Bethesda Fallout 76 is... not having an easy go. First announced to a cacophony of "... what?! ", the online-only spin-off is going down the furtive narrative route of showing what the first group of Vault-Tec survivors were up to... in an MMO framework. That means no NPCs as all quests are doled out through mission boards and found items in the world, a progression that factors in microtransactions, and an emphasis on squad-based gameplay. Even the main portions of what are usually Fallout-themed story sequences are pushed to the back of the experience. Now, there are some notable positives. Exploring the wasteland with your friends is a neat way to fulfil the escapism of literally being the first humans to do so in the lore, and Bethesda have peppered the landscape with tons of beasts to seek out and take down. At time of writing, a variety of outlets have gone hands-on with code only a month out from release, and sadly, it's pretty clear Fallout 76 is struggling to make ends meet; ticking boxes in a variety of camps, but not coalescing into something worth a premium price. Here's to Bethesda turning everything around, because right now? Eeesh...<doc-sep>Game details Developer: Bethesda Game Studios Publisher: Bethesda Softworks Platform: Xbox One (previewed), PS4, Windows Release Date: November 14, 2018 ESRB Rating: M for Mature Price: $60 After Bethesda revealed the "entirely online" Fallout 76 at E3 earlier this year , some franchise fans worried the new game would feel uncomfortably different from the story-driven, single-player post-apocalyptic action they know and love. After playing the game for about three hours at a preview event last week, I came away feeling like I was playing an elaborate Fallout 4 mod with some basic online features grafted on top. Our preview experience started inside Vault 76 itself, an extremely messy space still reeling from a party celebrating the residents' impending departure into the post-nuclear wasteland of West Virginia. In the vault itself I could only see and talk to my three fellow team members as we all got our gear and viewed some basic tutorial content. Once we stepped out of the vault, though, there were dozens of other survivors, all on their own teams, milling about and throwing built-in gestures to each other before setting off. Those gestures turn out to be the only way to directly communicate with players that aren't on my team, making the presence of so many other survivors feel like more of a nuisance than a meaningful addition off the bat (Bethesda developers on hand said voice chat with nearby non-team members was being worked on for post-launch). Teamwork makes the dream work To start, our team mostly ignored our fellow survivors and hiked into the West Virginia wilderness on our own. While the entire world was wide open to us, we generally hewed to the breadcrumb trail of a main quest line, which focused on finding a mysterious "overseer" leaving cryptic clues to her location. On the way, there was a lot of the usual foraging for survival materials, battling with mutated animal and zombie-like human antagonists, and discovering distracting side-quests. Graphical concerns Here at Ars, we try not to focus too much on aesthetic concerns when evaluating pre-release code, since a lot of final polish can still happen before a game is released. That said, the build of Fallout 76 that we played on the Xbox One X at this preview event suffered from some major, frequent frame rate dips in numerous situations. In both third- and first-person modes, we noticed significant screen-tearing and stuttering in a variety of not-too-strenuous situations. Here at Ars, we try not to focus too much on aesthetic concerns when evaluating pre-release code, since a lot of final polish can still happen before a game is released. That said, the build of Fallout 76 that we played on the Xbox One X at this preview event suffered from some major, frequent frame rate dips in numerous situations. In both third- and first-person modes, we noticed significant screen-tearing and stuttering in a variety of not-too-strenuous situations. There's still time for these kinds of technical concerns to be fixed, of course. But with a large beta launching later this month and a final release planned for November 14, that time is running low... While the basic gameplay will feel extremely familiar to anyone who has played Fallout 4, working together as a team brings its own particular quirks. In battles, for instance, experience points are shared between all players who were able to get at least one shot in on the enemy. Every team member will be able to loot that dead enemy (and other item storage locations) individually, and each one gets their own semi-random set of items from that looting (based on their character level). Having a full team of characters with different skills opened up the gameplay in some interesting ways at points. If one player had a strong lock-picking skill, for instance, they could unlock a safe and give everyone else access to what was inside. If another player buffed up their charisma, they were able to share perk cards with everyone on the team. In one memorable dungeon, a mindless Super Mutant started firing at us from inside a locked cage, and we couldn't fire back until we unlocked it. The entire team started scrambling to look for the hidden code to