Fallout 76 - The Review (2018)

recently on the giantbomb podcast Jeff Gerstmann said this you know someone asked me yesterday like hey well you know when you think your reviews gonna go up and oh my god no one no one on staff wants to play anymore of this video game like the this I'm not gonna subject myself to another 2030 hours of this [ __ ] mess it's really specific to just to put a number on it a number is [ __ ] don't play this game with 30 hours already invested into fallout 76 I was struggling to play anymore when I heard these words from Jeff they were a revelation I immediately closed the game and began writing this review fallout 76 is an atrocious video game if you're having fun with it good on you but as Billy Madison so aptly proves in this scene you can literally have fun with a flaming bag of [ __ ] especially if it's with friends whatever your personal opinion on this fallout 76 is objectively a [ __ ] game because it was not what was advertised to consumers its technical state would make the term alpha blush and there isn't a single new innovative or well-designed game system in the entire bloody mess in short fallout 76 is morally technically and creatively bankrupt and in this review I want to show you why [Music] from the very first moment that fallout 76 was revealed the lies began [Music] we always start with the world and this time it features all new rendering lighting and landscape technology it allows us to have sixteen times the detail this is Todd Howard head of Bethesda Game Studios talking about the technical leaps that he and his team made with fallout 76 we were clearly in for a visual treat the likes of which we've never seen before from a Bethesda game the reality couldn't be further from the truth fallout 76 is a hideous looking game that looks like a ps3 game at best and a ps2 game at worst interiors in particular look nightmarishly bad almost as though they were coloured in by an abstract artist who recently made the move from watercolors to pastels for every wooded area we traipse through at the end of it is a town or a hotel or a hospital that's been lifted straight out of fallout 4 you cannot boast a visual leap when 95% of your art assets are dragged and dropped from a game released three years ago all of this is even more disappointing when you consider that modders got fallout 4 to look pretty stunning by the time they were through with it Bethesda was so lazy that they couldn't even be bothered to copy and paste the work done by modders and incorporate it into their own game engine the second most egregious lie from Bethesda about fallout 76 was this one fallout 76 is by far the largest project that we've ever done it encompasses parts of the studio in Maryland Austin Montreal for Bethesda Game Studios as well as we're getting a lot of help from other parts of Bethesda some of the great folks at ed software are Kane ZeniMax online and so it really is a huge undertaking not just for us but all parts of the testing many of you will have not played fallout 76 i've played about 30 hours the miss suggestion that this buggy unfinished lifeless asset flip of a game was a bigger undertaking for these guys than skyrim was that suggestion enrages me it is such a bald-faced lie that i don't even know where to begin i won't even bother deconstructing this [ __ ] now just keep it in mind throughout the rest of this video and that will be all the proof you need to understand that this statement is utter rubbish I think that the much talked-about beta was also inherently Floyd ative and deceptive firstly it was only open to pre-order customers this is not an unheard of practice in and of itself but almost every bit of marketing you see for Fallout 76 sells access to the beta as a key selling point for pre-ordering beta access should not be a selling point for any product the fact that your progress is carried over from the beta into the game's full release throw the compounded the marketing value of this beta clearly Bethesda were looking to lock in excited fallout fans eager to be the first to play the new Fallout adventure fans who did foolishly put their money down on this scam were thrilled to find that the beta was only available during very specific timing windows often when people were at work or otherwise unable to play this was made worse by a PC bug that deleted the beader client on the first day of the beta and the fact that our near 50 gigabyte patch was issued halfway through the beta had fixed almost nothing people with limited data caps were fresh out of luck the core deceit of this beta though was the fact that it was not a beta at all with two weeks before release and with the sheer volume of bugs glitches technical deficits and poor optimisation prison it was dishonest of Bethesda to dangle the hope of improvement in front of players my video criticizing the beta has over 1.1 million views now and it's dislike ratio and the thousands of comments criticizing me there we're in large part because people were convinced that Bethesda would fix everything before the release date given Bethesda's long and well-documented history of shipping buggy games this was very foolish thinking but Bethesda indulged it nonetheless if fallout 76 achieves nothing else I hope it serves as the indisputable proof that beaters released two weeks before our product ships aren't betas their demos or at best service stress tests separate from all of this I think the most misleading aspect of fallout 76 is the ambiguous way it was presented to people is this a single-player game or a multiplayer game yes is fallout 76 really new and different or is it something more familiar yes is this game for more traditional fallout fans or are you trying to attract a new audience yes it's PvP really core to the experience or is it more of a side activity so they'll always there's always PvP like you can never tell well we first of all I'd say we're still dialing that we don't want it to be grief II but we want to have some drama there okay so there is a way that you can decide to do PvP and we are