 So my last video was an hour long and I'll admit it's not easy to put dozens of hours into making something that you know almost no one's going to see. With that in mind, this time you're all getting a video that took me almost no time at all. It didn't take any research beyond just playing the game and I won't need to find footage of 10 movies and a bunch of games to make it. I have played my generous allotment of Super Special Xbox Pre-Order Beta and then hours of the open beta after and I'm ready to talk about some of my thinky thoughts about Fallout 76. Let me preface everything I'm going to say with this. I have really, really enjoyed all of the 3D Fallout games. The first two games released after I had moved out of my parents house but before I had a pot to piss in so I didn't play those until after Fallout 3. But Fallout 3, New Vegas and Fallout 4 offer an almost completely unique gameplay experience. An open world RPG with RPG not just being 3 letters to use in the marketing. Those games are a strange blend of console, action shooter and deep PC role-playing game. A rich, detailed open world filled with interesting characters, unique choices and dynamic emergent gameplay. They're so unique that Bethesda Open World Game is its own genre in the way that Soulsborn is its own genre except nobody's even tried to copy Bethesda yet. And even with some of the streamlining and changes to Fallout 4, the game has remained an RPG. With interesting builds, unique characters, dynamic world of choices and consequences Fallout has always felt like a game for people who love games. I still remember the moment that made me love this series. One of my most memorable gaming moments was stumbling onto the Republic of Dave and talking to everyone before stealing votes from the ballot box. After counting the votes and seeing that Rosie had somehow been elected president, Dave stormed out and left. And I figured that was that, a really great, funny, well written quest. But later on as I was following the main quest into Old Olney, I discovered Dave's body in the street. For some reason, finding his body took the quest from great to truly memorable. It made the world feel real, it made my actions feel like they mattered. On my next playthrough, after electing Rosie, I followed Dave and killed everything in his path before he was killed. And later, when I came back again, I found him sitting in an alley saying, this is the new Republic of Dave. The quest was so different from anything else I'd played and so interesting and imaginative that I think I will always remember it. The fact that you could prevent Dave from being killed and that the developers considered that possibility and programmed in dialogue for him is what Fallout was all about for me. So yes, Fallout games are flawed and janky. Yes, the shooting is, at its best, subpar. Yes, there have been problems with the plot of all of them and especially with the endings of 3 and 4. Yes, Fallout 4's story and dialogue system were deeply disappointing. But Fallout is also completely unique. There's nothing else like it and the games above all else have always felt ambitious. They felt huge and inscrutable and amazing. They all felt like it's impossible to see everything and talk to everyone. They felt like real worlds. Only Fallout does what it does. No other games even try. So yeah, I've loved all of the Fallout games. Now let's get to this new Bethesda game that has a Fallout skin on it. Before we go further, I just want to say that I do feel legitimately misled and take advantage of with the beta thing. It's not some huge deal, but it needs to be addressed at least. I very rarely pre-order a game. Like only if I am completely positive I'm going to play a bunch of it. But then there was the whole get beta access a full week early campaign and I figured I was definitely going to buy it at some point anyway so, but yeah, three little windows of a couple hours each. Had I known that this was the deal I still would have pre-ordered actually, but my expectations would have been set properly and I wouldn't feel like I was tricked. But now I feel like information was knowingly withheld in order to drive pre-orders on the Xbox. I don't care if this came from marketing or Xenomax or whatever. It sucks and it's shitty. But moving on to the actual game. What did I think? Well, I think this was a terrible idea, executed badly and I kind of hope it fails. Now that might seem harsh, right? I've only played it for what, seven hours or so? True, but it only takes a few minutes to realize just how poorly the words online multiplayer and Fallout go together. They go together so badly I don't think this is a worse match possible in gaming. Let's demonstrate how badly they go together with two anecdotes that happened to me in my short time so far with the beta. One involving another player and one involving non-player enemies. Very shortly into the game, you'll arrive at the first little town and have to do some quests that teach the basic survival mechanics that are on offer here. And as a quick aside, they're basically the Fallout 4 survival mode mechanics except tone down so much that they are nothing but very annoying busy work with almost no actual gameplay value. Fallout 4 survival mode works because food, water, beds and radaway are scarce and saving is rare so the difficulty is ramped up