Fallout: 76 Catch-All

I also think the people are just tired of giving Bethesda a pass about delivering a clearly unfinished product out of the gate. Normally the content is good enough to allow that to slide. This time, not so much.

ranalin wrote:

I also think the people are just tired of giving Bethesda a pass about delivering a clearly unfinished product out of the gate. Normally the content is good enough to allow that to slide. This time, not so much.

Maybe you're right, but then, why do so many people still like it so much? Certainly some people are happier to complain than enjoy, but that seems like a personal choice I'd rather not make.

I think it's totally reasonable that for some people "it's broken just like all the other Bethesda games" is a defense--this is what we're used to!--while for others, it's damning criticism--I've been waiting for them to get it together and they're just not doing it!

I included Fallout 76 on my GOTY list at #10 because I liked it, but I completely understand why it's not working for some people. One of the things I love most about Bethesda games is interacting with characters and communities: heading into Nuketown, for example, and meeting the people there and learning more about them and talking with them and trying to charm or intimidate them and seeing how they react as the story changes are all a huge part of the appeal to those games for me. That's basically absent here: although I think the story content in the form of diary entries and voice recordings and such is pretty well written and interesting, for me, its impact is diminished upon realizing that I'm just never going to meet any of these people, that their stories are already written and will not be shaped by my input. I like the game! But it's not hard at all for me to understand why some don't.

One minor thing I have been finding frustrating lately, as I have jumped back into this in the last few days, is finding paths. I keep looking at a thing on the map and seeing it's to my east, heading straight east, and then finding there's a totally unpassable mountain in my way, so I have to take some super circuitous route and stick to the highway basically. Maybe it's just the part of the map I'm on at this specific moment? I'm heading to a mission at the Top of the World and kept thinking I could take a more direct route, but apparently not, and it has made it hard to progress when I've only got like an hour at a time to play. I'm looking forward to getting back in the groove of things soon though.

I don't agree with the "It's broken" complaints (at least not all of them). The complexity and sheer size of the Skyrim and Fallout games is immense. Between story interaction, effect of RPG stats, inventory management, various NPC AI, building, and crafting (plus some aspects I'm sure I'm forgetting), there seems to me to be a ton to keep track of. I expect each iteration to get a little better (while still having an engaging story) but I think anyone who expect something with that many moving parts to be bug free has unrealistic expectations.

I think that FO76, in terms of graphics and some gameplay mechanics, is a step back from FO4. But then you have to also factor in the netcode complexity and back-end resource management of what is essentially a MMO.

I've enjoyed FO76, but I do wish that there were more NPCs to interact with. I get the scorched explanation for no people, but they could have added in non-feral ghouls to talk to or more interactive robots.

If FO76 was released for the Switch, I would have bought it already. I still may buy at some point for XB1, but I'm at a point in time where portability is a must.

The funny thing is that, on balance, I’ve found Fallout 76 to be considerably less buggy than any other Fallout game from Bethesda.

I have yet to encounter a bug that renders a quest impossible to complete, which happened to me in every single Fallout game, even the Las Vegas expansion to 3. The worst thing I’ve seen is the occasional server disconnection, but I don’t play enough online games to know how common those are or even if the problem is at my end.

Other people seem to be hitting more bugs than I have, so maybe I’m lucky, but from my perspective, it’s not even as bad as other Bethesda games.

Well, whatever. I’m not going to spend too much brainpower trying to learn how to hate something. Life’s too short to not enjoy a video game just because someone on a podcast said it was the worst thing to happen to video games in 2018.

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Y'allz, said as someone who keeps buying Dynasty Warriors games, just accept that you find appeal in something very sh*tty.

SpacePPoliceman wrote:

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Y'allz, said as someone who keeps buying Dynasty Warriors games, just accept that you find appeal in something very sh*tty.

I’m pretty sure that was the first advice my father gave me when I was a lad buying my first Sega Game Gear.

I had never died playing this game until this weekend. Now I've died like 10 times!

As I was heading towards the Top of the World, my path ran through Bleeding Kate's Grindhouse and up the road, when suddenly floating up over that part of the road was a Level 50 Scorchbeast. I tried to sneak around the road out of its attention when it killed me the first time. It killed me a few more times before I finally figured a way far enough off of the road that would still let me get going in the right direction.