unlock the door. When one team member found it, he read it off to another near the door, who opened it to allow for a third teammate to get the immediate critical headshot. Go team! Advertisement Working as a team has an effect on how you get around as well. Each team member can build their own Fallout 4-style camp, complete with places to rest, fires to cook food and purify water, and workbenches to convert foraged scrap items into useful items (not to mention fences and turrets to protect against antagonists). Team members can fast-travel to anyone else's camp for free, encouraging teammates to spread out their bases around the massive map. You can fast-travel to the team leader for free as well, but warping to other discovered locations (or fellow teammates) requires spending in-game caps. Playing live with other people also brings changes to the V.A.T.S. system, which now operates in real time. Tapping the V.A.T.S. button in combat still brings up the usual green-highlighted limb-targeting system (using the right stick to change your aim), but both you and the target continue to move at full speed as you try to maximize the displayed chance at a successful shot. In my short time trying, the whole thing felt pretty cumbersome, and it was a lot harder than usual to get those high-percentage shots off. In any case, players who want to slow down and consider their shots are out of luck here. In general, though, wandering around the wasteland with three other people is a lot less lonely than the usual Fallout experience. Everything from multiplayer battles to scrounging for items or figuring out clues feels more dynamic and engaging with other people joining in. While it feels like you could play Fallout 76 by yourself, I'm not sure I'd really want to after playing with a group. Apocalypse is other people Outside of my three teammates, the presence of all those other people on the server became most relevant during a few timed, server-wide events, which tasked everyone in the area with taking on a huge horde of enemies in a marked section of the map. The idea is for everyone from disparate teams to come together against the challenge and share in the big dump of experience points when complete. It all felt a little hollow, though, thanks in part to the limited communication options between teams. Players from different teams can trade items with each other via in-game menus, and there were a few high-level Bethesda developers on the server that were eager to essentially gift us some wacky in-game outfits for the event. In the live game, though, I'm guessing the player base will have fewer benevolent traders and more determined griefers eager to try to ruin the experience of their fellow players. Combat between players doesn't unlock until level 5, thankfully, so the initial moments out of the vault aren't a deluge of experimental bullets. Even after that point, shooting another player that's not on your team only does extremely minor "chip damage," regardless of the weapon or relative character levels of the two players involved. This makes it quite difficult to outright murder another player that doesn't want to be killed. When that does happen, however, the murderer gets marked prominently on the map and becomes susceptible to lucrative revenge killings from anyone else on the server. Advertisement True PvP combat only starts if the griefer's target fires back at their assailant, at which point it's kill or be killed with full damage potential. The stakes for these PvP battles seem pretty low, though—the victor simply gets to pick up a bag containing whatever scrap the killed player was carrying at the time (the stakes of death against the environment seem similarly low—it seems relatively easy to simply respawn to your team leader, pick up your scrap, and move on as if nothing happened).<doc-sep>Shortly after bounding into the world of Fallout 76, I came upon a campsite put down by the overseer of the game’s namesake vault. She’d gone out ahead of us on some important mission. What exactly it was, I couldn’t tell, because the holotape she’d left behind, and all the others I would find this day, was drowned out by the multiplayer chat of my three squadmates. That first encounter draws out the fact that even an aspiration as simple and reasonable as Fallout 76’s — play a great role-playing game, just with friends — inherently poses some conflict to the staple experiences the series is expected to serve. Another great example is the well-known absence of human non-player characters in Fallout 76. By itself, that’s not a problem for me — and I’ve put hundreds of hours into this game’s siblings. In fact, piecing together my goals and purposes from the notes and recordings of others reinforces the kind of solitude that made Fallout 3, 4 and New Vegas so engrossing. But it also meant that barely five minutes into this new world, I wanted my teammates to go the hell away. Granted, that option will be available to me throughout the entirety of Fallout 76. Here, I was playing with others in a three-hour preview event organized by publisher Bethesda Softworks, the whole point of which was to show how the game’s world works with other people in it. The largest problem I found isn’t that the quest givers are now robots, recordings or other narrative workarounds; it’s who is in charge of the story’s