considerably. Now I don't particularly enjoy the survival mode, but I see its purpose. But if food and water are everywhere and I can make a bed wherever the fuck I want, the whole purpose of survival mechanics go out the window. Anyway, I did the first of the game's seemingly endless supply of shallow fetch quests and was turning you in at a computer, oh yeah, you turn in quests at a computer because there are no people and no dialogue and no actual meaningful choices. You know, Fallout. So anyway, I'm trying to read what passes for story in Fallout 76, a text log at a computer terminal and a main quest hub when a player starts shooting me. Now the game's anti-griefing system means that players that attack you do almost no damage until you decide to shoot back. But I'm not interested in shooting back right now because I'm reading in the quest hub at a computer terminal. I kept reading trying to ignore the gunfire but this guy keeps shooting me. For about a minute I was having to read while my controller shook and I have gunfire in my headphones. This makes reading harder than you'd think and it quickly started to actively piss me off. And it wasn't just that it's distracting, it's that it was almost the definition of immersion breaking. Fine. He, she, eventually got bored and left and I noticed that the game was insisting I sleep. Okay? Well, the game is always on line so now you have to sleep in real time. Yes, it is only 20 seconds or so but you literally have to watch your character lay down in the bed and fucking sleep. While I was laying in the bed, watching my character sleep in the little shack I'd made, the same player from before opens the door and proceeds to throw Molotov cocktails on me. One after another, over and over. He threw about 10 or 15 Molotov cocktails on me in my sleeping bag before getting bored and wandering off again. First of all, huge waste of Molotov cocktails. And the asshole did not even close the door in his way out. Let's examine everything wrong here. First of all, it was annoying. Second of all, Fallout's combat is at very, very best. Not so bad that it breaks the game. And this game is not Fallout's combat at its best as we'll get to shortly. And finally, I cannot help but think how fucking stupid this is. Isn't that other player, you know, a vault dweller from Vault 76? Haven't we just both left the vault about a day ago? Wouldn't we know each other? When would we have spent the last several decades knowing each other? And now they're throwing Molotov cocktails on me as I sleep for no particular reason other than the Lawls. Fallout has pretty much been a game about immersion in a real world with real consequences. It's been an RPG. Everything you did mattered. The game did everything it could to maintain a sense of realism while still being fantastical and funny. It would be one thing if the game allowed players to choose to be raiders or scorched or whatever. But that obviously would have required an entire other storyline so no. Instead, they are on the exact same quest as me, except for some reason they have instantly gone from fellow resident to Molotov slinging enemy for no reason at all really. Why would two people who have just left the same vault be trying to kill each other? Again, man, immersion breaking. I suddenly don't feel like the vault dweller out in the world trying to survive. I don't feel like one of humanity's last struggling along trying to help people where I can and fight people when I must. No, now I feel like me, plenty the old guy being annoyed by Tanghunter 69. Other players absolutely ruin any semblance of role-playing in this game. They don't add anything and they don't make sense narratively. It actively ruins huge core aspects of what makes Fallout great and trains it for what? An online PvP shooter that isn't in the top 100 best online PvP shooters? Okay, so there was that. Now I will say that with most people I met we either happily ignored each other or briefly cooperated because the game clearly seems balanced from more than one player in a group. Now I'm assuming most players ignore each other because most people play Fallout to be alone in a Fallout world. So misguided this game is. Anyway, let's get to the solo experience that turned me off. In the second day of the beta, I saw that most other people on the server were doing the next part of the main quest off near the airport, so I went in the other direction and found a pharmaceutical company. It's a classic Fallout building, dilapidated and creepy, and for about 15 minutes the game was firing on all cylinders again. I cased the outside of the place, took care of a few hounds, scattered the entrance and stealth headshot of the few scorched on the ground floor. The enemies were several levels above me so I had to be careful. I hacked a terminal and turned on the turrets to have them kill some more enemies. Then I went upstairs, fighting scorches I went, looting bodies and boxes. I picked a lock. It was just the classic Fallout gameplay loop that's carried me through hundreds and hundreds of hours across multiple playthroughs of all three games. I thought I'd cleared the entire third floor when I came to another computer terminal. I opened it up and started reading some interesting lore about nefarious experiments that had happened here. You know, Fallout. Now audio and text logs are THE only