Then I discovered the golf course and moved my camp there, as it seemed like a nice base. But as I went further through the country club, I all of a sudden attracted a swarm of level 30+ ghouls. I'm level 15, so my attempts to kill them did not go well. I managed to take down one or two, but somehow I had attracted about a dozen of them, so eventually I was just trying to run away from them and ended up leading a swarm all over the map until I tried to shut myself into a little supply hut or something, at which point I learned that the enemies can open doors, and they killed me.

After another try, I managed to get around to the Top of the World unscathed, and completed a few more parts of that quest. I fast traveled back to my base, located at the golf club, and logged out for the day. When I next returned, on logging in I saw that, due to a bug, for some reason I was just two arms and a hat, no other parts of the body rendered. That was funny, so I switched into photomode to see if I could capture it. On switching to photomode, though, not only did that apparently fix the bug so I was rendered correctly, but I suddenly saw in my photo that another level 50 scorch beast was suddenly right on top of me. He killed me very quickly!

I respawned right at my base, went to recover all the stuff on my corpse, and then the same scorchbeast spotted me again and killed me. Twice more, I respawned at base, ran the 10 feet to my corpse to recover my junk, and got killed again. Finally I managed to avoid the beast long enough to get my stuff and get back into my base, which has walls and a roof, and thought I'd be safe. That's when scorchbeast blasts started annihilating my base, blowing off the roof and blasting down walls. Whoops! Eventually I just logged out.

It was kind of frustrating! It also left me with questions:

--What happens when you die? Is the bag of junk on your corpse all the junk you had been carrying? And if you don't recover it before your next death, does it just go away?

--What happens when something destroys parts of your base? Is that going to be back in my "stored" parts, or will I just have lost those resources? If it's the latter, is there anything I can do about a scorchbeast just suddenly showing up and wrecking my base?

--Should I take my running into massively overpowered enemies as a sign that I'm going the wrong way? I'm level 15 and the Top of the World is the site of my next quests, so I would assume I should be following more or less the path that I'm following. But the scorch beast outside Bleeding Kate's was a huge obstacle, particularly given its flying range, and I assumed the country club on the way to my destination might have stuff for me to explore, which made the flood of level 20-30 bad guys racing after me quite a shock. This feels different than my first dozen or so hours with the game, where I felt like I could fairly safely explore stuff in the path between me and my next objective and very rarely encountered anything that was too difficult for me.

I did find my first set of power armor and managed to scoop it up and deposit it at my base, even if I'm many levels away from getting any use out of it, so that was exciting.

Sounds like you had fun in some similar ways to me! That golf course is murder, it often has high levels running around, so the mobs are also high level. I was facing level 68 ghouls the first two times I tried to go through there, around level 14.

I have never had a scorch beast deign to acknowledge my existence, despite foolishly trying to snipe them several times.

I think you can repair anything that has been destroyed by mobs in your camp.

The level of the mobs is affected by what players are in the region. Usually you can server hop to one that has lower levels, or come back another time. Pay attention to what players are in the vicinity before you go in, if you want to avoid getting high level ganked.

Yes, your junk items drop in a bag on the ground, and you can recover them if you are quick enough. If you die again, they are gone, if another player finds them, they are gone. Reminds me of Dark Souls a little bit, and as I recall they had a Dark Souls easter egg in Fallout 4, I imagine that's where they took the inspiration from.

Also, power armor pieces can be found that you can use at level 15. At level 25, there's a quest you can do to get the plans to create a power armour station at your camp, and it gives you a full set of Excavator power armour.

EDIT: Before you get to level 25, save up a ton of screws, springs and black titanium. The u-mine-it mining maps quests are an excellent way to do this, it will have you killing mole miners and getting lots of resources from the quests themselves. I had to farm for screws and springs for the legs only, I had everything else before I even started the quest.

1)When you die you leave a paper lunch sack full of all of your junk at your last death point. You keep everything else (weapon’s, armor, misc, notes and holotapes ) but you have to go recover your junk.

If you die on the way to your lunch sack, you lose whatever was in the lunch sack.

2) destroyed base components can be repaired by walking up to them and clicking the repair option when prompted.

The only way I’ve found to keep base components from being destroyed is to spam turrets. I have six on my base, two of which are guarding my generators specifically and the other four watching the base perimeter.