currently balancing kind of the incentives for someone who wants to be very aggressive to people and those who want to ignore it yeah and that really comes down to you know the in games and incentives and then also the social incentives [Music] when Todd Howard first started speaking about fallout 76 it was immediately apparent to me that he was speaking out of both sides of his mouth one moment the gang was familiar to fallout fans fully enjoyable as a solo experience full of great storytelling and law we'd come to expect Todd specifically said that 80% of this experience was the same as a regular fallout game at the same time fallout 76 was being sold as a franchise spin-off this bold experiment and a radical departure from the traditional formula Todd and the Bethesda marketing team were trying to appeal to all players simultaneously without ever committing to a specific vision of what this game was and who was four it seems a distant memory now but cast your mind back only two months or so where we literally had no idea what fallout 76 was we didn't know what sort of game it was trying to be because Bethesda was so unwilling to show us trying to understand what fallout 76 was felt like reading tea leaves now in retrospect it's clear that the reticence to share any information was designed to obfuscate how little appeal this game held to anyone it's rare that I would ever declare a game immoral but I think the sum total of these deliberate tactics to deceive and ensnare consumers marks a low point for Bethesda and for games in general this was a deliberate campaign to trick you into buying this shoddy product and I honestly take pleasure in the knowledge that it's been largely unsuccessful there are a lot of games released each year in a port technical state most of these are from small indie developers with limited resources who charge significantly less than $60 for their products fallout 76 is a $60 game or a $200 game depending on which version you purchase not including the microtransactions on top of that and it's made by Bethesda Game Studios one of the largest and most successful developers in the history of video games and it's published by Bethesda one of the largest video game publishers in the world the technical state of Fallout 76 is so far beyond acceptable that as Jim sterling commented in his recent gym question on the subject it honestly forces me to revisit my opinion of previous Bethesda releases it's like when you want to cook a frog you don't throw it into boiling water because it will just jump straight out what you do instead is you put it into cold water and then gently bring that water to a boil I feel like we're the Frog in the water and fallout 76 is the point at which we finally realize that after two decades of buggy releases we've all been cooked alive fallout 76 is technical failures exist on four levels the limits of the outdated creation engine the optimization and performance of that engine bugs and the UI design particularly on the PC port let's talk about the engine first the creation engine is built on the old gamebryo engine which dates back to decades that is not to say that fallout 76 is engine is two decades old but it is to say that there are still bugs in this engine that have lasted for two decades that is indisputable the engine is old and out-of-date it cannot properly handle running above 60 FPS as the game speed and physics are linked to frame rate a recent patch seemed to fix this even then some people are still getting the physics bugs so take Bethesda's assurance that this problem is fixed with a very large grain of salt the engine struggles with adjustable field of view does not support ultra wide resolutions and cannot handle native 4k very well it's lighting engine is decidedly last gen it's physics result in myriad situations where you are just scratching your head wondering what the hell is going on as I mentioned earlier all of these issues have in fact been solved by models who bootstrap solution to these things over their time working with the creation engine but none of these improvements have been incorporated here because Bethesda just couldn't be bothered you'd think that was such a basic feature set and being almost a decade old the creation engine would at least run smoothly on modern day pcs I mean it's clearly not pushing any visual boundaries like Red Dead or God of War so surely we can get this thing running pretty smoothly at 60fps right wrong the optimization and performance of this game needs to be seen to be believed I have a gtx 1080 TI and an i7 8 700 k it can run pretty much any game on Ultra at 144 Hertz no problem I cannot run for that 76 on Ultra because it takes my performance well below 60fps I run it on high settings and I don't run it at my usual 1440p because that's also too taxing I stick to straight 1080p even with these settings I will very very frequently get huge frame drops down to as low as about 20 FPS popin is complete lay off the charts lighting is straight-up broken and anything more than about 30 feet in front of you will become blurry because the engine is trying to scale down detail to maintain performance every issue I've listed above is worse on console I played the game on xbox one X and it was also a train wreck I often hear hey it's running fine for me I don't know what your problem is good I'm glad it's running fine for you it's not running fine for most people don't trust me in the description I've left a link to the digital foundry analysis where they demonstrate just how bad this [ __ ] is with an Xbox in particular dropping down to about 10 frames per second these guys analyze graphics for a living and they're very good at it so just listen to what they have to say okay let's talk bugs in fact [ __ ] it let's not everything you've heard about bugs is true I can't go more than about five minutes playing this game without encountering a visual physics AI UI or server bug I can't be bothered talking about it except to say that it's the worst I've ever seen from Bethesda and that's really saying something