storytelling you will get in this game so when I came across them I wanted to carefully read them and get a feel for what happened here. This is where much of the immersion and world building happens in any Fallout game. And when you're doing stuff like this, it does feel like Fallout. Until I started getting attacked while reading. It appears that I had taken too long and enemies had begun to respawn or maybe I just missed two or three but either way, half way through a text log I'm being shot so I've got to slowly back out through three screens because that's how Fallout handles its menus all the while taking damage. I finally get back out, see that I'm very low on health, fire a couple shots and get killed. The game, because it's online, doesn't pause when you're using a terminal. Or when you're listening to an audio log, or when you're reading a note, or sorting your inventory, or ever. And you'll be finding audio logs and notes while fighting and shooting is happening all the time. In the very first area I was trying to read the journal of a dead pastor. Classic Fallout stuff, touching and sad but I couldn't even finish because it kept getting distracted as other players ran in and out of the room and fired their guns outside the window while ghouls continually respawned on the street. The feeling of being in control of the game, of slowly working things out, of being alone in a desolate wasteland is just not here. The lack of pausing interacts with the normal Fallout gameplay in other really shitty ways. The over-encumbered mechanic is still here although very, very slightly toned down. But as always, you will constantly be over-encumbered because the entire purpose of the game seems to be collecting junk to craft shit. Anyone who's played Fallout knows that a significant amount of time, and I mean significant amount of time, is spent in menus trying to figure out what to drop on the floor so that you can accomplish what the game calls running but was actually simply walking at a normal pace. This has always been an annoying but somewhat necessary and certainly important part of the gameplay. But now, you can't pause, so if you're going through a dungeon and you go over your weight limit you've gotta figure out what to drop while potentially being attacked. It's not something that's theoretical either, it happens to be over and over in my 7 hours or so. And Fallout's menus are actually pretty fucking bad. In a regular Fallout game, the menus being annoying doesn't really matter because you've got all the time in the world. But when there are enemies all around you and you need to dump weight so you can do anything, it's beyond annoying, it is infuriating. On another note, I simply do not understand why there aren't NPCs in this game. I originally thought it was a matter of not wanting players to kill NPC quest givers but that can't be the reason. Fallout has had unkillable NPCs before, so why are there none here? Why not have a solution like all NPCs are instants in certain areas that only you and your group can enter, that way attacking them doesn't affect other people? Or just do what the game's always done with essential NPCs and make them unable to be killed? I can only assume it's because NPCs in dialogue and story cost money and take time and they just thought they weren't essential here. But they ARE essential for a Fallout game, not having them just totally neuters the ability to tell a story. Nothing fucking matters. Everything you do changes anything. Everyone is dead. Why am I doing quests for dead people again? What the hell? One of the biggest gripes with Fallout 4 was the dialogue system. People rightly complained about how poorly it was implemented, how shallow it was compared to the previous games. But the solution to that was not the elimination of dialogue. It was simply going back to the old system or making an even better system. A Fallout game without dialogue is like playing Destiny with no supers or grenades. It's like half of what makes the game interesting and unique. Moving on. Let's talk about how the game's fucking abysmal performance interacts with its online gameplay to make Fallout's already only adequate combat downright bad. Fallout 3 introduced the VATS system, not only as a way to counteract the very very dodgy and basic FPS combat, but also as a way to still retain real RPG roots in an FPS game. VATS was more effective than regular shooting and because VATS accuracy was basically a really cool form of the old isometric dice rolls, it just worked perfectly. When you add in the awesome slow motion kill cam, VATS was a nearly perfect system for blending a shooter with a term based RPG. It was a stroke of genius basically. The new real time VATS is very bad. It is so disorienting that the gun doesn't aim at the enemy you are locked onto. It just juts out aiming at a wall, it just looks bad and plays worse. First of all, targeting limbs is a fucking nightmare here. The visual feedback is terrible because unlike in previous games, the limb doesn't blink. Only the small percentage chance number moving to the limb lets you know you've targeted it. This is such bad visual feedback that for almost an hour I thought it was actually broken. But even after I realized how it works, it is terrible. Because the actual targeting is wonky and annoying. You know how in like Fallout 3 or 4, sometimes it's