Fallout 76 Review - Most Disappointing Game of 2018

so if you could tell the people watching this review anything what would it be [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] fallout 76 is a mass and I think that's the most charitable way I could describe this game after spending 67 hours in its wasteland no easy feat it felt like 500 hours maybe it was laziness maybe it was rushed maybe it was sheer incompetence I can't necessarily get inside people's heads apparently I live rent free and some so I may have to do a bit of guesswork here and I'm not in the position at this point to be charitable so we're gonna take a look at fallout 76 a lot of the reviews that I've seen about this game have been underwhelming disappointing and I feel like a lot of the issues that I took note of during my many many hours of this game we're going unnoticed or no one talked about them or spoke about them in their reviews kind of strange one of the reviews I watch that was awful was by a channel called oxhorn apparently he's a fallout youtuber he had nothing but glowing praise for the game after 35 hours gosh I wonder why even mr. Matty plays who's a fallout youtuber he titled his review disappointing is an understatement and it's a good review you should check it out give him a listen a few days ago I was skimming through some other fallout 76 related content see what people were saying catch up on some thoughts came across this by fiora the Tank Girl why fallout 4 and 76 our pad fallouts but good games the light disagreed vehemently with that I left her this comment explaining why and then I pointed out to her that she was contradicting her title and thumbnail in her response to me she decided to delete my comments or at least hide them so nobody could find them some people are really touchy about this game maybe they're just [ __ ] who knows can't have disagreements in the comments section that's not what that's for Noel just some things I noticed and there might be some people out there who think that this is beating a dead horse that I'm just adding to the pile that's already built up but I think you'll find some things in this review that you haven't heard elsewhere there is so much going on and fallout 76 that doesn't work I guarantee you that you haven't heard everything that's wrong with it despite you thinking that maybe you have and that doing a review is pointless for a lot of people a lot of diehard Bethesda fans a lot of Fallout fans this has really change their mindset into the series in the company behind the game's creation so grab the leash and pack a sack lunch and scooby snax we're going for walkies down the proverbial country road of apocalyptic West Virginia and we are going to have a gay old time fallout review we have always wanted to tell that story of what it will be like for you and the other characters who were first to leave the vaults but there is one big difference with this game it's that each of those characters is a real person I'm sure that'll work great for you as you begin the game it opens with it's only cutscene it tells the story and I mean that in the most loose of ways of the denizens of vault 76 leaving the protection of their underground bunker and venturing out into the irradiated wasteland of West Virginia this game is a a prequel of sorts it takes place in 2102 that's 25 years after the world had its nuclear calamity and to put that into perspective on the Fallout timeline which lots of people don't really have stapled to the brain the last game fallout 4 took place in 2287 so that's 210 years after the apocalypse essentially the entire premise of fallout 76 was the reason you're doing everything that you're doing or at least the reason that they give you is that this vault is full of the best and brightest of America and after the nuclear apocalypse it's gonna be your job to come out of the vaults and rebuild America and help save our way of life and it's no accident that I began this section of the review with the clip of everything being online that's like this game's stick it's all online it's multiplayer there is no single player element to this game there is no way to experience fallout 76 without the potential of running into other players are being beholden to the ping of whatever server you're placed in arbitrarily or or the constant fear of server disconnects you can't pause the game the world goes on with or without you so I think it's fair to begin the review by addressing how these things mix how how you have the narrative component of the game in the story it's trying to tell with the fact that the game is always online and the restrictions and hoops that one has to jump through design-wise when you're putting those things together if you're going to have a game that's always online there should be some kind of a common goal that players are trying to accomplish in terms of what the story is and the idea for fallout 76 is that it's your duty as a blue blooded god-fearin capitalist love an American to restore order and rebuild the wasteland of West Virginia which you'll quickly forget because like the previous Fallout game and others it's it's kind of just about you that's what people do in Fallout they collect weapons and armor and special little things and trinkets they have a little dinner house they spruce up with looted goodies and they scrounge and scavenge and for a game about survivors of a nuclear apocalypse who should be banding together to rebuild the broken world around them you never really get that feeling everybody's just sort of out there doing their own thing I won't get into how they could have made it work maybe later I will I don't I don't know I haven't decided yet but fallout 76 essentially plays like a free-for-all there's a bunch of people exploring bouncing around from place to place to resupply their little stock of adhesive and loose screws and turpentine doesn't feel like anybody I met was on my team even though they should all be on my team nothing that feels like they're my enemy I'll get to PvP later but they chose a story and setting that just doesn't really gel once you start thinking about it for the tiniest two seconds it all starts to fall apart you and all of these other people have been suck and stuck inside this underground bunker for the last 25 years together and when you spawn into the game with your newly made character it looks the part it looks like a celebration almost and fallouts tongue-in-cheek style of gee golly gosh look at how naive and happy but AI everybody is to go out into the wasteland kind of way there's nobody there in this vault you're home for the last 25 years is empty and the only thing approaching another living soul he's floating mr. handy robots were the same voice between all of them what a strange way to begin an online-only game if this was a single-player game there would be gosh - you know a game Bethesda [ __ ] gave a [ __ ] about there would be characters here there would be NPCs that were humans there would be young children curious about what was outside the vault that they'd lived in their whole lives there'd be older generations who would have the knowledge in their heads of the pre-war world and and even people like the player who probably recall those days to some degree but are about to embark into this strange new world fraught with danger and and you would know each of them by name because you spent the last quarter century locked up in a glorified safety box together and if this were a game that Bethesda gave a [ __ ] about you would explore the wasteland and watch how it changed them watched how these fellow vault dwellers coped with his dangerous strange new world how how the elderly tried to learn how to accept that this wasteland was once their home that a cataclysm engulfed it and that things can never ever go back to the way that they were I'm probably starting to ramble a bit whenever but the point I'm trying to make is that the idea of a Fallout game set with the opening of a vault in the early period following I guess its potential habitability in the wasteland is a very neat one that would have been a perfect game that isn't that isn't this game instead you walk out of the vault in the most unceremonious boring vault openings of all games and that's that's kind of that and the game comes with comes in with some contrived reason why you can't just turn around and go back in because that would make sense but we can't have that in this online game I mean you act you can't walk back into vault 76 ever once you leave at the beginning you can never go back inside it's closed and it makes no sense at all it just seems odd that if you're supposed to go out and restore the world you can't come back inside the vault where it's safe and there's clean food and water and power and medical care and clean beds there's some terminal entry about how I only could essentially grow tough spines and they can't rely on the vault and stuff like that but it doesn't really make sense I mean if you only have a very finite supply of human people leaving a vault so you want to keep them safe and well-fed and healthy so that they can carry out their job and that they would be very precious commodities also vault 76 doesn't have any experiment to it at least not to my understanding it's just a vault that was made to open like normal there's no cloning or psychological tampering or human experimentation it's just a vault and that's not very interesting that could have been instead of all the potential of some interesting cool story with memorable characters and dialogue and choices it was all removed so the game could be always online and these things aren't mutually exclusive but I guess Bethesda thought one was far more important than the other then maybe I should give Bethesda some leeway here they wanted it always online multiplayer Fallout game but I can't help wonder what was sacrificed in order to do that and why would they do it at all who exactly was clamoring for a PvP and a Fallout game I mean the last thing that I have ever thought about when I've played a Fallout game be at three new vegas for last thing that i've had on my mind to us man i can't wait for another player to walk into my game and [ __ ] it all up I'm sure there's a fair amount of people who wanted a like a co-op mode with a PvE focus I kind of prefer to go it alone myself but I wouldn't mind if I could turn it off and I could enjoy my fallout as what it's always been a single-player game that was really immersive but if I had the option to have some friends with me and we tackled the wasteland together without strangers mucking around in it as well that would be cool I would be down with that but now it's almost like every other player I see ruins the immersion when it's supposed to be the other way around so the point I'm trying to make is that from the get-go here if you're trying to have a game that's always online and there's always people and you're all working together for something well what I've booted up the game and I've done this with multiple characters just to see it pops you in a server and for the most part you'll be the only person in the server doing the one thing of leaving the vaults cuz it's a one-way trip you can't go back so you're surrounded by this empty vault and it's supposed to be this big thing but there's no one around and one of the biggest complaints I have about this game is how lonely it feels and from the very first moments I have control over my character I feel alone the game tells me that I'm one of America's best and brightest and I have to team up with all of my fellow vault dwellers and we all go out and rebuild the wasteland together but all that's around or me some robots and my immense disappointment the in-game story which I'll only briefly talk about because I'll um I'm only gonna give as much effort as Bethesda did essentially there's an overseer who doesn't even have a character model by the way because you never meet her but she's the main quest of the game and I used the quotations around the words main quest liberally is that you are to follow her path because she's [ __ ] around in the woods and you have to go do stuff with her before you get to leave the vault there's people who are out in the wasteland there's a group of goody goody two-shoes people called the responders and they want to help people and build the wasteland up and keep everyone safe and fed and they're all dead there's a faction of Raiders you know the go around raiding stuff stealing and they're all dead and here's the Brotherhood of Steel to collect tech and break the fallout lore and they're all dead then there's the enclave remnants of the old government they're all dead and everyone's dead they're all dead no one's alive you come across their bodies and you can't take the armor off them which is neat and you come across everybody and they're all dead it's like you had a wasteland full of factions that had their own objectives and goals and you pop in after gosh somebody else's Fallout game is over and done but they [ __ ] up with the main story so everyone died and there's no one here - no one here to care about or be invested in the only people who you interact with our robots robots are the [ __ ] the traitors the bartenders the the little floaty thingies they're the gardeners look at this picture there's like there's like 15 robots in this picture and a dead one like what is this pathetic how does it feel so lifeless like Pennington who gives you your first main quest thingy there are no people fallout 76 is completely without dialog there is no dialog that the player makes in this game it is all completely passive you are told to do this by a robot and you go do it and that's that you can't decline or ask for more information you can't engage with them in any way you are told to do things and your character has no choice but to either do them or just not ever get around to it and since there's no living people in the wasteland at this point apart from other players all of the game's stories and lore and stuff comes delivered through hollow tapes and computer terminals and some of them are just flat-out bad 9 Moreno night God quit here are you okay squirt freaking everywhere yeah oxhorn that's riveting storytelling you feel like a visitor passing through you have no reason to really be here so when people say there's no NPCs they're not really correct technically there are NPCs but they're all robots that you just listen to and do their bidding they're glorified quest dispensers that don't require your consent and I think it's important to kind of start the review with this in mind it helps to set the tone for the wasteland that you're constantly in when it comes to games like fallout and Elder Scrolls the world that you're in is almost like a character in and of itself I'll talk about the environment a palaca later on but I just don't want it to go unspoken that I think that there's a huge disconnect between what you do in this game and what your character is supposed to be doing in terms of the game's story and fallout 4 they had the same problem you're supposed to be frantically looking for your son that your character is supposed to care about a great deal but at the same time they throw all of these cool nifty locations in a whole brand-new world to explore and you want to go look in every little nook and cranny that you could possibly find and you want to get all the duct tape and all the screws and you want to make your character and do all that stuff so you've got that disconnect your character should be wanting to do this but you as the player want to do something else so you have the main quest that's always there something about some evil fungus from beneath the surface that these beasts will bring with them that infects the people up in the wasteland ultimately killing them and that's kind of the story you have to stop that or not really stop it kill a scorch base that doing it but it doesn't amount to anything and the quests are dull and they're boring and you never feel like you should do it because you feel no connection to the world and everybody's dead so you want to know what you're really doing this for or who's around to care about if you succeed or fail I didn't even finish the main quest I just found an article that told me what happened and I'm kind of glad I didn't waste my time it was just one silly mission after the next silly mission and I just wanted to explore I wanted to look for things and do stuff and check the environment out since there's no dialogue and no people to interact with you don't feel like you're ever really doing anything for anybody except for yourself so when you play fallout 76 and you don't feel like you want to do it you never feel any kind of encouragement to go out of your way to do anything for the world there's no sense of permanence no sense of impact every once in a while you'll come across other people's little camps little player bases