I feel bad for the QA team that will be blamed for this when the real crooks are the upper management who would have seen this list of bugs and said [ __ ] it ship it anyway the UI in this game demands special mention I struggled to think of how it could be worse the pip-boy interface was cute and immersive in Fallout games but it was annoying to navigate at the best of times at least you could pause the action in Fallout 3 & 4 so if it took you a while to do what you needed that was fine here in 76 you can't pause the action and navigating your menu during tense moments is extremely frustrating this is a mod for Fallout 76 that came out three days after the game was released it offers a vastly improved UI experience dividing a staff into useful categories and showing you weight limits per category it is the perfect example of how little effort Bethesda have put into any part of this game rather than update their UI for a new always-online unpossible experience they simply drag and drop the old UI from fallout 4 if a modder can do better than Bethesda in three days what the [ __ ] have Bethesda been doing for three years this point about the UI bleeds into the final point I'll make about the game's technical performance and that's the topic of the PC port this is one of the worst pc ports I've seen from a triple-a studio especially one that has such a strong PC community behind it in addition to basic options like refresh rate field of view and ultra wide and a bunch of other stuff just missing the UI is ripped straight from the console controller setup and crudely smushed into the keyboard and mouse setup you have to use so many unnecessary keys to do simple things here because Bethesda didn't bother to properly configure controls for the keyboard and mouse it's awful fallout 76s performance is in the toilet but it's actually future Bethesda games that worry me much more recently todd howard confirmed that they would be using the creation engine for starfield and elder scrolls 6 speaking - game star back in June he said this for Fallout 76 we have changed a lot the game uses a new renderer a new lining system and a new system for landscape generation for starfield even more of a changes and for Elder Scrolls 6 out there on the rise and even more we like our editor it allows us to create worlds really fast and the modders know it really well there are some elementary ways we create our games and that will continue because that lets us be efficient and we think it works best I know that graphic engines evolve and improve with time I don't want to beat an alarmist drum here but I will say this Todd thinks that this engine that Bethesda is currently using lets them be efficient and thinks it works best for them I don't agree you cannot look at these results and see efficiency you cannot look at these results and see works best I look at these results and see absolute failure so to see Todd praised this engine and commit to it to the next decades worth of releases from Bethesda when we still have bugs in fallout 76 dating back nearly two decades I'm sorry but I think that's just as [ __ ] as the way 76 was marketed to players in the first place you know it being us it's extremely ambitious I'm a bit of a softie in most regards and I'm generally willing to cut a developer some slack so long as they're trying new things big themes ambitious things etc like no man sky for example that was a shitty game at launch but it was also made by about 6 people and they were trying something extremely ambitious Shawn Marie oversold that game but they really did strive for an inspiring never-before-seen ideal so for that reason I was never really that angry that no man's sky sucked you miss 100% of the shots you don't take said Wayne Gretzky they took a shot they failed I respect them for trying fallout 76 takes no shots whatsoever it aims for nothing remotely interesting or ambitious it's the video game equivalent of the bunt and what little they do try to achieve here they fail that categorically picture yourself in a room with a bunch of people and it's your job to design the perfect online Fallout game picture big elaborate quest lines where you can do these with your friends think of build diversity that allows for interesting team compositions think of building new cities together or pursuing life as a Raider or playing as a super mutant think of all the possibilities inherent in Fallout with friends in 2018 and let your mind truly wander now witness fallout 76 with its shriveled up uninspired vision for what online fallout could be a game with no NPCs no narrative no meaningful RPG no hub areas no real gameplay loop it reduces the franchise to a dull looter shooter where the loot is literally garbage and the shooting is absolutely terrible it's the least amount of effort or design work that you could put into this and still call it fall out beyond the lack of ambition in this gameplay formula every game system is hopelessly conflicted and compromised this is best demonstrated by looking at the game's major elements its narrative its quest design its combat its crafting and its PvP story first the game has no story there are people in the comments section who will spring to Bethesda's defense saying that fallout 76 is dripping with rich engaging story you just need to listen to the holotapes and read all the scraps of paper and all the notes on the computer terminals that's not story that's law calling its story is like saying destiny one head story because it had grimoire cards no there is no story in fallout 76 and the only way you will enjoy the narrative or law in this game is if you are that 5% of players who enjoys getting their story from computer terminals if you're one of these people great you'll probably like for that 76 but if you're not then fallout 76 has no story the decision to deliver the law or the narrative around holy tapes and terminals is directly at odds with the co-op focus of this game it's better with friends is the mantra is it better with friends when you're trying to listen to a hollow tape and