used sparingly and infrequently they can make a rich game world to flesh in a world that has untold stories or things hidden from everyday individuals.  Without NPCs these mechanics for doing quests are expected to pull the entire load to flesh in environmental storytelling.  I guess this is a variety of 'fun' and even a type of challenge to making a game.  If people are truly tired of NPC vendors who also have stories to tell, well, Fallout 76 may be just up your alley!  Heck, YOU can take the place of that NPC!  Isn't that grand?  And expect all the problems of theft, intimidation, destruction and such that such vendors always have to face...don't worry, people are encouraged to do this, you see.  Are there vendors in other game worlds you would dearly love to get rid of but couldn't because they were necessary to the game?  You won't face that problem now!

Now imagine the scenario where, a few weeks into the game, a group of relatively new players are exploring an area for the first time and discovering it, then get into a fight with other players who are Raider role-playing, or just being jerks, only to have a much higher level group of players get their hands on a silo who want to destroy the region to get high level goodies give all of you the warning that this is about to happen.  Fun, huh?  Guess you gotta find another server that hasn't nuked the place yet.  Luckily BGS will slowly 'rebuild' the region when no one is around because that is so 'friendly' and 'smart'...instead of forcing players to live with the long-term ramifications of their decisions, why not just quietly reset it when no one is looking?  Because that is so friendly to the Fallout franchise, right?  Just look at the rest of the wasteland, after all, it reset so quickly, didn't it?  Oh, wait, it is still called 'the wasteland'.  Don't worry, this will all be done with new lore to explain why the region around Vault 76 is set in its own area that can be nuked over and over again without long-term consequences.  Perhaps it will be the actual experiment of Vault 76 and those playing in it will be in a virtual reality like in Vault 12.  Or a GECK gone wrong that created an isolation field and rebuilding system that was impenetrable to the outside world or even put the residents into an alt-alt history timeline away from the rest of the franchise.  All the lovely possibilities of trying to explain this to keep a multiplayer game 'fun' that involves the use of nuclear weapons.  Perhaps the Great War wasn't something feared at all, but welcomed as the great fun war by those who received it.  Really, if using nukes has no long-term consequences, then what is the point of Fallout franchise?