essentially and you'll walk in you'll use their stuff to manage your inventory and change your weapons maybe repair your gear but you know that no matter how much work and time and effort they put into their house I never was really interested in building one for myself and once they leave the server it's gone once you leave the server your campus it's it's disappears along with you like it's just not there there was never any sign that you existed in this world you essentially create blueprints that will save all of your stuff so you can put it up later somewhere else but it's like you're carrying a little magical briefcase house it doesn't permanently exists in Appalachia as a place you can always go back to that's always there whenever you want to move it you just pick it up and place it in a new spot providing that the buggy landscape allows you to and you just go on your way and that's that compare that to previous fallouts where you would have like a special place you liked more than anything else a little house your your home your hovel your little din and you would always go back and you'd bring your stuff to your lair and you'd stuff it in the fridges and boxes and you'd add it to your collection coming across the bases and the camps of other players though it didn't add to the world in fact it took me away from it it's like coming across and other human beings projects and it wasn't something that was in universe and you were always aware of that multiple times sometimes when I would come across a player's base I would find there dropped loot of items that they couldn't carry were useless to them sometimes tens of thousands of useful materials insanely voluminous stacks of ammunition special legendary items a hospital's worth of Kem's and healing equipment and they would just drop it coming across these massive discarded stores of materials directly clashed with the idea that we were supposed to be in an apocalyptic wasteland where resources were scarce and the idea that you're supposed to be surviving and rebuilding a nuclear wasteland would imply that there's some kind of a scarcity of things like medical equipment and food yet coming across things like this it only served to pull me out of the game further the games telling me that all of these other players in the server they're members of the same vault as me emerging from the world but whenever I find them their creations whenever I see them in the wasteland I don't get the sense that they're supposed to even be here that were not on the same team that we treat everybody that we meet with incredible indifference and that was by far the most common reaction that I got from other players that I met complete in total indifference now there's not particularly a reason why you would really want to cooperate with other people especially strangers there's just no reason for it fallout 76 even though it's designed to be always online in a multiplayer game I never felt the desire to once to play this game with other people I felt like they would get in the way of me exploring the world that Bethesda crafted Bethesda set up a world whose story is only told to me through passive ways I have to listen to a hollow tape I have to read a computer terminal and if I'm playing with other people who aren't really interested in that and I don't blame them because for the most part is very uninteresting and just you feel no desire to want to learn about people because you have no emotional investment in anything if you're the guy in the group who wants to learn about all that stuff then you're gonna slow everybody down because they have to hang out while you listen to hollow tapes and while you're trying to pay attention they are chattering about this and that and you're sending out a computer terminal reading every entry and they just want to [ __ ] get on with it the immersion and investment aspects of Fallout games in the past are practically non-existent in this game I've never found it harder for me to get absorbed into a world than with fallout 76 and that isn't to say that it wasn't possible and that it didn't happen it was just more difficult another aspect of fallout 76 since we're somewhat on the topic of it being an online always game is the fact that there's PvP and I don't think PvP was really something that was requested in large numbers I imagine a lot of people wanted to maybe have a cooperative mode where it was them and some buddies in a server of their own where they could tackle the world maybe make the difficulty a little higher challenge themselves all work towards some kind of a common goal I never really got the impression that a lot of people wanted to have a Fallout game that they were familiar with where there was a potential of another player waltzing into their game and [ __ ] around with their stuff and while fallout 76 does have PvP it is one of the most poorly thought-out and implemented aspects of the game that there are and that's actually saying something considering how much this game gets wrong PvP I won't spend too much time on it because chances are you won't spend too much time with it should you ever get this game here's how PvP works a player decides he wants to attack another player the aggressor pulls out his weapons and attacks the victim the damage that's inflicted will be severely reduced to the point of near impotence so until the victim decides to retaliate the aggressor is basically just wasting time and ammunition a but should the victim return fire damage will then be dealt as normal so this means that the defender has a gigantic massive large big big advantage over his aggressor all the time if somebody attacks you you can heal yourself get into position pull out your best gun get in close take some Kim's to boost your stats and then your attacks will be the first to do normal damage if a player is actually killed by another player they can be revived or finished off and if a player dies the only lootable stuff that they drop and that can be taken from their body are just the junk items so those are the materials that are used to build things and craft them upgrade items all that jazz you cannot lose your weapons or armor or aid items or anything else only junk essentially PvP is one big waste of time and in my 50 or so hours of this game I only had two pvp interactions at all and neither of them would be what I would call traditional PvP one time I found two somebodies area where they had a base set up and I walked inside and you know waved and they waved back and we didn't say anything and they had a porta potti inside and so I opened up the porta potti and I got inside and I sat down hee hee hee I'm inside a porta potti sitting down ha ha well I decided I would go ahead and take a screenshot well my dumb ass forgot that left alt and f1 are my keyboards bindings for taking a screenshot with shadow play left alt is also the melee button so I'm a laid the inside of his porta potti now what that means is that that counts as me attacking his building which made me a wanted man on the server which meant that anybody could now attack me for freebies and they would get caps for it because I accidentally made the inside of somebody's porta potti I was a bad dog it didn't take very long even though this guy didn't care he obviously knew I wasn't attacking him but other players on the server who were much much higher level than me fast traveled close to me and then I was killed in one shot I was around level 30 at the time in people who were level 100 120 appeared and were able to take me out in a single shot I didn't feel too bad about it though because of somebody's level 120 and fallout 76 even though they killed me at least I can walk away with the satisfaction that I know what the inside of a vagina feels like PvP honestly I don't know why they even bothered in this game it doesn't make a narrative sins if you're all supposed to be from vault 76 and you're all supposed to be cooperating to rebuild the wasteland it makes absolutely zero sense that anybody would PvP with somebody else because in the game's eyes no H other you grew up together ideally cooperation is the best tool to survive and it's not exactly like this world is a scarce four resources my other PvP encounter I'll get into later but save these two examples and fifty hours worth of time of meeting people never was I fired upon not a single time I met groups of people who probably could have killed me if I had wanted to engage them in PvP but that never happened whenever I met another player for the most part we just went on our separate ways we didn't interact maybe they would give a little hello emote or or shake their mouse back and forth but that was it and all my time of Fallout 76 I only killed one player and it was an accident he dislikes this is a fun game JP this is a fun pulpit as deferred from Dover the things in yellow no JP I'm coming JP who [ __ ] JP [ __ ] dead oh my god I shot a vertebrate and it landed on a poor level a player oh my god JP I'm so sorry I had no idea that would happen that was a total accident that could have that could have landed on anybody in it and it just happened - I'm gonna take I'm gonna take your stuff but I really I didn't mean for that to happen so sorry but I'm not sorry that I took her your style it's a tough world get used to it every once in a while I would just stick around and maybe follow someone around to see what they were doing but all that meant is that we would just be shooting at enemies together and that's what we would have done anyway now there's just two of us shooting at enemies not one of us in fifty hours of playing this game there was only one instance where I managed to find some stranger another player and actually helped them with something in a way that could be construed as cooperation there was a location that we were both at that had a locked door to get into the facility here I was able to jump on props and doodads to get inside unlock the door with a terminal which would then allow it to be accessed from the outside while he was trying he was still trying to jump up on the stuff that I had jumped on but I was about I unlocked it and I went back outside and I found him still trying to jump up on the little doohickeys and I got his attention because I had unlocked the door from the inside so that he could come in and all of this was done without any in-game voice communication which kind of made it a little special little thank me he did the little thank me thumbs up right no know who this guy was he didn't know who I was but that was kind of cool and it made me think of what this game could have had in terms of its potential you might be asking though why we didn't just talk to each other in-game and that's a pretty fair question and let me explain to you why you see Bethesda in their infinite wisdom decided to sell this fully price $60 always online multiplayer gaining experience without a pushed [ __ ] function the game launched with two options either your mic was turned off and you could not transmit voice to anybody in the game or your mic was always on always transmitting your voice if you were talking to somebody in discord or if your cat jumped on your lap and you told mr. whiskers he had to go find somewhere else to sit for a while then all of that would be transmitted to anyone around you inside of Fallout 76 the game launched without proper 21 by 9 support it launched without a field of view slider it launched without a push-to-talk function the game was originally tied to 60fps because in Bethesda's magical world game speed is tied to your FPS and while many of these things have been fixed some of them less than a week after lunch it does make me wonder what the hell were they thinking what kind of incompetent company is this who's pushing out these kinds of products these are mistakes that I wouldn't expect to see from most indie developers and it baffles me that since it took them only less than a week to fix these issues why they wouldn't wait when first impressions are so so important but if you've been keeping up with the news the last you know however many weeks since this game is release then you probably know that Bethesda's reaping what they sow I think you guys get the gist of things I've been rambling long enough let's get into something more interesting like the gameplay oh boy oh boy now we're done talking about all that boring stuff now we can talk about the fun things like the gameplay I promise you everything you've heard is true it is awful first and foremost fallout 76 is a first-person shooter this is like the the building block upon which everything that you do is built on Bethesda is a triple-a development team and they have more money than God and they have a lot of experience underneath their belt especially when it comes to making first-person shooters and I hate to pull the current year argument but it is 2018 and we do have access to a certain level of technology when it comes to our video games so why does this game play like garbage as far as first-person shooters go fallout 76 is one of the worst I have ever played and I don't say that for hyperbole fallout 76 as it has one of the most unresponsive clunky cumbersome clumsy unintuitive and frustrating gameplay that I've ever played it legitimately surprised me how bad it is here let's take overwatch as an example love it or hate it it's an extremely responsive game when you press a button [ __ ] happens when you jump or use abilities when you aim everything from moving to shooting happens like that no waiting no lag it's precise you're never frustrated by the game being unable to translate what you want to happen into the game when you press buttons let's take dirty bomb rip dirty bomb was a game that has tons of problems but what kept me invested in that game for over 900 hours and over the span of years was the fact that it was so responsive whenever I wanted my character to do something it was done in immediately I jumped reloaded double jump back flip front flip ran sprinted reload canceled shot swapped weapons used abilities it was all instant what I wanted to have happen on screen happened on screen with no delay almost everything about the actual playing of the game in fallout 76 is done poorly there's issues there's problems and they caused frustration and they make me not want to keep playing the game and if the gameplay makes me not want to play the game you done [ __ ] up combat in general is a mess and it's actually a downgrade a step backwards from fallout 4 if they had just literally copied it in its entirety and put it into this game it would be better but they managed to take a system that was ok and make it bad I would say it's about three categories of different things that come together to make the combat and gameplay and fallout 76 such an immense mess let's start with the controls of the game how it responds to player touch as mentioned before combat in fallout 76 is so bad firstly due to how you interact with your weapons and how your controls are represented through the actions of your character in-game or perhaps better stated how your inputs are not translated into actions by your character in game a lot of this game will be spent using slow firing weapons often with low capacities so you'll want to have as many of your shots connect as possible because there's a fair amount of time in between your next shot and there's a fair amount of time reloading weapons like hunting rifles which are bolt actions revolvers such as the pipe revolver you seen in that clip and shotguns I've played a lot of first-person shooters over the years and it's really worthy of note in this game that you do a lot of reloading and you take a lot of damage while you're reloading because of reasons we'll get to soon fallout 76 is just a terrible shooter and this game is a first-person shooter it's an awful first-person shooter what it is more than anything else it's terrible at remember earlier I was talking about how overwatch and dirty bomb are fun in a way because they're so responsive with the controls and the input fallout is the opposite of that I don't know if there's a technical name for it but there's a lot of dead time in this first-person shooter that is when you tell your character to do something like sprint reload shoot scope or unscoped jump change from [ __ ] first to third person there's a lot of times when these actions shouldn't get in the way of one another for instance there's no reason why I shouldn't be able to change my view from first to third person while I'm doing anything else but the game doesn't let you do it you'll spend a great deal of time using a hunting rifle in this game because it's used 308 rounds the game throws these rounds at you and it's a fairly potent round so if you've played this game you already know this if you haven't played this game I'll explain you get to know things like it's a good example whatever you are scoped in with a hunting rifle