Fallout X: Back after those messages

[Grim Portent]

Junk jet. And it can shoot just about anything, including boxes of cereal.

Being a bit pedantic here, but I'm not actually sure it can shoot cereal boxes, unless there's a cereal box item that's classified as Junk rather than Aid that I've forgotten about. It would be fun to bomb someone with Sugar Bombs, but I think firing boxes of detergent at people is about as close as we get at the moment.

[LibraryOgre]

I am so very tired of bullet sponges.

[Cikomyr2]

I am so very tired of bullet sponges.

I think the next game should be Far Cry : Fallout

With laser guns and power armor

[MCerberus]

I am so very tired of bullet sponges.

Last time I played 76 it took an entire 7 round clip of .50 cal from my top-of-the-line crafter specc'd sniper rifle wielded with full rifle perks and all headshots to kill some super mutant mobs. Thanks level scaling. Can't even one-shot a naked cultist anymore.

And then I found out their netcode still can't deal with the 8-shot double-barrel shotgun they gave me.

76 still has issues.

[Mechalich]

The spongy-ness seems to have gotten worse over time. F76's worse the F4's is worse than F3's. F76 is sufficiently bad that basically only heavy weapons and melee are viable approaches in the mid to late game. Especially because effective leveling requires mowing down huge numbers of high-level enemies as fast as possible, not completing quests.

[LibraryOgre]

Like, in FO1, you were going to have to beat the crap out of a deathclaw to kill it with hand weapons... unless you hit it in the eyes. And you could use heavy weapons to kill them relatively quickly. Get to NV, and you're having to degrade a missile launcher to nothing to knock one down.

[Triaxx]

Deathclaws were never that tough in New Vegas to my recollection. Given AP ammo they were actually easier to take in a straight fight.

That said they did get spongier over time but it sounds like a lack of player scaling.

[Mechalich]

Deathclaws were never that tough in New Vegas to my recollection. Given AP ammo they were actually easier to take in a straight fight.

That said they did get spongier over time but it sounds like a lack of player scaling.

Or not having the right build. If you put NV on 'Very Hard' difficulty the reduction in Player damage means that many attacks, even with powerful weapons and a high skill rating, will fail to break through the Damage Threshold on powerful enemies like Deathclaws so you'll only do ping damage. In order to get around this you need a build that further boosts damage through the right perk choices. However, because perks are limited (in the vanilla game anyway) any given character will probably only be effective with a single weapon setup even if they max every skill.

F76 is worse in some ways because perks are limited to Special Stats and you only have so many slots to juggle, which means that build has to be chosen with extraordinary care in order to make sure the right slots are available for the necessary perks (if you're going to play F76, look up a build and commit to it, all other paths lead to misery).

[Rater202]

Would 76 have been better if it used the same perk and level system as 4?

Because thats what I was picturing when I first heard about it. Multiplayer version of 4 with a hell of a lot more perks so you can really customize your build if you want and I was disappointed by the card thing.

[Rynjin]

I'm sure it would have been better, but that's the least of 76's problems.

[Triaxx]

Oh right I forgot about difficulties adjusting damage flow as well.

I think the perk card system has some merits but it would have done better as a modifier on top of something like F4's system.

[Mechalich]

F76 has the problem that basically everything has way more HP than it should and that there are huge swarms of enemies in many major locations, or events involve huge swarms spawning. So, in order to survive and level up the player has to be able to output lots of damage. Additionally, they have to be able to both carry off the lot enemies drop in order to farm credits, legendaries, and ammunition, and they have to be able to carry their own armor and ammunition while doing so. The latter of which, considering the number of rounds necessary to clear a major event (it's very easy to pour several thousand rounds into any of the major enemy wave events), is considerable. This means everything in the game is about DPS optimization, and Strength, which not only boosts melee damage but also boosts carry weight, is the OP stat. Therefore, heavy weapons and melee dominate utterly (thankfully these two builds can be swapped without too much efficiency loss), with an obvious bias towards heavy weapons because Scorchbeasts fly. I've actually found that F76 can be very fun once you've learned the world's tricks and setup and effective build - melee works just fine so long as you run away from Scorchbeasts and Suiciders. There's actually a lot of cool if depressing lore and locations buried out there in the game, it's just extremely frustrating how much you have to wrestle with the game to make it functional.