3) yes. The further east you go, the worse the enemies are, and the golf course is one of the worst places in the game for ghouls. I recommend doing grinding out some daily events and workshop missions on the western half of the map before moving too far with the main story.Top of the world is something you should think hard about going to before level 20, and the quests you get from that area are really for level 25 and up.

Also, be mindful of other players on the map. If you see a level 100 in a place you need to go, consider doing something else or loading into a different world, because the locations seem to spawn enemies to match whoever got there first.

Finally, don’t neglect your armor. Build as high a level as you can build as soon as you can. Also, try to stay away from anything that needs Ballistic fiber. I am perpetually short on it, and most of the armor you find in the world needs it for repairs. Fortunately, stuff you make is usually better than what you can find. I recommend metal and trapper armor, because those just need screws and adhesive.

A tip for lower-level players:

Spoiler:

There’s a town that has a lot of mothman eggs on the western edge of the map, and it has a lot of level 1 scorched in it. They’re good for grinding, and you can get mothman eggs, which are the most valuable item in the game. It’s a great way to earn some caps early on.

And a free base-building tip:

Spoiler:

Build at least two tato, corn and mutfruit plants as well as at least one water purifier. You can harvest the plants and water every day, and cook it to make vegetable starch, which will scrap to adhesive.

My wife came up with the idea: she calls it her glue farm. If you couple t with the Green Thumb perk, you’ll never be low on adhesive again.

Helpful feedback, thanks. I'm surprised to hear that I should hold off on progressing the main quest for a while. I can't remember now whether there's a "suggested level" tag on any of these quests, but this weekend's play time was the first time I had a clue that I shouldn't be going after this quest. If there isn't something saying "wait until level XX to do this quest," there should be. It's always tough to figure out what to do when a quest seems hard enough to be unpleasant, but still achievable enough that it's not clear if you're just bad at the game and need to push through it. I'll explore out west for a bit!

mrlogical wrote:

Helpful feedback, thanks. I'm surprised to hear that I should hold off on progressing the main quest for a while. I can't remember now whether there's a "suggested level" tag on any of these quests, but this weekend's play time was the first time I had a clue that I shouldn't be going after this quest. If there isn't something saying "wait until level XX to do this quest," there should be. It's always tough to figure out what to do when a quest seems hard enough to be unpleasant, but still achievable enough that it's not clear if you're just bad at the game and need to push through it. I'll explore out west for a bit!

As the MOB levels change depending on who is in the area, the game is unlikely to give you a suggested level for the quests.

There are some quests with level limits on them. The excavator power armor quest specifically tells you not to do it until you hit level 25, even though it doesn’t actually stop you from trying.

In my experience the biggest thing to learn in Fallout 76 is knowing when to run. Most of the time you’ll see one or two of the high level nasties before they see you, and that’s when you should get outta Dodge. Don’t waste your bullets on something more than 10 levels above you, or has a modifier in its name (“diseased mole rat” or “ferocious super mutant.”)

That golf course is the most popular location in the game for player camps so it almost has has at least one high level player throwing off the enemy scaling.

doubtingthomas396 wrote:

There are some quests with level limits on them. The excavator power armor quest specifically tells you not to do it until you hit level 25, even though it doesn’t actually stop you from trying.

In my experience the biggest thing to learn in Fallout 76 is knowing when to run. Most of the time you’ll see one or two of the high level nasties before they see you, and that’s when you should get outta Dodge. Don’t waste your bullets on something more than 10 levels above you, or has a modifier in its name (“diseased mole rat” or “ferocious super mutant.”)

I thought the excavator quest was specifically gated to level 25? That's what I've read, anyway.

Dakuna wrote:
doubtingthomas396 wrote:

There are some quests with level limits on them. The excavator power armor quest specifically tells you not to do it until you hit level 25, even though it doesn’t actually stop you from trying.

In my experience the biggest thing to learn in Fallout 76 is knowing when to run. Most of the time you’ll see one or two of the high level nasties before they see you, and that’s when you should get outta Dodge. Don’t waste your bullets on something more than 10 levels above you, or has a modifier in its name (“diseased mole rat” or “ferocious super mutant.”)

I thought the excavator quest was specifically gated to level 25? That's what I've read, anyway.

I think I may have broken it a bit because I was level 20 but my wife was level 25, and we were a team so it didn’t stop me from following her to provide fire support. It also let me do some parts, but there were parts that I couldn’t physically do because I was too low level.