and you shoot you cannot unscoped ill you have work to the action of the bolt and you are ready for your next shot this is very very important in a game where enemies are often chasing after you and you move slower when you are scoped in and a lot of other games this isn't an issue because whenever you let your finger off the button for scoping you unscoped and you move as normal but you obviously want to move as quickly as you can away from enemies that are generally chasing you and it's just frustrating when this happens when your character is scoped in and you're you're stuck staring down the scope of your rifle while you're working the bolt it's little things like this that all add up a lot of times you can't swap between weapons or select different kinds of grenades if you're reloading or if you're doing something else the responsiveness of sprinting which is not hold by the way it's toggle this is a game with toggle sprint it just doesn't work it seems half the time what I want to be sprinting I have to press it hope it works and sometimes it does work but I don't think it works and then I accidentally end up hitting the button again and I cancel a sprint that I've already made yeah let's start going over some clips here because I think that showing is better than just telling the game makes you frustrated and I hate to use the whole it's current year argument but it is 2018 we have a certain level of technology available to make video games and Bethesda clearly has the money for it and we have a an uncountable number of examples of competent first-person shooters now that you can draw from many of them from much smaller Studios like Fatshark or you know Splash Damage I just I have to just state it plainly fallout 76 is a bad first-person shooter game I'm not being hyperbolic when I say it does feel worse in a lot of ways than fallout 3 since there are so many different crazy awful horrible things about this game and how it plays out we're just gonna go through a bunch of the clips that I've saved and I'm gonna tell you like it's awful I don't know how to I don't know how to structure this like I I don't even know where to begin we're just gonna have a fun time a lot of suffering and pain and tears went into getting all of these clips together so I hope that as you sit there listening to me explain and show you how terrible this game is I hope that you can get some enjoyment out of it because in some weird way maybe that'll make it all worthwhile as you've probably noticed from watching this video play the enemies in fallout 76 are not exactly bright enemies in Bethesda games for a while they've been typically yeah I guess you could call them the flat earthers of the video game world in terms of problem solving but I've never seen it this bad then I give much less wiggle room for charity here because there's such an immense reuse of assets and I'll explain what I mean by that in a moment just make no mistake enemies in fallout 76 are [ __ ] [ __ ] at least that's one way to describe them as I played the game I couldn't help but wonder to myself if it was a limitation of their cognitive function or if it was just the fact that their animation set was so limited in terms of mobility enemies don't have an animation for crossing over knee-high objects or waist high objects there's no vaulting the tiniest most innocuous of obstacles presents a major pathway blocking problem for the enemies of Appalachia that's a pretty big deal because a vast percentage of the foes you meet and fallout are or melee based their super mutants with hammers or radioactive dogs with teeth that Nash and the poor went out for my fellow canine quadrupeds brothers just trying to get by in the wasteland but there's no animations for vaulting or climbing or jumping gaps or just generally traversing terrain that's easily exploitable by you the player a huge portion arguably a majority of fallouts enemies are exploitable you can essentially kill enemies with no sense of jane danger or or any chance of failure they present no opposition to you other than just slowing you down and expending your ammunition now I think the reason that this is such a big frustration for me and why I think this game seems so lazy is that if you're gonna sell this game as a full $60 title and at the same time reuse so many of the assets then I'd hope that you'd take those assets that you had before and improve on them I mean if you want to have some same deathclaws sure fine ok I dug the death claws and fallout 4 the way they looked and you know behaved but holy [ __ ] do something to them that's new add to them and that's why I can fight a deathclaw and jump over this tiny gap in the road and they can't follow me this massive fearsome terrible creature that should strike fear into the hearts of all players and beasts alike it's been effectively thwarted and into harmlessness by a little gap that even [ __ ] Billy the fridge could bound across if he was on crutches here here's an excellent example this boss here's a Grafton monster it had some easily avoidable ranged attacks but the bulk of its damage comes from its melee attacks that means you can do things like stand inside of a building's doorway and just shoot it until it dies even though there's another player right now out in the street who's also shooting at him he won't swap between the targets you'll just stand there and let me kill him even though he could just turn around and attack the player shooting it in the back another example of this is is this clip here where I easily defeat it because of this mostly buried log that wouldn't even be a concern to a Mazda Miata driver drinking coffee from an open Cup this is the kind of unassuming obstacle that will effectively render what should be this dangerous nasty terrible beast that's supposed to be challenging completely harmless laughable even this is the kind of stuff that makes me just just sigh in frustration at this game it's just a joke let's take the ghouls as an example they're pretty much totally used models and movements from fallout 4 and I had issues from how they jerked around and sped up in that game and even that's ported over ghouls moves suddenly at lightning-fast speeds and they lunge and move in these odd ways that are frustrating to deal with but you'll fight a lot of ghouls who are exclusively bailing enemies and despite their speed and agility they can't clamber up onto objects like cars or vault over little obstacles that are knee or waist high so you can jump on cars and the ghouls cannot reach you this is the prime strategy for killing them all so find car jump on car win battle they lack the animation necessary to get onto the car or to lean over and reach at you that they can't do anything just don't end up accidentally killing yourself with a chain reaction that would be I mean you know slight inconvenience you get all your health back and this clip here that I got recently I attack a Grafton monster in white springs it doesn't run tor me it actually seems to flee to another location where I have to chase it in that in and of itself was a little confusing but when I finally catch up to it it's stuck on a small ledge making it an easy kill and I can take out what's essentially supposed to be a boss monster sometimes even use for world events or server events all by myself there doesn't seem to be like a trigger in place where if an enemy is trying to reach you after a set amount of time it doesn't do something or perform some action or change its behavior in any way but the AI pathing issue isn't restricted to just ghouls and boss enemies like this monster here pretty much every enemy has this issue super mutants scorched various beasts and wild critters if an enemy does not have a ranged attack it can be easily rendered harmless so that's some quality game design right there Bethesda it reeks of laziness and poor construction it's like a joke but you don't laugh at it you just roll your eyes enemies like the player have levels as well and in theory a higher level of creature is the more dangerous they are generally and I'd struggle to really call this a rule and fallout 76 enemy levels are extremely inconsistent with the danger they pose to the player some enemies at high levels are insanely powerful in some enemies at the same level are much much much weaker there's just such inconsistency it's hard to really nail it down because the difficulty of enemies that the player has to face and how tough they are and how much damage they do it's important stuff the enemy shouldn't be so weak that it's unengaging and boring and they can't be so difficult and unstoppable that the player feels hopeless and gets frustrated and this is another incredible failure of Fallout 76 the level scaling is abysmal a ghoul that's at your level can volume to death with ease while scorch that are 10 levels above you pose no threat at all super mutants that are at my level getting damaged by by weapons that are also near my level are bullet sponges I think that some of the most deadly strategies of enemies in Fallout 76 relies on me dying of starvation or old age by the time the battle is actually finished if I'm at level 40 in my weapon is level 40 and I come across level 40 45 enemies I shouldn't be pouring magazine after magazine of rounds into them in order to get the kill here at the gate of white springs I heard this assault tron moments after leveling up to 44 and while the enemy was only two levels ahead of me the ammunition I was expending it just wasn't worth the damage output and I barely made it out alive when it just tapped me once part of the big pull of a game like fallout 76 is the exploration of the world and each location generally is populated by a certain type of enemy scorched super mutants etc but in fallout 76 the same location can have different enemy types depending on the visit so the first time I found the ranger district office it was full of robots protect ron's and sentry bots they weren't much higher level than I was but they destroyed me ripped me to shreds the protect Ron's were moderately spongy but not very damaging but the century bot was just unstoppable fighting it was hopeless there was nothing I could do I gave up and when I returned at a later date the same location was populated instead by scorched one of the most numerous weakest enemies in the game essentially replacements for the Raiders I slaughtered them without a second thought didn't break a sweat didn't come close to it cakewalk no problem interestingly though as I was using the workbench in the area after all the foes had been killed all of a sudden the enemies in the location respond around me because another player had arrived and the scorched were much tougher now easily 30 levels above me because the player that had come closer was himself much higher level than I was I mean at least I think so this is what I attribute this phenomenon to its fallout 76 at this point I'm willing to believe any crazy theory that pops into my head it very well may be true there are countless reddit through each you can count them there's a lot of reddit threads asking how the level scaling works why are enemies so difficult now and they weren't a moment ago what is the cause of all this what's the system and as I browse the threads sometimes I get contradictory answers and I don't really know which one it is what I've read is that the first player in an area will set the enemy levels though I've also heard that it's the highest level player in the area which is why depending on the server you're placed in you can consistently find enemies that [ __ ] down your throat or enemies that all pretty much die in a single shot what I noticed about the game and reading all this stuff on reddit is that up until around level 25 or so the game was shockingly easy almost every enemy died in a single hit maybe they were they took two hits if they were really tough but they did very little damage to me and my death was so that's where so rare that I probably only died a couple times in my first 20 levels and I think one of them was just me experimenting with fall damage the game was a joke in terms of his difficulty I regularly told people that I was bored out of my mind because everything I just melted the game was shockingly easy and I told everybody that this was a big problem with it and what I've heard anecdotally from other people seems to confirm that I'm definitely not the only one who had this issue so as a result of the incredible easiness of this game for the first 25 or so levels which it takes a fair amount of time to get through I chose perks when I leveled up that weren't combat based more on that later so when level 25 to 30 came around all of a sudden I started noticing a shift enemies became much more difficult as I explored more and more and more the problem was terrible in some areas I was actively dying over and over because enemies constantly were at way higher levels and I could just deal with my numbers just weren't there and there was nothing I could do you can't really outs kill a lot of enemies in this game you just can't generate the numbers you need to whittle down the enemy the piles of ammunition that I had been acquiring were being eaten away by bullet sponge enemy after bullet Bunji enemy that would just tear me apart though oftentimes I would simply stand in front of an enemy as we have this war of attrition they are high level giving them an incredible resilience to all damage but their weak attacks barely did anything to me we just sat there like a couple of retards humping a brass doorknob we're combat was once a breeze and I can at least explore as I wished it had become a gamble locations were once I cleared without any problem could now spawn enemies that were just unstoppable eventually my stupid ass learned that was better to just let enemies kill you oftentimes and then after that you just returned to your body moments later gather up your joke that's it later later to gather up your junk cuz junk is the only thing you drop when you die and if there's one thing I'm not unused to its dropping my junk see there you knew I would make you know I would make a crude remark around that comment so I hope you're satisfied and I know you are because that's generally what happens when I drop my junk see we'll just we'll go all day the hits just keep coming the point is that you might as well just let enemies kill you because there's no real sense wasting your healing items on a lost cause if your health is low just let them kill your character and respond or help if your health is low blow up a car next to you and just respawn and run back to it your health it's filled when you die it's great it's a wonderful system it works it works excellently it definitely isn't abusable or exploitable death isn't just an inconvenience in fallout 76 sometimes it is welcomed I embrace gladly the healing properties that is dying anyway since it Jesus Christ my refrigerator is out [ __ ] it it's staying in since enemy levels will be based on the highest player around you if that player isn't you then you might be in some trouble the game for me has been consistently more enjoyable the less I see of other human beings kind of like life in general and for a multiplayer always online games that's that's odd that's not how things should be and Guild Wars 2 it's good to have other players around you there was the request and events that take this into consideration you want other players to be around you get more goodies there are more enemies to kill but fallout 76 doesn't seem like any thought at all was putting how to balance out the difficulty for a world where players of every level will be wandering around in you can't choose your server so depending on the players on the server you share and their levels and where they are your enjoyment of the game will vary greatly enemies around the starting area seem to be capped for low levels though that's consistent I've noticed and that makes sense though that does seem to be the extent of good game design when it comes to the level scaling in this game I've had people tell me that they've stopped playing and their friends have stopped playing because of how little ammo they eventually had essentially scrounging for it because of how bullets Bengie enemies became after the feast of fallouts early game shifted in the hours carried on damages damage numbers or numbers and as far as I know there's no percentage based system or buff debuff when it comes to two characters of multiple different levels attacking the same enemy bethesda doesn't seem to have put much work or thought into making a world that players have vastly differently different link differing levels will share because they have to share it together and as a result the inconsistent gameplay and the massive difficulty spikes are just another part of the game's terrible design and many on the fallout 76 reddit are trying to find out just why it seems to be broken