[factotum]

Last time I played 76 it took an entire 7 round clip of .50 cal from my top-of-the-line crafter specc'd sniper rifle wielded with full rifle perks and all headshots to kill some super mutant mobs.

I really, really hate games that do that. Why even give me a sniper rifle--a weapon which is obviously designed for one-hit kills, because once you use it people know where you are and will come after you--and then give everything titanium skulls so you knock off a tiny bit of health if you're lucky with your opening shot? Borderlands was particularly bad for this. At least Skyrim and single-player Fallouts generally give you enough of a damage boost to a stealth attack to make it worthwhile.

[NeoVid]

Would 76 have been better if it used the same perk and level system as 4?

Having played hundreds of hours of both, hell no. 76 letting you change as much of your loadout as you want at the drop of a hat is big advantage compared to being locked into a build that you have to plan ahead of time. Building up enough cards to have a variety of builds ready takes a little while, but you can gain levels so stupidly fast in 76 that it's only an issue for a short time.

That said, it is unfortunately clear what builds are most effective in 76. My melee shotgunner alt was so much easier to play than my stealth rifleman main that it was kind of ridiculous... I never thought I'd play a Bethesda game that made me wish stealth headshots were more unbalanced, but it happened.

[Cikomyr2]

Fallout 76 "change your loadout at will" would be a fun component of multiplayer visitors coming for coop or opposition in a fallout 4 climactic battle where Player 1 is still invested in his full permanent build.

[MCerberus]

F76 has the problem that basically everything has way more HP than it should and that there are huge swarms of enemies in many major locations, or events involve huge swarms spawning. So, in order to survive and level up the player has to be able to output lots of damage. Additionally, they have to be able to both carry off the lot enemies drop in order to farm credits, legendaries, and ammunition, and they have to be able to carry their own armor and ammunition while doing so. The latter of which, considering the number of rounds necessary to clear a major event (it's very easy to pour several thousand rounds into any of the major enemy wave events), is considerable. This means everything in the game is about DPS optimization, and Strength, which not only boosts melee damage but also boosts carry weight, is the OP stat. Therefore, heavy weapons and melee dominate utterly (thankfully these two builds can be swapped without too much efficiency loss), with an obvious bias towards heavy weapons because Scorchbeasts fly. I've actually found that F76 can be very fun once you've learned the world's tricks and setup and effective build - melee works just fine so long as you run away from Scorchbeasts and Suiciders. There's actually a lot of cool if depressing lore and locations buried out there in the game, it's just extremely frustrating how much you have to wrestle with the game to make it functional.

Just so people know how out of whack burst vs sustained damage is: Missile launchers, if you're lucky, can barely kill a ghoul on a direct hit, and the splash damage is nowhere close on all his friends. You are more likely to kill yourself than anything threatening with the things. There is one viable explosive weapon I know of, the heavy grenade launcher that knows 50 ways to kill your wallet before it touches the ground.

[Mechalich]

Just so people know how out of whack burst vs sustained damage is: Missile launchers, if you're lucky, can barely kill a ghoul on a direct hit, and the splash damage is nowhere close on all his friends. You are more likely to kill yourself than anything threatening with the things. There is one viable explosive weapon I know of, the heavy grenade launcher that knows 50 ways to kill your wallet before it touches the ground.

A big part of the problem is that not only does Enemy HP scale up completely out of line with base damage enemy armor does so as well, which means that armor penetration via some method is mandatory. Melee has a nice simple solution to this problem: the Incisor Perk, which drops enemy armor by 75%. All other approaches are more complicated.