progress, and what the trade-off is for each. On my own, a world without NPCs seems starved for human contact — and that’s the whole point of the first multiplayer Fallout. Playing Fallout 76, with others, I was continually distracted: Someone found something, someone was shooting at something. Our group leader plowed into a side quest with no notice, adding its goals to a list encompassing the other quest I was tracking, a nearby event and advice to go find my dropped junk where I had been killed earlier. These shared missions began to feel like chaotic, semi-cooperative scavenger hunts from summer camp. Once I can have the game all to myself, and set more of the agenda, I’ll be more than eager to dive into Fallout 76 when the beta kicks off Oct. 23 and the full game launches Nov. 14. This is still a rich Fallout experience, after all, a new chapter set earlier in the series’ canon than ever before. Such that I could hear it, I was intrigued by the story that awaits. In-world “events” similar to ones in Destiny are there when I just want multiplayer action separate from my character’s journey. The new progression system is an engaging change of pace from what had been a rather standard RPG build. Bethesda Game Studios and its developers have described how Fallout’s familiar SPECIAL and perk system works in Fallout 76, but as with most things, it takes playing to understand the choices and opportunities within it. The biggest difference between this and Bethesda’s previous Fallout titles is that first-level players begin with no perks and minimum ratings in all attributes. This means I won’t start with a build tuned to my playing style (usually ranged weapons with a lot of endurance) and going in that direction, usually forsaking some other components of my SPECIAL attributes. I’m good with that. I’ve rarely paid much attention to strength in any Bethesda RPG, but in Fallout 76, I chose to increase it to take advantage of a perk card I’d passively acquired, duplicated and then upgraded. Progression in Fallout 76 should lure me out of my old habits and get me to try new things; it’s possible that at higher levels I will end up with an effective character unlike one I’d intended or imagined. In past Fallouts, I never chose the Lead Belly perk (absorb fewer RADs from impure food and water). It found its way into my loadout because it was among the random draw from a perk card pack, and it was the only one I could lay on endurance. (You get a pack of perk cards every second level in the early goings; it’s every five levels at some later point.) And Lead Belly was a good one to have, because thirst and hunger played a more insistent role in my health maintenance than they did in Fallout 4. Though I didn’t get much use out of VATS, other than using it to scan for easily hidden enemies, the combat was clean and accessible, with melee weapons taking on greater importance thanks to what I perceived as more scarcely available ammunition. There are throwable melee weapons, too, including a hand ax, which appears to be a first for the franchise. Some items were locked behind level prerequisites, but I saw no barrier to my travels or to mission adoption, other than the general deterrent of getting my ass kicked. (Note: Some Bethesda developers mentioned that other players at the event had managed to stumble onto and equip power armor pieces, even this early in the game.) I trundled off to see The Whitespring, the game’s take on The Greenbrier, the West Virginia resort where this preview event was held. Once I was there, a pro shop full of golfing ghouls set upon me and handed me my first death. That said, I routinely fought above my weight class, chopping down level 15 and level 20 ghouls with a modified machete while I was level 5 at the most. Such level disparities were instant death in any other Fallout. Death doesn’t strip you of your weapons — just your unprocessed junk, which you should always be breaking down and storing in your mobile campsite. Dying does take a chunk out of a weapon’s overall condition, I guess to keep players from overcoming a tough foe simply by respawning over and over. I lost the use of a hunting rifle this way, requiring a trip to a repair bench. Players may respawn on the location of any teammate, which allowed my unit to prevail against a level 50 Scorchbeast, a flying menace that barbecued me many times. But without teammates, you’ll respawn somewhere other than the place where you just died. This maintains some semblance of level gating while allowing lower-level players to join battles with higher-ranked friends. As to that Scorchbeast, Fallout 76 has a photo mode for taking snapshots, and my teammates posed around the beast’s carcass like big-game hunters, popping the Vault Boy thumbs-up pose. I would have taken a picture, but the game glitched on me and didn’t show the dead creature. Where I have my biggest concern is in how the game’s bartering economy will pan out when human players are the majority of the vendors. No human NPCs means no settlements and no merchants in those settlements, and no traveling traders, armorers or weaponsmiths, either. While human characters may have a greater variety of things they’re willing to part with (especially junk parts useful for crafting), there’s also the question of whether anyone will be willing to trade, if not innately hostile. An