oh here's a fun one I when I'm going through the reddit I've found instances multiple instances of players noting that high level characters can follow around to low level characters which makes the enemy spawn at high levels and that'll kill the weak players and then the weak players can be looted without the wanted penalty of PvP this has happened personally to me in fact somebody followed me around which made really difficult enemies spawned and they massacred me and they just looted my body and I lost all my resources so that's if that was fun it's an RPG you can roleplay as a dick once while at Harpers Ferry I was asked to join a team with some random player about 30 levels above me and I went ahead and said [ __ ] it I accepted I followed him around in his fancy power armor as he massacred enemies by hitting them with a pointed stick I barely did any damage by comparison I just made sure to hit each enemy once or twice with my guns so I got the XP and then he just hit them and they died and once while at the bottom of the top of the world that's an odd sentence there was extremely deadly mosquitoes and radscorpions down there and they were so bullet spongy and straighting to damage that I just rushed up into the tower itself and in the tower there were they were easily dispatched scorched and they all died in a couple shots didn't pose any problems at all in multiple times I found this to be the case where you'll have level 1 to 5 scorched enemies in a location and then you take a short walk down the road to the next location just a couple stones throws away and enemies were level 68 Legendary's that massacred me so you know that was that was fun that seems reasonable issues with the behavior of enemies it's not just limited to what I've mentioned so far when it comes to the AI itself enemies don't really show much difference in the way that they actually behave in combat enemies like robots and super mutants and mole miners and the scorched that often use ranged attack show essentially no difference from one another in terms of what they do their coordination there in combat behavior scorched have a rudimentary occasional impulse to take cover and peer out of it intermittently to shoot at you that's the only exclusive behavior that the three quote-unquote intelligent enemy types make the others simply move into a position usually out in the open and far away from cover and fire towards the players often standing still enemies in this game act like they know their only purpose is to be killed they show no sense of self-preservation they don't flee or run away and they will not become discouraged when their allies are decimated by a superior level player what's odd is that I've seen super mutants who have no ranged weapon pick up the weapons from the bodies of their fallen comrades and use them but then they'll just stand there in the open and be shot and by stand I mean their feet are planted on the ground they are nice and still so the player can headshot them even as they take heavy damage they won't move sometimes when the player is positioned in a spot the enemies can't reach enemies will flee though this is rare right they will immediately return towards the player once the players reachable again which makes me believe that this isn't actually the enemy like fleeing to preserve their lives but instead choosing some other random target I'm not aware of who has been initiated into the combat since if if they were fleeing out of fear they wouldn't immediately about-face sometimes and clears out of the player to continue fighting melee enemies make beelines towards the player and they'll do this based off the shortest path they can find and they never utilize cover to close the gaps sometimes though and thankfully so you'll find enemies like like scorch beasts who are the game's big boss enemy you could say that will fly around your head and just generally not care that you exist well and that makes what's supposed to be the dreaded final boss type enemy of the game seem benign and I'm not gonna lie this is something I actually found rather fortuitous as a scorched beasts are really tanky and really annoying to find I haven't killed one yet as they're always far above my level or they seemingly just find me at random while I'm wandering around Appalachia or at least that's what it feels like and then they see me and then they and then they kill me they fly up in the air and they launch these weird sonic gamma radiation hula hoops at you that they almost always stun you in place they can hit you from a mile away and sometimes as if that wasn't bad enough they'll spawn scorched death claws in your face just in case you felt like enjoying yourself in this game speaking of scorched beasts if you get the feeling from watching this that Bethesda gist asset flipped the Dragons from Skyrim and used the new model for it well well the references to dragons from Skyrim in the content check system from fallout 4 are copied directly into fallout 76 so that's fun but as this sounds like a company that really cares about the quality of their products anyway some enemies fly some enemies shoot and the rest of enemies generally constitute beasts and wildlife who are mostly melee based as well and they just charge towards the player and they attack and this makes complete sense sure as they're not intelligent but they're vicious it would have been nice to see some variety in the waste that enemies behave without changes simply being little things like this enemy burrows so it teleports around you and that's that surprise [ __ ] and then it just does identically everything that the other enemies do throwing explosive towards enemies so sometimes damage their legs and [ __ ] them meaning they move so slow they're effectively incapacitated though crippling the legs of super mutants makes them completely immobile they're just kind of stuck in place in a strange animation pose and depending on where an enemy standing crippling their legs can actually make them clip into the map and be stuck there amateur stuff another big issue that I noticed while playing fallout 76 is the hit detection enemies can be completely still in their hit boxes simply will not accept the shots that are placed directly into their noggins and poor head detection it just adds another layer to the shoddy gameplay when the frame rates often already really low and enemies move in very weird and unusual ways like random speed ups and jerky and unnatural lunges and how they they change directions without any sense of momentum like like overwatch and the poor hit detection it works both ways it's not just the enemies it means that combat with melee based enemies so a lot of them adds to the frustration because while you're shooting enemies oftentimes it won't register your damage in foes attacking the player will regularly inflict damage at ranges that are far beyond their actual reach so you have lungeing ghouls and stinging scorpions and biting mole-rats pretty much every enemy that uses melee damages you at ranges that exceed what you think they could manage to pull off and it's incredibly frustrating to take damage in this way especially considering at Bethesda in their infinite wisdom decided that a wide variety of enemy melee attacks will will stun you and you can't reload or fire back or move like it it interrupts whatever you're doing so that's fun in the top five things that I love to see in video games being stunned by enemies and incapacitated and not having control over my character easily in the top five love to see it thrilling especially when you only have five six rounds and your guns that you use most of the time and your reload gets interrupted and you have to start all over again I love it it's stellar - give me more let's do more of this Bethesda it's like it's like we have dozens and dozens of amazing first-person shooters and Bethesda's like nah let's not do any of that oh and it's even more fun when you notice that one enemy can run up to smack you and they stun you with that smack and then they can hit you a second time before you have time to regain control they can hit you and stun you and why you're stunned ooh they can hit you again because [ __ ] you in addition animations syncing up with the effects they have on the player are also really inconsistent in this encounter that I had recently I was fighting a bunch of blood bugs and they have an attack where they spit blood at the player and here is the first frame that I take damage though there's clearly nothing that's happening between us right now this is pretty shoddy work for a company that has the budget and the manpower that pathetic as taking damage before there's any visual cue of what's happening it means that you can't have any potential to dodge the attacks other than through sheer luck honestly I just wish people had higher standards geez another another really odd thing that I've been noticing is that enemies will suffer this is gonna sound really weird but bear with me enemies will suffer mass instantaneous cardiac arrest which is my only in game explanation for the strange phenomenon [ __ ] was that did did all the ghouls just [ __ ] die bold statement so I heard them die I heard them all just yep yep they are dead they have all perished mysteriously that is that's odd sometimes like twice in one night of playing the game and in consecutive locations one after the other enemies in the area that I see moving or who suspect my presence so I know they're there and I can hear them they'll simply all just die and all of their death sounds will play at once and they will not be lootable in the area can be explored freely and it's a fascinating incompetence of game design that sometimes you witness enemies spawning inside of you right before your eyes and before you can walk up to engage them they've all just perished their bodies are on the floor the area is totally pacified they're just they just die I I don't I'd have no idea and not that enemies spawning in front of the player is particularly rare when often times when they do they're stuck t posing until you get too close even though there's no reason the game shouldn't have them moving around like normally when you're just I mean you're just so close to them I mean the game knows that enemy should be spawned in this location players are near but at the same time the game doesn't figure because of how vision works maybe they shouldn't be T posing sometimes they won't t pose they'll just be frozen until you get closer and other times they won't move at all until you until you actually fire upon them despite them being right beside you I don't know I don't know I just report the news I don't make it and the problem with enemy and player spawns I know I just keep going on and on but there's a lot to talk about this game the problem with enemy and player spawns like there's like when a player loads into the game in Fallout 76 this is an issue as well it is not unusual to spawn into an area next to enemies and as I've discussed from earlier on the deadliness of foes in a location can vary wildly so fast traveling to a location is a roll of the proverbial dice since bethesda thinks it's just a great idea to put a player spawn location right next to where the enemies spawn in this clip here I spawn into the game from the main menu and I start taking random damage which is not actually that uncommon honestly and I'm dead in moments since the game isn't intelligent enough to spawn the enemies into the game before the player so that you can do things like see them you know so in this one I load into the game and I'm placed into a location where an enemy has already spawned and it notices me and attacks me which leads me into another fun fact about the game which is how far exactly enemies will chase you this mirelurk thing here chased me for an incredibly long distance and into other locations and past other enemies like through a bog over obstacles beneath the monorail across the river and into the center of the city location [Music] here is the body of war I eventually killed it and I'm lucky it was still there because it's not uncommon for bodies to disappear before you can walk over and loot them after you've killed them so for a little palate cleanser before I continue I'll play some clips of random stuff that happened to me in one short gaming session for Fallout 76 these aren't even all I found that was ridiculous or broken I just want to show you how densely compacted the silliness of this game is and how quickly you can gather this stuff shotguns are really annoying it for it in this game they're [ __ ] awful they have insane inconsistent damage you have to reload them as [ __ ] right there are a joke in this game I haven't I haven't carried a shotgun in like the last 10 levels I probably should just don't I can expend the ammunition it's it's a really good sneak weapon [ __ ] look at this look at all these [ __ ] robots like find a clip online what a joke of a video game are you I need you to strobe I need you to understand how [ __ ] terrible this video game is I need you to look at this with me and I need you to witness this and I need you to understand that this is an awful video game you know you're one big ahead of me you are one level ahead of me I'm I'm playing this game for a meme review I don't know why you have our level above me I want you to look at this [ __ ] it [ __ ] it the robots are dying [ __ ] it [ __ ] it kill them all I say they may take mine Thank You Melvin oh my god Stroeve I don't what I don't want to hit you I don't want to I'm made by accident I made by accident you'll be fine it'll be fine as long as like as long as I stay behind the century Bob we should be good that's what I'm here oh [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] finish the job for me can you hit me on the bush they can't they can't hit me on the bush this is amazing oh they can crawl the back of the booth are you intend to be on this car how are you still playing that [ __ ] you think that you've done enough for me shade reaction of I get cuz cuz all the I went on to a thing and they couldn't get me on the thing and so I blew up all the cars another thing is that um for the first god knows how long you'll find power armor all over the place but the parts better on it can't use it until you take on your part yeah yeah you have to take off all the parts cuz the armor parts are too hot oh this this dog is stuck without it's not doing animations it's just wait one of the dog tipos I'm gonna put this in my video because it's so [ __ ] [ __ ] a traveling merchant that is not a travelling merchant that's a deaf cloth this def call body literally says it's a traveling merchant I'm not [ __ ] with you take a picture I genuinely don't believe that is a piece of gore that you're looking at no like here maybe you maybe it's a reference and you okay run at you know I didn't even I didn't even [ __ ] with this deaf clock this is a no no this is a body of another death call that I found he was just the traveling merchant as for the friendly neighborhood traveling merchants deathclaw and i'd like to make sure that i'm not on the core piece like i'm going around his body and i'm doing everything by the way i don't know what he's carrying because the servers just [ __ ] not telling me so that games not broken dude so this is a song about this is the travelling deathclaw merchants actually to be fair Zach here yep he's up in his room playing games all right what the [ __ ] yeah I know this is my my childhood was blonde different than kid [ __ ] it oh [ __ ] enemies just call the nerf t Eviscerator yeah is that a scorched deathclaw yeah you know my favorite weapon was in New Vegas what the Master Sword I got it I killed it yeah I exploited the [ __ ] AI and I killed a scorched deaf claw that was like 20 level rings above me I pocketed welded a boring piece anyway back to the video where I was talking about the insane distances an enemy will chase you the problems compounded further when fighting against enemies because sometimes your foes will become invincible and they'll just not take damage here's an example with a scorched boss the enemy takes consecutive multiple shots from the rifle however his health bar just it just doesn't feel like budging today and here's one where pouring hundreds of minigun rounds into a mirelurk Queen does nothing not even it scratch and that's not the only issue regarding enemy health not a fair number of occasions I've watched enemies that I've damaged simply regenerate their health I have no idea why they don't take items and use them they just they just get all their health back it's a freebie from Jesus everyone gets one it's like the games taunting you mocking you laughing at your foolishness and glitching relating to combat it doesn't it doesn't stop there oftentimes when you throw grenades they just won't explode which is always a pleasant surprise in the middle of combat when you're really