a huge pain in the ass to actually target the limb you want? Like you'll push down to target the leg but it won't move and then you'll push again and it'll target the right arm instead. And then you get annoyed and you push really hard down into the left and it finally will snap to the limb you want. Remember that? Yeah, that is still a thing except now it is in real time. Which means that the inability to quickly target the limb you want goes from an annoying inconvenience to causing your death. Now that is still actually useful here because the combat remains wonky and having an auto aim button helps. Strangely in 76 it's actually much more useful for melee but that used to be functional and fun. It gave the shooting an RPG feel. It felt strategic and let you feel like your build really mattered. It was fun and rewarding to stop time and decide your course of action. First I'll shoot the gun out of that guy's hand there. Then I'll cripple that ghoul's legs and then I'll finish them off in real time. Now it's just a crutch that lets you overcome the fact that the shooting here actually feels worse than Fallout 4. And that game shooting was only good for a Fallout game to begin with. Compared to the shooting in actual shooters? Compare Fallout 4 shooting to Destiny or Call of Duty or Battlefield or Titanfall. It is laughably bad in that context. Just embarrassingly bad. Okay, so how can the shooting here be worse than in Fallout 4 you might ask? Easy. First, at least in the beta because connectivity and framerate issues mean that not only are enemies teleporting all over the place, lining your gun up dead center on their chest doesn't mean you'll do any damage. Hit detection. At least here, again, in the beta is a fucking mess. I have had many times where I shot an enemy and nothing happened. Or three seconds later a register they'd fall down dead. Bethesda does not have this right. Which isn't all that surprising considering where the studio's expertise lies. I understand that connection issues are to be expected at a beta, but the performance here is so bad that it feels like this game should be months away from releasing. Destiny 2's beta showcased all the problems with that game and it was also only a few weeks from release. But performance was rock solid and the game felt finished and ready to go even though I hated all the changes that had been made I couldn't argue that the game worked and felt ready for release. This game feels like it should be releasing in March, not two and a half weeks from now. So was there anything good? Of course, there were lots of good things. The world is shockingly beautiful for Bethesda game and I'm actually quite impressed with how it looks. Enemy models and animations are much improved from Fallout 4. The radroaches, possums, blood flies, robots all look really fantastic, a big step up. The resolution, at least on the Xbox One X, was impressive, even if the frame rate and pop-in were terrible. Lighting is great and the game can actually be a real looker at times, although there are lots of times when the game just shits the bed visually for no particular reason. It is about as inconsistent and buggy as your average Bethesda game and I don't see why we should assume that this Bethesda game, its first ever online game, would be any better. In fact, I think we should assume it will be significantly worse than their previous games. Now, I was actually quite surprised to really like the card pack system. I was super skeptical of it before playing and while I don't like it as much as the Fallout 3 or New Vegas system, I think I like it better than Fallout 4 system. Again, the 50% of the time that you are creeping through a building alone, looking at the environments and listening to audio logs feels as good as it ever does. Except here the audio logs are less satisfying because you know that's the only story you're going to get. Basically, all of my fears are validated now. The game has only the barest thread of narrative. The quests? Imagine an entire Fallout game that is only Preston Garvey's radiant settlement and need quests. It is some of the laziest, MMO-iest, fetchiest shit ever. It feels particularly empty and barren, only broken up by Noob Slayer 93 jumping up and down and shooting you while you're trying to listen to an audio log. I don't understand the need for this game. I don't understand why this simply isn't Fallout 5. Everything is here for a really great Fallout game. A gorgeous, tremendous map. Their best art, animation and design work yet. A really fun progression and crafting system. A reasonably improved base building system making Junk useful. But the lack of NPCs and dialogue and the presence of Noob Slayer 93 and Tanghunter 69 jumping up and down and emoting at me as I try to stealth around a town just make this a game that doesn't work. If this game is meant to be a competitor to GT Online or Destiny or the Division it will not work. It simply doesn't have the gameplay chops those games have. It is as clunky and janky as ever. Which could be charming in the past when it was offset by everything else the Bethesda games do. But when you strip out all of those things, conversations, finding interesting characters and talking to them to get their backstory, companions and their quests, choosing a faction and making an actual impact in the world, listening as 3Dog