It's worth noting that this applies to the player as well, at least to a degree. If you're all armored-up and in powered armor it takes a lot to kill you (at least with damage, ghouls can kill you with rads), which is why Unyielding builds where everyone ran around 15% health all the time were so popular forever (I think this got nerfed recently, but am not sure), because you actually could do that even facing really late game enemies. Everything is spongy.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

I strongly suspect the bullet sponginess and ammo grind in F76 is very much a design feature. It's an MMO, after all, its primary goal is hours played and moving people to the microtransaction store. I mean, come on... let's not even pretend F76 wasn't a blatant attempt to get into the MTX groove in a game that modders simply can't fix their game for them, so people have to shell out more cash to get the fixes from Bethesda. And hey, if the grind is getting too much, ten bucks worth of ATOMs and now you've got some extra ammo. Or repair kits. Or stimpacks. Or whatever resource is a pain to grind.

Then again, my salt over F76's launch is such that should the oceans ever freshen, it would be capable of resalinating them all with plenty to spare. So pardon my jaded cynicism.

[NeoVid]

As much fun as I've had with 76, I'm extremely grateful I heeded the warnings and didn't touch the game until it had two years of updates. In its current state, it's a better Fallout game than 4 was. That's not a high bar, but still...

[Spore]

As much fun as I've had with 76, I'm extremely grateful I heeded the warnings and didn't touch the game until it had two years of updates. In its current state, it's a better Fallout game than 4 was. That's not a high bar, but still...

I think I am the one of few people that genuinely liked Fallout 4 including its story. And the fact of (force) multiplayer just completely throws me off of the Fallout vibe. It is a post apocalypse. You are supposed to feel lonely at times, supposed to immerse yourself in the world.

Which is difficult with community features and Bobby McCashshop Person over there with their bright pink Nuka Cola cashshop paint on their power armor bunny hopping around the countryside.

[Rynjin]

There's a lot to like about Fallout 4 but I'm gonna be honest, I genuinely cannot fathom how anyone could like its main storyline. Tolerate it? Sure. Like it? ...Why?

[Triaxx]

F4 personafies playing for the world not the 'story'.

[NeoVid]

I was super addicted to FO4, it was the most fun I'd had playing a game in a while. It's a great game, it's just not very good at being a Fallout game. I've never enjoyed a game so much while also being grateful I didn't spend money on it, since I wouldn't want to encourage Bethesda to make future Fallouts more like 4.

And the fact of (force) multiplayer just completely throws me off of the Fallout vibe. It is a post apocalypse. You are supposed to feel lonely at times, supposed to immerse yourself in the world.

Huh. You know, until you put it that way, I didn't see the point of why 76 has the option for private worlds.

[Mechalich]

I think I am the one of few people that genuinely liked Fallout 4 including its story. And the fact of (force) multiplayer just completely throws me off of the Fallout vibe. It is a post apocalypse. You are supposed to feel lonely at times, supposed to immerse yourself in the world.

Which is difficult with community features and Bobby McCashshop Person over there with their bright pink Nuka Cola cashshop paint on their power armor bunny hopping around the countryside.

At launch, F76 was actually super lonely. The game world is really big, and even if a server was full, you could play for hours and never run into another person. If you did it was almost always at a shop for a few seconds. As long as you turned off the player audio channel (which I did about 5 seconds into the game), it was like the other players were almost never there. Yes, you'd occasionally randomly happen across someone's CAMP - there's almost always at least one at the Whitespring and a few of the better workshops, because of gameplay incentives - but that was it. And the actual in-game story about the second apocalypse (which has regrettably become significant more on the nose since release) and the failures to overcome it were crushing if you actually listened to all the audiotapes (admittedly some of them are like 5+ minutes in length, which is a lot when you're being shot at and stuff). Later edits to allow living NPCs actually really diluted the theme.