relying on that grenade to blow up and sometimes when you throw grenades they just clip to the ground and then they fall into oblivion and then you can hear them explode far far away out of sight one time I had an issue involving a fragmentation mind where I set it down where I knew enemies would be on the other side of a door and for some reason it exploded next to me so you know that's fun I have lots and lots of clips and bits of how clumsy and strange and glitchy and buggy that combat is how the enemies look how they behave their textures their animations the entire game reeks of an amateur project fallout 76 is primarily a first-person shooter and it is arguably the worst component of the game it is the worst first-person shooter I've ever played almost every element of this game is frustrating inconsistent or dated this game is like a live streamers dream it's a meme production but let's move on because there's still more to fallout 76 that we have not yet touched [Music] that's is an acronym for vault-tec assisted targeting system in the modern Fallout games drew its inspiration from the turn-based nature of the original Fallout games whereas in fallout 3 new vegas and fallout 4 using vats would stop or slow down time significantly and it would allow you to target specific body parts out of the proverbial box vats in fallout 76 does not allow you to target specific body parts the player has to unlock the perception based concentrated fire perk that will allow you this option this used to be a function of vats with that was available from the beginning of the game and the other recent modern Fallout games and I found myself not using vats outside of a few scenarios mainly enemies that were at odd angles as they moved like looking down at them from cars or other terrain I was exploiting to be safe from them or from oddly shaped enemies that were agile like mosquito thingies typically since most enemies in Fallout 76 just kind of stand there so you could shoot them in the face it wasn't really needed when activating vats there's a noticeable delay until your accuracy shone on enemies with the percentage there it begins to normalize and I'm not sure if this is a bug or if it's done by designed in this game it could be either I don't [ __ ] know however while you aim at targets and vats and fire upon them your weapons model doesn't really point itself towards the enemies you're firing upon this doesn't affect the functional aspect of vats but it looks really awkward and lazy so impairing us I guess it matches the rest of the game hey anyway by using vats you're correct I'm going insane what was I saying by using vats your character builds up a critical shot meter down there at the bottom after you land hits and you can activate this with the spacebar that will give your next shot a critical damage increase so that that's nifty if that's isn't useless by any means it's possible to spec occur around the use of vats with perception and I believe it's agility bonuses that affect your action points and in other buffs to the feature to make it far more viable than its out-of-the-box functionality personally I didn't use it much mostly because I forgot it even existed as a mechanic and this game to utilize it all but all in all if you don't particularly care about vats or the idea of vats you rarely ever will feel the urge to even use it if anything it would pop up as this backup option when the framerate tanks are when ghouls and critters show horrible animations that are difficult to aim over that's as a real-time aiming system it's fine it could definitely be improved upon but it does serve a purpose that is a viable one for common [Music] the leveling up process in fallout 76 isn't anything unusual or strange if played previous Fallout games in the past or really most mmo's you level up by primarily killing enemies and completing quests and though you do get small bits of experience for crafting items and discovering new locations and other things as you do gain XP you level up and your character will become more and more powerful and for the most part due to upgrades that you choose through the perk system and by increasing your special statistic every time you level up and fallout 76 you get to increase one of your special attributes by a single point and they all start at zero as you increase each special statistic you open up new perks relating to each of their respective attributes special stands for strength perception endurance charisma intelligence agility and luck strength helps you do things like inflict more melee damage carry more weight reduce the weight of certain kinds of items like armor and Kym's do more shotgun damage or heavy gun damage take less melee damage perception helps you do things like make vats more viable find items in the world pick locks increase the damage of certain rifles ignore enemy armor gain night vision and gather more materials from plants and animals endurance it lets you take less radiation damage it makes your food and drink more potent resist disease increases your chem duration effects and lets you breathe underwater or regenerate health from radiation or by standing in the sunlight charisma said there's no dialogue with NPCs and fallout 76 now affects the group's you are in with other players it can affect effects that happened when you're in your camp and other various things like gaining more experience in general gaining resistances for being alone or for being with a group it gives you better buying and selling prices regenerating health for revived players or curing their radiation lets you run faster when you're in a team or nerfs in amis after you strike them with damage intelligence does things like make your healing items more efficient it allows you to hack computer terminals do more explosive damage scrap items for better components repair and maintain items better and craft more numerous and higher quality items agility helps you regenerate action points faster which allows you to use vats sprint jump it reduces the weight of food pistols you consume less action points while sprinting and it makes your sneaking more efficient and increases sneak damage bonuses you get and lastly there's luck it helps you research containers a second time for more ammo or food or money it makes your food items spoil slower it causes your weapon to repair itself when it's struck at times it'll help you [ __ ] enemy limbs instantly reload after exhausting your magazine and even deflect back incoming damage and this is all a very abbreviated list of the kinds of perks you can choose for each attribute the full list is expansive and there's a wide variety of effects that your character can improve themselves with most perks in the game have tears of effectiveness their own levels in a way picking a perk more than once will increase its effectiveness so if I choose the demolition expert perk which increases my explosive damage by 20% I could select that perk again up to 5 times to increase my explosive damage by a potential 100% doubling the damage of them I could then use the perception based Grenadier perk which increases explosive radius by 50% and then 100% and you can see pretty obviously how perks can complement each other very very well it's actually rather impressive as I was reading through all the potential options for this list that I just named off and now I can see why Reese pecking a character would be desirable or making new characters with different builds and play styles would appeal to people I mean it does to me and there's even a really nifty character build planner for Fallout 76 I found at nooks dragons calm that lets you essentially build up a character and see the stats along the way so that's useful that's really nifty because you can get pretty deep with it honestly though the perk system it it honestly impresses me I really do like the variety of bonuses and the interesting effects you can give your character and I think that having your special stats increase from all starting at 0 instead of assigning them at the beginning of your characters creation is an interesting and potentially better way of leveling up it's not imperfect though I would say there's plenty of very borderline useless perks that nobody will ever choose or that you'll quickly gravitate away from some just don't hold a candle to others in the same category take a shift here for the most part comes with it's got positives and negatives you sort of build up a character as you go trying to beef up things that will help you while other less pressing concerns you just sort of learn to deal with you don't start out with I want to be this kind of character quite as much as you did and other Fallout games your character grows based off what you'll find more necessary to improve upon and in that sense it feels more natural a kind of progression more open-ended however this also means there's less commitment to what you're doing less focus on a role less need to specialize as you play the game or or stick to something you decided upon Curtis can be changed at any time which is an odd decision to me it feels unusual an example of this would be to have lock-picking perks unlocked but not having them equipped until you actually want to pick a lock because when you're not picking a lock the lockpick perk is just taking up space so most of the time you have your concentrated fire perk equipped that you already have but but you swap to pick lock when you want to find a secured container that has a level 1 lock this makes this makes the choice to want to hack into terminals and pick locks that you find not quite the same not quite as weighty it doesn't have the this at the expense of that idea since you can essentially toggle it on and off when it is and isn't needed the lack of permanence and commitment to your character extends past just the perks and even into the aesthetic side in Fallout 76 just like in real life you can change your gender whenever you feel like it this doesn't impact the gameplay in a meaningful way it just adds to the feeling that I'm not playing a character I should grilling in any way feel attached to or concerned with and I'm perfectly fine with the idea that fallout 76 has for leveling of characters and the perks are often genuinely useful in interesting even with all of the dull filler ones in-between the problem here is that these potentially excellent changes and I mean that these are potentially excellent changes to the fallout formula that are overshadowed by buggy glitchy clunky awful gameplay and the perk system clashes with that in a number of ways that hurt both of them so for instance as alluded to earlier in this review the game for me hit a really noticeable difficulty shift at around level 25 to 27 at least for me so that meant for the first 25 levels which which constitutes about half of your perk selection because you only get 50 I had almost entirely a selection of perks that were just quality of life improvements or or time savers since I melted anything on my screen for the most part I never invested into damage' buffs or armor penetration or any resistances instead I stocked up on perks that would keep food from spoiling faster that tripled the effectiveness of dog food which is totally opie by the way perks that would reduce my radiation intake or allow me to carry more stuff or reduce the weight of certain types of items which is a big deal as I'll discuss soon but this meant that I had to essentially play catch up with my next 23 levels I'm currently level 48 so I'll only have slots for two more perks and every level after that after 25 or so I did what I could to increase the damage of rifles explosives to boost my armor Pichette penetration stumble percentages I did everything I could to pick perks that related to damage and surviving combat and that was a fairly dark time in this game for me where I just kept getting thrashed by enemies that I simply could not take on reasonably I hit a point where I really kind of wanted to explore but the points that I needed to go out to explore were often full of those enemies that just they just I just shat down my neck this aspect of the combat and how it relates to perks really showed in fallout 76 especially that weapons you find in the world that you are not perked for will be will be pretty garbage but weapons that you can be purchase or will be really useful way more useful or you'll just find that enemy that doesn't give a [ __ ] about damage you put out its way plasma weapons laser weapons automatic weapons melee weapons I'm not perked for any of these kinds of items so their effectiveness is severely handicapped for me if I pick them up and I use them this gives them a throwaway attitude as you stockpile the ammo for these weapons since you never really use them because they don't have a lot of effectiveness and they become dump weapons you use almost like free shots that don't consume the ammunition that you actually do care about not that running out of ammunition in the game is really an issue depending on how you play but the threat of running dry on bullets is oftentimes a more fearsome notion than the reality of it and those of us with a more conservative mind for ammunition we might fall into this little mental trap this isn't a good thing it's not a bad thing really it's the nature of specialization though in Fallout 76 you can certainly boost all of them so calling it specializing is admittedly an odd way to phrase it there's nothing to stop you from having an equally potent melee and ranged built character but what aspect of perks and leveling that's also worth mentioning are the perk card packs every five levels you get a random assortment of perks that you can use and that's about that it's an added bit of randomization on top of the system that's already in place and I don't really feel like it's worthy of more than that and mentioning I wish it was less random and more guy double and direct about but since it feels more like just an additional layer on top of an already decent system it's among the least of my worries with fallout 76 [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] items crafting an item management your inventory it's almost identical to fallout 4 and it comprises a pretty large but really familiar aspect of your game time but there's one significant change about fallout 76 that you'll probably notice really soon weapons have requirement levels you can't just pick up a gun and be shitty with it you have to be the correct level for it and if you find a weapon that's above your level you you just can't flat-out use it it'll sit in your inventory or your stash until your appropriately leveled and you know I kind of I hate this if it was implemented better as a system I probably wouldn't mind as much but there's just a load of games that have item levels but feel way more fair and balanced than this game does when the game released it wasn't unusual and in fact it was actually fairly common for me to kill boss enemies really tough enemies and have them drop items that were and I'm being serious here that were 35 levels above my character so that was demoralizing tons of fun and this happened constantly though the problem is much less severe now enemies will still drop items that you can't use yet but the range at which they're dropped is now much more close to your character's actual level so the issues still there just to a significantly lesser degree and there also isn't an option to upgrade the levels of the weapons and armor that you use if you have a level 35 the pipe revolver and you want to level 40 pipe revolver you have to find a new pipe revolver that's level 40 or you have to craft one for yourself and then you have to upgrade all of the individual components to match what you had before the barrel the break the receiver the sights the gripped magazine all that some items had even more but to me this feels like this feels like an unnecessary resource sync for both weapons and armor and I mean that I can't I can't reliably keep upgrading a weapon that I like I have to constantly be hunting around for things that I do like replacements for my old stuff not stuff to keep what I like maintained in my hands acquiring upgrades for weapons and armor is now unlocked by scrapping weapons of the same type in my same type I mean that exact weapon so this is a change from Fallout 76 that I really don't like either scrapping a hunting rifle for instance will give you a very small chance to unlock certain mods for the hunting rifle and this can make getting mods for weapons really slow because the carry limit that you have isn't very high and you can only carry so much to bring back to a workbench to scrap and if it wasn't slow enough for weapons for armor it's much much slower remember how in Fallout 4 there were a bunch of Raiders everywhere and Raiders would wear armor chest and arm and leg and head pieces and they could be Raider or leather or metal and stuff