recounted your exploits for all the Capital Wasteland to hear. Without those things you're kind of just left with an open world shooter with really bad shooting. Will this game be fun to play with friends? I imagine if I had friends, sure. Checkers is fucking fun to play with friends. Rolling dice against a curb for dollars is fun with friends. That doesn't mean it's a particularly compelling game. It means that doing things with your friends is fun. I have fun sitting and doing nothing with my friends but I don't charge them $60 for that. This simply isn't Fallout. I don't see the hook. I do not understand why this game was made and I don't see people playing this game for as long as they have played the other Fallout games. The entire replayability of Fallout games was dependent on seeing all the different interactions, playing with the karma and faction systems and none of that seems to be here. At least the first 7 or 8 hours of gameplay don't feature any of that. I will give it a fair shake when it launches, hopefully in a much more functional state than it currently is. Maybe there are actually NPCs somewhere? Maybe the story and quest design drastically improves later in the game? I mean, I kinda doubt it seeing as how most games stack their best quests up front to hook you in but maybe I want to like this game. For all of their obvious flaws, Fallout games have been some of my very favorites. Even Fallout 4 which had the worst story, dialogue and quest was still an excellent game that I played for almost 200 hours. But my impressions now are that this game is exactly what I thought it would be. Maybe to squeeze another Fallout game out the door this generation by reusing most assets and not having to bother with things like quest design and writing and plot. Basically a Fallout game with all of the nuance and complexity leached out. A way to see if they could cash in on the games or service thing. We've lost dialogue options, conversations, speech checks, romance options, companions and their quests, karma, factions, story, replayability, a world that you can change and a whole bunch of other things and it was replaced by, by what? What did we trade all those things for? What did we trade the very things that make Fallout what it is for? It's been traded for being able to shoot Noob Slayer 93 or silently quest with Tang Hunter? Why? When I want to shoot Noob Slayer I will shoot him in games that are made for shooting him. Games like Battlefield, Titanfall, Destiny, Overwatch, etc. If I want to quest with Tang Hunter I will do that in games that are designed from the ground up for just that purpose, like Destiny, Anthem, the Division, World of Warcraft, etc. When I play Fallout it's because I want to play what Fallout does, conversations, quests with branching possibilities, deep immersion and getting lost in a huge world where my actions have an effect on the people I meet and the story I am engaging with. I just don't understand this game. Bethesda Game Studios has great artists and writers. The world design is as good, fuck, maybe better than ever. So yeah it has its moments, basically whenever the game feels like Fallout it is good, but it only feels like Fallout rarely. So why would I play this instead of, uh, instead of Fallout? The gameplay as always with Bethesda games here simply isn't polished enough to stand on its own and I don't think the world of Fallout fits for this type of game. Fallout is a single player game. The player character is called the lone wanderer for Christ's sake. I don't like it. I don't see why anyone needed this game and it makes me annoyed that they didn't just use all this and take another year or two and make it the next real Fallout game. That's what I kept thinking as I played. I'd come over a hill and see a gorgeous sunrise filtering through the trees, illuminating a far off power plant and think, fuck, I wish this was actually a Fallout game. This is so cool I wonder what's in that power plant, but then I turn around and I'd see noobs layer and tanghunter69 punching each other in the face and jumping up and down and that feeling would be gone. I suspect that after the game launches and everyone is in different areas that it will be possible to only rarely see other people. But once that happens it will only further cement how empty it feels to have no towns, no settlements, no NPCs to talk to. Having other players around sucks, but not having other players around will also suck because the world has been designed with the idea of having other players around. Again, I will give the game a fair shake and I have had games surprise me before, but as of now I am more skeptical of this game than I was before I played the beta. I'll have final thoughts when I finish it, but right now this doesn't seem like it's really for me and I'd probably be better served simply replaying New Vegas. Alright, so coming up I'll have some thoughts on Red Dead 2 and how it's the most polished and technically impressive game ever made and also how it goes from amazing to incredibly annoying every 13 minutes or so. I want to do a quick video on where Destiny is at currently and I've got some other stuff percolating. Thanks for watching and if unlike me you actually do have friends, do me a favor and tell them about the channel, it's demoralizing sometimes. Okay, see you next time and bye, thank you.