We’re both over level 30 now, but we haven’t gone back because that quest is always full of nasty enemies.

Hmm, I completed it solo at level 25-27 this weekend, no troubles. I had to go back like three times because I'm a moron, and had different enemies there each time.

I had mole miners the first time, robots the second, and ghouls the third time, but nothing that wasn't manageable for me. The robots were the worst, because there was a level 32 boss assaultron, fortunately she was maybe glitched and refused to enter the power armour workshop area, so I was able to easily cheese the head laser.

The quest doesn't give you a full set of Excavator armor. It gives you the plans and requires you to build the armor. That's a very important difference. That difference being a crap load of battered clipboards and dead mole miners or deathclaws.

Later in the quest you have to equip a full set of excavator armor. That's the bit you can't do before level 25 due to the level requirements on the pieces.

It's probably worth mentioning that I was able to build Power Armor stations in some friends' camps well before they managed to complete the quest themselves. They were able to pack them up and move them around just fine, though I have had to replace one of them after a nasty scorchbeast attack.

I stopped playing this. I had a full set of Enclave Power Armor with jetpack. Was pretty cool.

mrlogical wrote:

As I was heading towards the Top of the World, my path ran through Bleeding Kate's Grindhouse and up the road, when suddenly floating up over that part of the road was a Level 50 Scorchbeast. I tried to sneak around the road out of its attention when it killed me the first time. It killed me a few more times before I finally figured a way far enough off of the road that would still let me get going in the right direction.

When I played over the weekend, that was the first Scorchbeast I ever ran into. And it killed me. So, I ran back to grab my stuff...and bolted out of there...

No useful advice on the issue - just sayin' you aren't alone!

doubtingthomas396 wrote:

I might turn this into something for the front page, but I don’t really understand where the haterade comes from.

I think a part of it is that it's not really a streamer friendly game, and most streamers (like the internet in general) are incapable of simply not liking something, they have to hate it. So now the people who get their gaming news and impressions from streamers hate it it too.
It's fun to play, but not to watch, and since watching people play games has inexplicably been getting more and more important over the past several years, the gaming press takes that into account.

Good points Stengah.

I’ll echo Dakuna about Stengah’s points, but I’m not clear as to why this game is any less fun to watch than, say, Minecraft.

Maybe I just don’t understand today’s youth.

doubtingthomas396 wrote:

I’ll echo Dakuna about Stengah’s points, but I’m not clear as to why this game is any less fun to watch than, say, Minecraft.

Maybe I just don’t understand today’s youth.

Watching someone play minecraft solo is about the experience of them seeing it for the first time, or about an interesting build perhaps. I don't think you get a lot of minecraft watching when someone is just running around gathering wood or something

I've never understood the appeal of streaming, so I can't really say.
The ease of switching gears is better in Minecraft. You don't have to stop what you're doing and go through several different menus to select a different perk card layout each time you switch between exploring/fighting, and building, crafting, or repairing. And do it again every time you come across a locked container or terminal.
Also the way the story is presented in FO76 isn't particularly streamable, unless you already know it and specifically want to take your audience through a specific part of it (like Enola Walker's 5 holotapes spread out over the Cranberry Bog. In normal play you'll come across one, likely out of order, but there's no quest to get the others, and no reward when you do. It's put together slowly and definitely not something you'll experience in a single play session). Some of the other small stories are only tenuously connected to each other, but let you put together a more complete picture of what happened. If you're not willing to read lots of terminal entries and sit quietly to listen to lots of holotapes, neither of which stream well, you'll not get any more than the basic outline, which is where you get the mistaken assumption that no NPCs means no (or poor) main story.

Stengah wrote:

which is where you get the mistaken assumption that no NPCs means no (or poor) main story.

Compared to other games there is no actual story for your character. Just the lore of a story that is used as a backdrop for your own adventures.

Spoilered for those who haven't reached the end.

Spoiler:

You are a former citizen of Vault 76, who, following prompting from your former Overseer, combines the leftover resources of the Responders, Firebreathers, Free Staters, Brotherhood of Steel, and the Enclave to destroy the Scorchbeast Queen and effectively end an extinction level threat that would have otherwise ended human life in North and South America.

It's as much a main story as being a Vault Dweller who has to go find a water purification chip and destroy a mutant army.

Man, y'all still arguing over whether people are justified in having fun or not? Yeesh.