like that and so you kind of had a pretty reliable source of different armor types that you could scrap and unlock and find for yourself to wear well the Scorch to essentially act as Raider replacements in this game they don't wear armor like that so your ability to learn mobs for your armor is even slower than it is with weapons and enemies can still drop armor as loot but but you won't get your hands on it at nearly the rate you did in the previous game and unlike the previous game Fallout 4 when you remove a mod from a weapon it doesn't go into your inventory like an item that you can install on another weapon when you remove a mod from a gun or from armor it is gone it's solid gun and and I recall a time when I was in town Beckley I want to say Beckley I think is where it was I found a pump-action shotgun with a suppressor ooh-la-la that's the kind of awesome [ __ ] that I was looking for and I remember this so much because it was the first suppressor that I had found for shotguns and I liked shotguns but the game doesn't allow you to take the suppressor off of a weapon you that you find and put it on the identically constructed weapon that you're currently using because that would be silly and that's just not how things work in the fallout world you would have to basically take the new shotgun that had the suppressor and up grade the entire new shotgun to match the quality upgrades of the shotgun you have currently you're essentially building a weapon around an attachment instead of just taking off the suppressor and moving it to another one so that's frustrating can't say I'm a fan oh and items like fallout 4 they have legendary properties some at least so they'll do things like turn you invisible if you're standing still in crouched or they'll give you a damage bonus to certain types of enemies like insects or animals or whatever they'll give you special resistances or maybe health regeneration other effects and these items can't be scrapped so unless they're useful to you at the time there's really no point in holding on to them some bonuses are really neat actually but some of them they're passive and they're not very helpful and they don't come to play off and so they're not really even worth mentioning and since item levels can't be upgraded that means if you find a legendary weapon that you like a lot then eventually you'll just outgrow it you can't upgrade it over time and you can't put resources into it to make it stronger and stronger to keep pace with you you you'll just well it'll eventually grow objectively weaker as you encounter more and more difficult enemies and then it will just be time to throw it away or sell it fallout 76 it teaches you not to get attached to what you find and I feel like in a scenario like Fallout 76 is trying to present to us the the idea that we can't have our trusty favorite weapon or our lucky sidearm well I I I don't know it just doesn't seem like it fits the world well fallout adds a throwaway attitude to the weapons and armor you have instead of a find a thing you love and take good care of it sort of mentality bobbleheads and magazines they're found in much higher quantities than before now and they only confer temporary bonuses to players the length of these bonuses can be increased through perks but I found myself just selling them for caps instead of consuming them they certainly don't have the the rare and valuable item appeal that they have in the past I remember in Fallout 3 when I still played on Xbox I would find out where all the bobbleheads were and I would try to go to each and every one cuz I wanted to make my character really strong well well those days are gone ah those were the days anyway item management in the game is I think it's one of fallout 76 as greatest failures whereas another modern Fallout games your lair your house hidey hole it had containers that you could fill with items essentially without limit and your character now only has a stash that can be accessed from the the base you make the camp you make or at certain points in the map like train stations and they're always there and so at the release of the game the stash had an abysmally low limit of 400 units which is what's about double a low-level character just carry weight and this insultingly low amount was eventually increased to 600 which is still something that I think he'll reach rather quickly I know that I did and reaching the stash limit means that your character storage is full and any items that you cannot carry on your person they won't have a place to go there's nowhere to put it and in many players like myself like to collect in Fallout games and Elder Scrolls games and if they find a rare or a legendary weapon they'll keep it they'll bring it to their house to have a later time they'll put it on the wall or keep it under the mattress I collect scrap and junk and building materials and a stash of medical items and other aid materials that I can put to use later in between weapons and armor mods junk eight items ammo and all the other stuff the stash fills up quickly that's 600 limit yeah you get to it fast and I found myself constantly bringing back to the stash far far far more than it could ever hold in a game that's essentially about looting I kind of felt like I wasn't supposed to loot need too much since I wouldn't have a place to put all the stuff I pick up and I really really do not like this change I really love it I like to collect armor sets weapons special bits and bobs in the world almost like trophies or memoirs of things I've done and seen or quests that I've completed but if you have the collector mindset and fallout 76 like you might have had in other Elder Scroll games or in previous Fallout games I think you'll find a frustrating roadblock here I think the idea of such a low stash weight in this game relates back to the always online nature of Fallout 76 if players can't keep in their inventories a a constantly growing stockpile of acquired goods and materials they'll have to spend more time with their hours of fallout looking for things on the fly or simply when they're needed at a given time for a specific thing and this I think was Bethesda's way of keeping players constantly working on the grind or the gameplay loop to keep an always online world running it needs to be a steady and never-ending cycle which slows down if you aren't restricted with the resources you can put in storage so for instance I found myself when I played the game I would have a gun in it would need to be repaired and so I would change the items that I I would I would tag the items specifically for that weapon instead of going to all the stuff that I had picked up previously just for this occasion and use that stuff because I worried about collecting too much to fill up my stash it was very much what do I need to do now or what do I need to do in the very near future and shift my focus to that not just start collecting everything that you feel will be sort of useful and I wish instead they put like limits on how much of each type of material you could save copper aluminum steel all that stuff but would allow us to store weapons and items as we wished fallout 76 clearly aims for a more keep going process where you are constantly replacing what you have with new things and progressively shifting the items that you use not not having that trusty sidearm or outfits that you feel fit you and that you really like returning to the stash it often felt like a drag it really was just a depressing break on the experience I was constantly selling my stuff to the vendors oh and they only have a 200 cap limit which you reached just like that and then I'd be fiddling around with the items that I did have moving stuff from my stash to my inventory and dropping big stacks of stuff on the floor in these gigantic quantities like earlier in the video where i came across the drop materials of other players where you would have you just have stuff in the tens of thousands sometimes over 100,000 worth of an item the world is filled with things to collect and scrap and find but it's honestly a it's a waste to be thorough about it I don't like leaving useful things just just laying around but I had to start learning that my time spent looting in a Fallout game would now just sort of be wasted and that's really weird for a Fallout game one change you know because it's not all bad one change I do like about the game is that some items like radaway which removes radiation in rad acts which helps resist radiation can have diluted variants that are less potent but more common stimpaks which are the games primary healing item they can be either diluted regular or even super and I do like this change it's a good way to vary the balance of availability and potency and items that the player would find useful all of the item management though it'll pretty much be done through the pip-boy a very very familiar interface pretty much exactly like it was before and it can now be toggled from its regular view into a more screen filling but out of character display of your inventory here you can check your status your health effects quests you can listen to the radio which won't happen in this review because YouTube and copyright strikes are the worst thing since [ __ ] Hitler and mostly you'll just be using the inventory the pip-boy to manage your items anyway you'll equip weapons and armor here and you'll cycle through your items for aid and whatnot in the game does include a useful weapon wheel that can have guns and grenades and eight items etc it's signed to it for quicker designation and that'll be important because remember now this is an online only game so there's no pausing so if something isn't in your weapon wheel and you need it well I hope you can cycle through your inventory quickly and as no doubt you've probably seen power armor exists in this game as well it functions practically identically to its fallout 4 inception and the way it looks and moves and based basically everything they copied and pasted it like a lot of things that fall out 76 each suit of armor is comprised of a frame that requires a fusion core for power and this fusion core is drained of its energy as the user utilizes the power armor frames can have a body for armor left and right leg left and right arm and a helmet and each of these pieces has a level attached to it that has to be met by the player so the first four or so sets of power armor in the game that I found I wasn't allowed to enter into it until I removed the armor from the frame so I could only have the option to walk around in a bare naked power armor frame like a poor person and lots of players that you meet will be wearing power armor as well and it's I think it's meant to be one of those in the game sorts of things you aspire for and build up this is my suit of power armor you know but seeing so many players in power armor it really I I guess you could say it cheapens the idea it's not rare or interesting it's not valuable it's not something special everybody has one and they're laying around all over the place and where once power armor was something amazing and rare to be sought over now it's something that I just find laying around wherever I go I'll go to a farm and in the storage shed of a farm they'll just be power armor you know in case you just really need to plow hard you cannot craft while in power armor though you can scrap items if you want to craft or repair your equipment at a workbench you have to exit the power armor in order to do so then when I began this section of the review talking about power armor I didn't carry any around I didn't have any in my inventory I had to go and get some and luckily getting power armors really easy I just looked up some locations and strolled on over they really are just kind of all over the place some locations have multiple sets you just go from point to point and get the armor pieces of unattended frames and voila you are now wearing a full set of power armor also important to note that a power armor frame or chassis can be carried in the inventory for only ten units of weight which is significantly less than many rifles in the game even if the chassis the frame has any armor on it or not while armored parts of which there are six do not actually weigh anything when they're added to the chassis so by putting power armor on the chassis you ensure it will only weigh ten units even though their parts in reality add up to anywhere from sixty eight to eighty eight units so you can wear power armor while having a second set in your inventory and that's an unusual choice but alrighty then but that's about all I have to say regarding some of the items and such and fallout 76 and I feel like it's time I actually talked about one of the biggest aspects of this game it's not yet gun really explored and by that I mean Appalachia [Music] I have heard fallout 76 videos tell me that it is an ugly game and I have heard others tell me that it is a gorgeous game but I think the better way to phrase it a more accurate way at least is that fallout 76 is a bit of both it is inconsistent there's elements of both of these things mixed in together to make an overall picture Appalachia is at times legitimately gorgeous and other times it is legitimately ugly remember before the game launched months ago Todd Howard stood on a stage and told us we always start with the world and this time it features all new rendering lighting and landscape technology it allows us to have 16 times the detail and even view distant weather systems across the map all new rendering lighting and landscape technology it allows 16 times the detail 16 6 and 10 viewing distant weather systems [ __ ] that is some mighty big talk there Todd and there's a part of me that even at the time wanted to believe you but here we are it's a new year it's a new world and I can't help but feel as if fallout 76 is Appalachia is simultaneously the best and the worst thing about this game absolutely Apalachee is like how do I even come up with an analogy for this alright I think I've got one alright imagine a guy has a thousand dirty styrofoam cups and he stacks up all the cups and makes one big massive pyramid with these cups making them taller and taller and taller and he steps away and displays his creation to you and upon first seeing it your eyes widened it's a very impressive display the fact that somebody did this it stands out it catches your eye but then after a moment the surprise wanes wears off and the more you look closer the more you notice that it's just it's just a bunch of cheap styrofoam cups stacked on top of each other they're not even clean they're dirty they're kind of discolored and some of them are even a little bent out of shape in some places in fact you kind of wonder how the whole thing manages not to collapse that's Appalachia let's take a screen shot click gonna have a sound effect Wow look at that that looks kind of nice huh need the lighting the bridges the water below the trees and the vegetation wait it wait a second look at the rock cliff here on the top left and oh the the textures on the bridge supports there the water itself these weird shadow line thingies Oh God look at that tree dude Lord and what's even going on over here you know the more you actually look at fallout 76 the the worse it gets oftentimes a location is busy with details there are trash heaps and props and lighting effects and vegetation buildings rubble is a lot going on and it kind of tricks you into thinking the game is prettier than it actually is so there's plenty of screenshots you can take in places you can go that are immersive to a degree and and how all the ambience and such come together to make an environment but once you stop and actually look at the rock face or the propeller or the damn bushes if falls apart I think what saves fallout 76 from some of my ire is that it is indeed the more diverse and interesting world and modern Fallout games yet the more diverse the most diverse yet [ __ ] it it's staying in probably more than the elderscrolls I'd say honestly but the fact I have to stop and think to myself is this late 2018 game actually better looking than a 2015 game or 2011 game that should say something and yes while out 76 does look better than Skyrim mostly it does sort of look better than fallout 4 but the improvements especially to the latter are minimal and honestly since fallout 4 in Skyrim both have a plethora of graphics mods to change the way the game looks I would actually say that they both look better than fallout 76 if you take that in mind fallout 76 is doing a huge disservice to itself in that regard and instead of taking the mods that made the previous game so gorgeous and interesting and stunning to look at fallout 76 just gives us a world that only marginally improves over fallout 4 and that's kind of one of the big issues appalachia is only a tiny step up from fallout 4s Commonwealth despite the insane reuse of assets the locations