emote signal helps tell others you’re open for business, but there’s no guarantee you’re going to get an honest broker. Players engaged in the trading menu can still be shot and killed, so finding a good place to do business will be necessary to keep it from becoming a chem deal gone bad. As to player-versus-player hazards, I’m not sure the “murderer” designation, and the bounty/forfeiture one faces, is going to be much of a deterrent to unprovoked combat, at least at the outset. Everyone will try shooting someone just for the sake of the experience; we all did in our preview, and encountering another group almost always guaranteed a firefight. Sure, Fallout 76 imposes financial penalties for murdering other players (and damage is minimal if those hit don’t return fire), but that’s not the same thing as encouraging or fostering mutually beneficial interaction, such as trading.<doc-sep>
In brief: Bethesda recently gave several journalists the opportunity to get some hands-on time with Fallout 76 ahead of the public beta later this month. Does the new multiplayer-only format work? How does the game compare to earlier Fallout titles? For the answers to these questions and more, we turn to the experts, each of which spent about three hours with Fallout 76. The first thing Engadget’s Jessica Conditt wants you to know about Fallout 76 is that it isn’t Fallout 5: I represent Fallout 76 design director Emil Pagliarulo's nightmare scenario. "I think a lot about the players who want Fallout 5, and this isn't Fallout 5," Pagliarulo said in a roundtable interview after the hands-on session. "Are they gonna be happy? Are they still gonna enjoy playing this game even though it's like -- I actually think we've pushed a lot closer to a much more Fallout 5-ish, single-player-friendly game, but it's still not. ...I worry about that." Fallout 76 is an online-only game. This is a departure for the series -- previous Fallout entries have been story-driven, single-player RPGs without multiplayer modes. Fallout 76, meanwhile, is packed with real-person players and it strongly encourages team-based adventuring. In fact, every human character in the game is another actual player, while the robots, mutants and creepy creatures are computer-generated NPCs. Despite being an all-new game, Andrew Webster from The Verge ensures us that it’ll feel familiar to fans of the franchise: It looks the same, set in a gritty world of brown and grey, and the basics of playing are also similar, right down to the controls. As with Fallout 4, it’s a first-person shooter with a big focus on collecting junk and repurposing it into new weapons, armor, food, and other things that make life in a nuclear wasteland a bit easier. Your Pip-Boy serves as the game’s menu, where you do everything from swap out weapons to take radiation pills. And yes, it still has a radio, so you can listen to old songs about the end of the world as you try to survive it. That sense of familiarity extends to the game’s structure, at least early on. Fallout 76 takes place in 2112, in a massive open world set in West Virginia. This is just 25 years after nuclear war decimated the planet, making it the earliest entry in the series chronologically. (Fallout 4 is set more than a century later, in the remains of Boston.) It’s open in the sense that you’re free to go wherever you want once you leave the vault, though you’re gated somewhat by high-level monsters, which can make it impossible for brand-new players to access certain spots. GameSpot’s Alessandro Fillari dishes on combat mechanics: With the new online focus, some returning mechanics have seen some changes. For instance, Fallout's iconic V.A.T.S.--allowing you to target enemies and fire off precisely-aimed shots--now operates in real-time. It acts more like a real-time lock-on--with your weapon's hit-rate adjusting depending on the enemy's movement or their surroundings. This style of V.A.T.S. definitely took some getting used to. Mostly to the fact that enemies move around often, and combined with the awkward focus of the V.A.T.S. camera, it was jarring to actually use it during a fight. Because of this, I mostly stuck with standard aiming and shooting, which felt more reliable during engagements. While you can upgrade V.A.T.S. with perks to make it more effective, it feels more like an option that should be used sparingly. Dylan Bishop with PlayStation Lifestyle talks PVP combat: Player-versus-player combat works a little differently than it does in most games. When one player attacks another, the victim takes reduced damage until they retaliate. In a sense, this means true PvP duels must be reciprocated and won’t break out in every situation. It’s a drawback for the initiator: you’ve revealed your position and intent, and the second your victim shoots you back, you’ll take full damage—meaning they’ve already turned the tides on you. While this is an odd system, it adds an interesting meta-layer when considering team-wide conflicts. Some teams might send single members into a fight as bait, waiting in the tall brush or dense forests as enemies snipe out their friends. This is entirely possible too: the foliage and beauty of Appalachia make for the perfect espionage action zone. Of course, the other player may not retaliate. In such a case, it’s possible to continue dwindling a player’s health down and kill them.