There's more interactivity now, but there are still huge chunks of gameworld that are almost always empty.

[LibraryOgre]

I like Fallout 4 as a game, but I agree, the story is lackluster; it's sort of like being at an amusement park. Wander around, do what you like, and, every so often, hop on the rails and do this thing that you have little control over (e,g, "Follow Dogmeat to Fort Hagan, which will be completely locked down until you get there with Dogmeat, and then only if you've followed him.")

[factotum]

Bethesda's environmental storytelling is top-notch...for a world maybe 20 years after the bombs fell. It makes absolutely no sense that all those audio logs and computer messages that tell those stories are still intact 200 years later. For that reason, the *setting* of Fallout 76 sounds really interesting...25 years after the great war? In a place that wasn't actually an irradiated desert? That just sounded all sorts of awesome. Unfortunately the fact it was an MMO destroyed almost all interest I had in the game, and then, when I heard about the state of it on release, it just killed any remaining desire I might have had to play it. Especially once I found out that supermutants were in it! Is there a single lab anywhere in the continental United States that was *not* secretly experimenting with FEV at some point? They had a real chance to dial things back to the beginning and *not* include half a million lazy tropes, but apparently they couldn't resist.

What I want from Fallout 5 is for it to *not* start in a Vault of any kind, to not have supermutants, and to be set somewhere green and pleasant. Maybe have it set on Hawaii? That'd make a nice change!

[Rater202]

I think Supermutants are kind of grandfathered in at this point.

What I think they could do is try to make something more... Oringal with them?

Maybe you are the super mutant? Nah, that's better for a spin-off or an MMO. r if they just went full "Elder Scrolls with Nukes" and let you pick your race. you can be a Vault Dweller, a Wastlander, a Ghoul, a Synth, a Supermutant, or a modified humanoid Robobrain. Same perk system as 4 but some perks are slightly different for each race and each race also has its own set of unique perks.

[Mechalich]

Especially once I found out that supermutants were in it! Is there a single lab anywhere in the continental United States that was *not* secretly experimenting with FEV at some point? They had a real chance to dial things back to the beginning and *not* include half a million lazy tropes, but apparently they couldn't resist.

Supermutants are only in it a little. Yes, they're a reused asset, because F76 reuses every asset that was created for F4, including Far Harbor monsters like Anglers, but they're only central to a few areas and their location based quest line is really limited. The central F76 quest line is about the Scorched, and while that's still a lab experiment gone wrong, the Scorched are definitely different from previous entries and have solid lore. F76 also, unlike F3, F:NV, or F4, really goes into some detail about what happened after the bombs fell and how the survivors tried to hold things together and rebuild (or not, in the case of the raider-based part of the plot).

All of the Fallouts under Bethesda have been about how technology has both the power to save or destroy, and ultimately places a piece of extremely powerful technology in the hands of the player at the end of the game and asks them to chose what to do with it. F:NV is most successful in no small part because its choices feel the most reasonable and have a spectrum of consequences (I mean, you have to be a massive d*** to chose the Legion, but there are real arguments for and against going House, NCR, or Wild Card). The choices in F3 and F4 are much flatter. F76 mostly presents only the illusion of choice. I mean, sure, you can drop the nukes wherever you want, but there's only like two places on the whole map where it will actually do anything consequential.

[Cikomyr2]

Fallout 4 is the single best Murderhobo explorer simulator thats built on top of a fantastic world that could handle a story about paranoia, terrorism, fascism, xenophobia, community and neighborhood..

But it doesnt. It plays as a murderhobo simulator that has self-contained missions that never interact matter how much they should.

[Triaxx]

Part of F4's issue i think is it leaned too heavily on a pre-conceived character. A parent, mother or father. And it kind of subsumed any other character development.

Compare to Fallout 2, which when you were asked if you were a parent played it off with a couple snarky responses. It was something to be aware of but wasn't the only driving force to the Narrative.