themselves can be interesting and if more time and care was put into making them look better and the objects buildings props fit together better it would have served the game all the more but unfortunately the overall appeal of a location is often overshadowed by the fact that so many of the details themselves are poorly made Appalachia feels like it was the only part of this game that had any work put into it and much the same way that stacking up a thousand dirty styrofoam cups is work and effort but ultimately something that you can't stop noticing the zones of Appalachia are the forests a much better game which is the starting area with verdant lush autumn vegetation kind of like an actual forest odd for the apocalypse now you would say the toxic valley a caustic white and brown barren alien landscape you have the ash heap a mountainous and rocky desert with red-hot crevices and mining operations you have the savage divide a tall and narrow stretch of harsh wilderness and Badlands that cuts the map kind of into pieces you've got the mire a swampy wet highly vegetated marsh and cranberry bog which is orange to the game's credit the zones of the map really do vary in their aesthetic and it's normally very easily recognizable what zone somebody's in just Glantz there's a clear and obvious difference in the terrain and the look of an area something that Appalachia does well in that I legitimately appreciate it has an MMO kind of feel where zones look differently and have a different range of enemies when it comes to the weather effects of Fallout 76 Appalachia is is disappointing rain looks sparse and is barely a sprinkle on the screen not a torrent of a downpour that maybe hinders your visibility and hides you from being heard by nearby enemies fallout 76 does boast radiation storms as weather it makes the air into a green fog that looks looks legitimately interesting especially in comparison to the otherwise uninspired weather effects rad storms give your character radiation intermittently if you're not protected and they reduce visibility however as cool as I found the rad storm to be the rad storm to be the rad storm to be I only found a single one in my 66 hours of playing this game only once a single time I took a picture here isn't it lovely don't blink or you'll miss it as for viewing distant weather systems yes you can't see rain in the distance and that's neat I guess that's kind of like yeah there it's raining which is kind of cool I suppose kind of expected more but baby steps with Bethesda I suppose and what should happen if you're totally doodling along Appalachia and you cross the barrier underneath a rain cloud well it only takes half a second for clear blue sunny skies to turn into gray dreary precipitation just like that but the weather changes aren't the only things that like subtlety in this game I couldn't tell you how many times I was brought out of the world by the sudden changes in day and night cycle when things got way too bright way too quickly to the point where I would be looking over my shoulder wondering if a character had just turned on a flashlight my way that's what Fallout 76 does to a person it makes you think the Sun rising is something you have to peer cautiously over your shoulder for the interiors have fallout 76 though I feel are the biggest improvement in terms of the game's aesthetic and immersion the environments of a video game aren't just about the vistas and the landscapes of the outside world but also the more more closer and intimate haunting interiors of abandoned or broken-down buildings that are hazy with dust in the air the rubble of collapsed passageways and in the scattered remnants of furniture and other interior mainstays it was in these interiors where sneaking about avoiding detection and trying to get the drop on enemies I had the most enjoyment with in Fallout 76 which is exactly how I felt about Fallout 4 to immerse myself in the world presented to me I sneakily crouched and scuttled about a newfound factory ax a garage or a complex trying to trying to do my best to avoid damage and use my guile to kill as many enemies as possible using a much more believable tactic than just taking damage at times like these I was able to in my own way skirt around the bullet spongy enemies the clunky combat the cumbersome inventory the inconsistent landscape graphics and actually enjoy myself I got flashbacks to the times I enjoyed in Fallout 4 in playing this title as a stealth game was rather satisfying otherwise though you'll spend your time hopping from place to place from farms to factories golf courses to abandoned shacks watchtowers to gas stations to shopping malls the different locations and fallout 76 are impressively varied and the world of appalachia presents the player with a wide swath of different aesthetics and sometimes unusually structured locales that fully went to the idea that this is indeed a world just starting to regrow from the destruction of a nuclear apocalypse so long ago a believable presentation of a sci-fi themed wasteland that mixes the remnants of the familiar fallout retro future with the savage and tamed wilderness where clanking man-made machinery clashes with the much younger beast eale monstrosity is created by the cruel scientific excesses of a of a humankind long gone leaving us to tame through struggle their melancholic legacy god I sound like such a [ __ ] all new rendering lighting landscape technology sixteen tines the detail these are all bold claims to make and I wouldn't be surprised if it was in some way true you know since we're talking about all this new technology that Bethesda apparently has at their fingertips I want to take a moment and tell you about something I have noticed in fallout 76 that I have never seen in a videogame before I mean I had to come up with a name for it says I didn't exactly recognize the graphical phenomenon that it is I decided to call it movement blur not motion blur though I would forgive you for thinking that's what I meant I mean movement blur whenever you move not look around but when your character is in motion altering coordinates legs are shifting character moving the world becomes blurry everything on screen the characters the environment the items you the player everything and when you stop moving the world comes back into focus again before your very eyes this doesn't happen as you look around again it's not motion blur it only happens when you're actually move around the world even if it's just an inch and it's very distracting for me I play with a 1440p resolution on a 27-inch screen and this movement blur effect is really noticeable and it's kind of irritating and I have no idea well I don't know why it's in the game and as far as I know it's tied to anti-aliasing as the setting and the cost for removing it is a pretty significant hit in performance how much of that new technology went into the creation of Fallout 76 world I can't say what I do feel though was that Appalachia is perhaps my favorite aspect to fallout 76 and for all its faults and poorly done textures and clipping issues within the environment I still feel as if this was the only part of the game given any real considerable effort I wonder just how much more impressed I would be if the game wasn't so held back either by rush or lack of polish or perhaps even just sheer incompetence also swimming underwater looks like [ __ ] it looks like basically no effort went into creating underwater areas I mean this looks awful and while fallout 76 at least I feel is a lost cause the design of Appalachia does give me hope for future Bethesda titles in terms of the worlds that they'll be able to create for the player to explore however with the incredible lack of polish and attention to details that fallout 76 seems to have I'm also worried as well it's a mix for me I think Bethesda has what it takes deep down so long as they put in the effort to give us the kinds of neat places and interesting locations that Appalachia offers though hopefully in a game that does so much better in all the ways that I feel fallout 76 failed I think that's why if Europe player who really really puts immense value into the exploration aspects of video games going to interesting places seeing things doing your best to immerse yourself in a world value can be found in fallout 76 but for really anybody else it would be difficult for even a world like Appalachia to overcome all of the other negative aspects that Bethesda has created for the game as long as Bethesda cares then they will make beautiful interesting worlds to explore as long as they care as long as they show firt and respect to the universe that so many players love they'll do well but in Fallout 76 I think it's clear that the passion simply did not exist though sometimes if you squinch rise and you look just right and you find the right places I can't help but feel that at least there were a few people on the team who maybe actually did give a [ __ ] events and quests make up a portion of the gameplay and busy work and fallout 76 and not just casual exploration to satisfy your curiosity for the unknown or your desire for a nicer hatch than the one you're wearing now or a better fitting pair of trousers the events and quests are actually almost not even worth mentioning they're mostly dull boring repetitious and most of the ones that I've done myself have been little more than dressed up slowly paced escort missions or kill the waves of enemies missions there's little of interest here nothing exciting or noteworthy nothing innovative it's all stuff you've seen before and other much better games and the way that the events are given narrative explanation seems know it seems lazy when there's apparently some voice on the radio that asks for help but they can't actually be found anywhere and you can't communicate back to them ask them questions and you know that it's all some attempt for a Bethesda to avoid having to actually make models for NPCs or create dialogue or put decent effort into creating a believable world it's just a voice on the radio that tells you to do something so there's something to do and the effects it has on the world even for the most of focused and easily convinced of players who want to invest themselves in the world it seems non-existent and pointless the events in particular they don't seem like they're actual things that happened in a living changing world they're just jobs that pop up and players do them for experience and some goodies there's no real impact on Appalachia or any of its now-deceased factions one event feed the people has you using machinery in a canning factory to produce food but everyone in Appalachia except for players is dead and you all just kind of wonder why you should even bother it doesn't do any good for the world around you it's just a just a job to do and it gives you XP and loot so might as well write events also repeat at different places meaning the messenger event where you escort a stupid [ __ ] robot to some stupid [ __ ] house to deliver a stupid [ __ ] message can take place in the middle of uh swamp or down the sloping hill of a forest or along a lonely highway for most of your time has just spent walking alongside it unless it just randomly dies because apparently a robot that waits 25 years to deliver a stupid message can't possibly finish its mission unless it gets escorted in the next 20 minutes or else it'll die the majority of the quests and the events that I did complete in fallout 76 were done solo for a game that stresses online functionality that is multiplayer always all the time the only time when I ever felt like an event was a community sort of endeavor was actually tonight the last night the night that I finished this review after 66 hours of this game was the first time I happened to come across an event where it seemed like it was actually kind of an effort where multiple people came together to complete it even though this particular event can be easily completed by a single person without any issues because I'd done that a few times before it's also worthy of mentioning that bugs in fallout 76 can sometimes cause events to be impossible to complete and if the server decides it just doesn't like your face and disconnects then all of your progress on an event will be lost which happened to me once and I lost about 50 minutes worth of progress here I feel as if you should share in my frustration and misery no no what a fun video game I love video games that have events that take a long time to complete and are clearly designed for a lot of people to do them but since I'm the only person around in the area I do it all by myself and right when I'm about to finish going towards the finish quest button the server disconnects and I've lost 50 minutes of my life thank you so much Bethesda and I'm not proud of getting that angry at a video game sitting in my room barking at a computer screen but if you haven't played this game as much as I have then then you don't know you don't know what this game will do to a person you're not yourself when you play fallout 76 fallout 76 does have a new feature for fallout the photo mode the photo mode allows you to take pictures of your character which you can pose and zoom in and do all sorts of stuff and then those will become loading screens so you can remind yourself of all of the wonderful fun times that you had playing fallout 76 when I logged into the game to get some footage of photo mode for this review this game is a [ __ ] mean in any event the last thing that I do have to say regarding the environments of Fallout 76 are the fact that you will eventually come across player built bases and camps while you're wandering around the world now in Fallout 4 I wasn't particularly interested in the the base building system that they had there nor am I really interested in it in terms of Fallout 76 you can construct walls and floors and ceilings and props and workshops and beds and other knickknacks and doodads to build a little house on the prairie for your very own other players can enter it and I often use these bases as essentially free work benches for me to repair my stuff and scrap to my junk the design of these bases though clashed immensely with the world around them oftentimes bases would be put together in ways that made no sense architectural er structurally you would see player bases that were propped up and constructed in a way that you know there's no way they should actually be standing which would directly oppose the buildings around them it seems odd that this would be a stressed aspect to fallout 76 if I had emerged from a vault and it was my job to reclaim the world rebuild it to restore it to its former glory then obviously I wouldn't construct with my own hands my own house and shelter obviously I would use all of the structures that already existed in the world with solid walls and rooftops and doorways coming across player bases essentially just worked to remove me from the immersion of playing in appalachia also bases often were built up in locations where they could constantly farm enemies or take advantage of events if they occurred within an area so fallout 76 is in addition to being everything that it already is and it wants to be a lot of things also is a survival game though I would say it's a survival game in the most technical of definitions it's survival diet survival light it's zero calorie survival it's barely barely even to a point in this game that it adds so little that the survival aspects of fallout 76 really they just seemed to be an annoyance and a distraction more than an actually well flushed out mechanic around which the game flourishes the little times gonna be needed to explain this as little time was probably given to its creation to fallout 76 is a survival game in much the same way that let's see in much the same way that going to Walmart is a survival experience technically you do have to eventually eat food and drink water in order to not die but sustenance surrounds you everywhere and as long as you have the presence of mind to reach out and grab it you will survive in fallout 76 food and drink is everywhere it is all over the place it's not rare it's not valuable it is all over this supposed wasteland the only time I even remember that I have to eat and drink is when a notification pops up that I need to do so and I take a bite from whatever I have in my inventory at the time which is basically a massive stack of canned dog food and purified water because I took the perk that triples the effect of dog food which basically renders the game's entire survival system obsolete at level 8 and it makes dog food a very effective healing item as well in fact canned dog food is the most consumed item in the entire game by all players and and by then too you can have the slow metabolizer in the dromedary perk I don't know how to pronounce it that makes food and drinks satisfy an additional 25% for level yeah there you go whatever right food and water so easy to procure in this game that it almost feels like distracting busywork you roll your eyes whenever you're notified you need to travel to your inventory screen and munch on whatever to lunch you decided on for a dangerous wasteland survival from the elements in sustance sustenance sustance is so easy I wonder why they even went through the trouble to add it in I think it would have been better to have food and drink not be mandatory but give perks that would give bonuses to keeping your fullness above a certain level which the game has now to agree but could really be fleshed out and reworked or maybe allowed players the ability to put a lot more focus on skills that allowed them to create food and drink items that would themselves confer bonuses to players instead of having players need to constantly stop and eat and drink to survive which is pointless busy work since you're constantly looting anyway and there's rarely ever a time when you aren't passing over food or water because you have enough or it'll just weigh you down too much and besides you'll always find it later anyway you're never exactly wanting survival implies there's a sense of of a looming threat a subtle bunt but but I'm the present danger that comes with maintaining your precious body's capability survival implies a challenge or a constant need to be aware of the consequences if it's ignored but fallout 76 is survival is so easy so watered down that little would be lost if they let you just toggle it on and off so you don't have to face the constant interruptions that come from having having to stop what you're doing and be reminded that video games aren't about enjoying yourself or overcoming challenges but moving right along my final note about Appalachia concerns the detonation of nuclear devices it's a puzzling and on aspect of the game honestly something that just I mean I'm gonna be honest it seems like more of a marketing ploy instead of a well-made or interesting actual mechanic for the game but hey you show a nuke blowing up on screen that players call in and I guess some people will clap at anything these days nukes don't make sense in this world if every player is supposed to be a resident of fall seventy-six he was tasked with rebuilding and restoring a wasteland then it's doubly nonsensical why would you further destroy in irradiate the land you're tasked with rebuilding with a nuclear explosion that's insane it makes no sense it's completely antithetical to what the narrative of Fallout 76 and the opening cinematic the only cinematic convey to the player and why on earth would you kill the fellow denizens of fault 76 I mean what a mess it's ridiculous anyway nukes happened about every once in a while on the map and when it does a quest will begin called death from above or something like that the map will display a blast zone or the nuke will land and after about two minutes boom it hits the nuke transforms the area into a high level irradiated zone where where deadly enemies will spawn that can drop high-level loot and players can gather rare resources the explosion from the nuke itself is I mean I'm talking about the animation for the explosion itself I will just let this footage from IGN play that released back in October because it is an excellent example of how how awful the explosion looks this is this looks awful Bethesda it looks terrible honestly I think you hurt the appeal of the game by showing this to players because of how poorly it looks considering that it is hashtag current here and we know that you can do just so so much better the game is worse for having this in it it really does look worse than the Megaton explosion from fallout 3 which was released ten years ago back in 2008 man fallout 3 I have so many fond memories of playing Fallout 3 more than I will ever get from fallout 76 I bet man that came out 10 years ago geez time flies when you're having fun [Music] fallout 76 was sold as a full $60 game when it launched that's what Bethesda thought this game was worth it's what they priced it as and that is what it shall be judged as fallout 76 also has microtransactions a fully priced $60 game with microtransactions not dlc not expansion packs microtransactions from day one and this isn't a surprise we all saw this coming with the addition of the the creation Club garbage where they would charge money for mods that were otherwise completely free in order to squeeze even more money out of the consumers who loved their games however the amount of incredible greed displayed here and fallout 76 is atomic shop is it's surprisingly bad so before we get into the shop itself let's explain something before we begin the in-game currency is the atom you can obtain atoms by completing challenges for characters in the game some challenges are tied to your account and not per character and can therefore only be unlocked a single time they can relate to combat or crafting or looting all kinds of actions kill these types of enemies gather this much would complete this many events etc the yada-yada in addition though there are both daily and weekly challenges that grant adams upon completion every day you can earn 50 atoms by completing the five challenges that you're presented with and every week you can complete 150 atoms worth of challenges this means that there's the potential of gaining through weekly and daily challenges 400 atoms you have to login every day you have to do every challenge every day and you have to do this without fail for a maximum potential of 400 atoms a week 7 days a week so how much doesn't atom cost in real money well 100 atoms equals $1 so if you bust your ass and fall out 76 and do all of the stuff that I just listed all the challenges every single day without fail every day all the time you can get four dollars a week for microtransactions for all of that work I currently to give a scale here I currently have 67 hours in the game at the time of me saying this and I have played the game organically without going purposefully out of my way to get challenges done just to get microtransaction dosh after 67 hours I have exactly 25 dollars of Adams results may vary but that is the number that I got so keep that in mind as we proceed going through some of the items in the atomic shop 67 hours toiling through this game twenty-five dollars of credit let's start small and say you just want to get some 2076 sunglasses that will cost you seven dollars and sixty cents a single baseball cap will cost you $6 one to buy an ugly camouflage pattern suit $10 this vault-tec bomber jacket will also cost you $10 as will the poodle skirt $10 the military officer uniform that is $12 and the starlet sniper outfit $14 oh but you could buy far far more than just some outfits or a few little accessories you can buy things like poses for photo mode this walking pose will cost you one dollar and fifty cents for a walking pose the tough girl pose flexing your arm muscle well that's four dollars the rock out pose is six dollars but if you just want to lie out that'll cost you six dollars I'm sorry want to just be able to sit down well that's a dollar fifty and so is waving want to paint your metal armor the color of vomit eight dollars please maybe you prefer leather armor and want to make it blue that's eight dollars if you prefer combat armor don't worry you color that blue is well for $8.00 but if you want to show the wasteland that you really like blue and yellow then you can spend $18 on some skin for your power armor or maybe $18 on this power armor skin instead but don't worry a more believable camo pattern for your military armor it will only be 14 i mentioned mr. maddie plays at the beginning of this video for his review on fallout 76 but he also has another excellent video concerning the game concerning the atomic shop particularly here's a clip from that video that i think you guys should watch just to get the point across of how how ridiculous bethesda is these days now not everyone's gonna consider this a huge deal or this shop predatory and I don't feel everyone's going to share my point of view on this but I still think it requires a discussion as we move forward into it because fallout 76 reuses so many of Fallout Force assets - a borderline insulting amount in the base game but I found myself puzzled how Bethesda could feel ok with their decision in charging us for some of this stuff so juice had actually taken one for the team and he bought some of these items from the atomic shop like the wild man rags greaser Jean and jackets Red Rocket jumpsuit and the rocket suit comparing them to the fallout 4 counterparts and as you can see for all them aside from some increased saturation in the rocket suit and some uplifting for the greaser Jean and jackets overall these are pretty much identical on Bethesda wants to charge you real money for this because once again I highlight there comes a point in the lifecycle fought somebody 6 where you really don't earn atoms at all and about 5 dollars worth of atoms per week can only get you so far the atomic shop presents us with a set of extremely overpriced items items that can yes be purchased through in-game rewards but at the prices that Bethesda has set getting any substantive amount of goods from the microtransaction store would require an immense amount of work since there's an atom gain slowdown eventually as you complete challenges and have to resort to dailies and weeklies i think it's pretty clear that pathetic know that you would quickly exhaust gained atoms on the few things you might actually fancy at the time and then feel more compelled to spend real-world money on credits and again all of this for many reused assets from fallout 4 and an already fully priced $60 game the video by mr. Maddy plays from which I played a clip earlier it did highlight concerns with the state of mods and monetization that Bethesda are taking what was once a company that had games that could essentially be modded is now definitely moving as they have been already before towards a method of monetizing that was once a free and open modding system Bethesda wants even more of your money they see the kind of popularity and drive that their community gives to modding and they see just how excited players can be to try new mods or they're installed favorites that they learn from friends they want to make money off that they want to charge you somehow they want to find a way to take something that was once free and add even more to their coffers I worry about the state of modding in the future when it comes to Bethesda titles and I think they've become an extremely greedy company after all Todd Howard himself said that that modding in fallout 76 will only be available on private servers and I wouldn't be surprised if they only allow these private servers to be purchased through themselves and looking past fallout 76 who knows what the future holds for the once free and open realm of modding Bethesda titles but I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be a bleak one I think it would be foolish to ignore the trend of it Bethesda has set oh I think I think I'm done I think I've covered just about everything that I feel I need to cover I think I've said my piece I think I've commented enough on this awful video game what are we at now two and a half hours geez so much to go over so much to discuss and I know that there are things in this game that I could add to I know there are aspects of this game that I haven't mentioned you could go on and on and on now about the failures have fallout 76 as I tell people constantly who asked me this game I almost want to recommend so that people can see how interestingly and bizarrely terrible it is to see how the awfulness stacks upon itself in layers to see in just how many ways it is poorly created make no mistake fallout 76 is a bad video game I think it's I think it's terrible every time I get on to play this game which was for the purpose of footage really I'm not gonna be playing the game really any more unless some serious changes are made every time I got on to get footage I found myself finding new and interesting ways that the game didn't work properly broken animations strange visual effects glitches bugs AI issues the list goes on and on and on I think it is an awful video game a terrible video game full of incompetence and poor design decisions and while there are some good aspects of it they are buried underneath the crap and a lot of people don't like to hear that fallout is a beloved series by many many people a lot of people don't like the idea that a Fallout game is terrible I think parallels between fallout 76 and Star Wars the last Jedi are somewhat appropriate it's a beloved series that has had its high points and low points and its most recent production has been very divisive and has caused a great loss of faith and a a schism in the community and is seen by many many people to be in abysmal piece of work and so to those of you out there who are watching this who got through two and a half hours of me bitching about this game if you like fallout 76 I can understand why you might like it I can understand what reason somebody might have for enjoying this game I went through 67 68 ish hours of this game I got to level 50 51 there were times when I could see it when I could see how this game could be really good that if Bethesda was a company who gave a [ __ ] that fallout 76 could have been so much better than what it was because the concept isn't undoable but if you like this game this isn't an attack on you this is an attack on Bethesda's product and in some ways Bethesda themselves and if you love the Fallout universe do not allow your love of the Fallout universe in the Fallout brand to give you rose tinted goggles through which you will look at fallout 76 if you want the best for your series if you want the best for the Fallout franchise in the future then you cannot accept mediocrity and you have to be vocal and you have to resist these kinds of projects that are being released by Bethesda you can't accept them you have to call them out because if you don't then they will not be incentivized to do better I don't like that there are people who like this awful game I wish everybody hated this game so that it would never be made again so that a game this awful by a company that has become immensely greedy and cruel in just bafflingly combative to their community would learn their lesson so while I don't like the idea that you might like this game it's ok if you do just be honest about how [ __ ] this game is and don't let the moments that you enjoy and fallout 76 fool you into thinking that it is a good game it took me a lot of work to make this video this was by far the most difficult video I'd ever made and I don't know too much about editing editing but I learned a lot along the way I've never done a video game review like this before but I've learned a lot along the way I have an insane amount of experience that I've gained from creating this video and I hope that as it remains on YouTube into perpetuity I can learn from it and Bethesda can learn from it and hopefully it will illustrate with my observations about the game how terrible it really is because I don't want fallout to slowly pitter away into mediocrity I don't want fallout to become the next Star Wars I don't want to happen to fall out what happened to Mass Effect what happened to Dragon Age I hope you enjoyed this video this long-ass video about fallout 76 but I am looking forward to with great optimism what will hopefully be a very productive and enjoyable year on YouTube

Channel: Rags

Views: 2,321,436

Keywords: Fallout 76, fallout, fallout game, Bethesda, game review, bethesda review, todd howard, fallout 76 review, fallout review, rags, rags review

Id: orDCkujaX1g

Length: 155min 55sec (9355 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 17 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/BowlingPuding]

God damn i hate youtubers who have fury animals as avatar's and shit..

[u/Doncic77]

I don't get it. Everyone with a fucking brain knew this was going to be shit before they even officially announced it!

[u/[deleted]]

i had no idea what people thought of him on here till i saw the comments, please actually go and watch him, most of you must have only seen some people bitching about him on twitter or something, hes quite nice.

[u/Reidlos650]

Cant be disappointed if you knew since announcement it was going to be trash. Every Bethesda modder/maker saw this comming

[u/DoubleSpoiler]

Maybe I've just watched too many FO76 reviews and "news updates," but this review is so boring. I can forgive repeating points others have before, but he keeps repeating himself over and over in the first 30 minutes, and it's just so... boring.

[u/Funky_Mcfunkface]

'rags' is a confirmed racist and attention whore, no point in posting his trash here.

[u/[deleted]]

Is there a beat in the background for the whole thing?