your friends won't shut up over voice chat is it better with friends when one of them wants to sit there reading every line of every entry on every computer terminal when you just want to go outside and keep killing [ __ ] is it better with other people when there's no push-to-talk and some dude starts running up to you and like yelling at you and this dogs barking his kids crying and you're trying to immerse yourself in this fallout law and experience when you just have all this [ __ ] in the background no it's not you can't design a co-op experience and deliver its narrative through things that don't work in a co-op setting that's exactly what Bethesda did here owing to a lack of engaging narrative or NPCs you can relate to the quest structure is hopelessly compromised with no stakes to care about or dialogue choices to engage or NPCs to accompany you every single quest without exception is go here loot this thing go here click that button go here kill that thing every quest feels like an MMO fetch quest or one of those side quests you collect from the bulletin board in the center of town in an open world game combat man ok combat in fallout 3 and 4 is propped up by vats the gunplay is not good and the enemies are very poorly designed so you need vats to be able to hit things regularly in 76 you can't pause combat so traditional vats doesn't work it's been twisted into a glorified aimbot that looks as ridiculous as it sounds to be clear the core issue here is enemy design fallouts enemies are not designed to be shot out without vats most of the enemies run up to you and crowd around you blocking your view forcing you to walk back endlessly while you reload your weapon many of them scurry about your feet forcing you to look down meaning that you have no peripheral vision many of them simply move way too fast to be shot at many of them burrow underground so you can't shoot at them at all enemies in well-designed shooters present themselves as targets so that you can engage them and feel good about that engagement Bethesda could not be bothered to develop a suite of enemies that work in the absence of a traditional vats model and as a result the entire combat loop falls apart this is in addition to the utterly baffling decisions they make about what level enemies are where those enemies are at any point in time and how much HP each of those enemies might have you go to one area and it can have level 6 enemies right alongside level 25 enemies and the level 6 enemies die in one hit and the level 25 enemies a complete bullet sponges even though you yourself are level 25 and you should be doing normal damage to them and the north part of the map the South pattern that doesn't matter anywhere you go it's a complete random potluck chance of what level enemy you're going to bump into at any point in time it's ridiculous ok let's talk about crafting now the aim of Fallout 76 is in large part to collect as much junk as possible so you can scrap it and build stuff with it this means that the core gameplay loop outside of combat is collecting chunk building a game around such an asinine gameplay loop may seem baffling but don't worry it gets worse the carry limit you have is so absurdly low that you basically cannot loot or collect anything you'll spend your entire time playing this game obsessing over your carry limit because it doesn't allow you to just go out and collect stuff like you want to just heading out with a full suit of leather armor some basic supplies 2 or 3 weapons just the bare minimum will immediately take up about 60 to 70% of your carry capacity and you have to leave vast amounts of valuable materials and weapons and armor on the ground because you simply cannot carry them if you do get them back to base you'll find that your stash has the absurdly low limit of 400 pounds this means that storing weapons and armor and all that sort of stuff in the long term it's basically impossible with what few materials you do have the crafting is a tremendous chore you need to unlock weapon and armor recipes by deconstructing weapons and armor but because your carry limit is so low you can't carry back many weapons and armor to construct which means that unlocking recipes is painfully slow the crafting of your camp brings frustrations to new levels terrain difficulties make putting items down extremely annoying your turrets just don't do anything because enemies can literally appear from the concrete foundations that you've laid down when you log out your camp can be removed if someone happens to build near your existing camp so you have to rebuild the whole thing when you log back in you can blueprint a camp but most of the time that terrain issues I mentioned mean you cannot place it down again PvP is the best example of how compromised this entire game is fearful of the dreaded griefing that so many people fear Bethesda have completely neutered the PvP experience it requires an awkward handshake that no one wants any part of because there's no reward structure associated with PvP there's no reason to do it at all so people just pretend that the whole PvP system isn't even there and they go about their business there are no good gameplay systems at work in fallout 76 not a single one is interesting or innovative and not a single one isn't deeply compromised to the point where the system just has no value it is a complete failure from a design and implementation perspective in November of last year the internet exploded in response to EAS attempt to monetize Star Wars Battlefront - by stuffing it full of loot boxes which were tied to in-game progression it was a violent uprising from consumers who were finally fed up with increasingly insidious and exploitative micro transactions it led to immediate change with numerous publishers removing loot boxes from games or offering the no loot box guarantee as part of their core marketing seeing the reaction to fallout 76 I think a similar reaction is occurring here I think people have finally had enough of triple-a publishers releasing broken unfinished games and then asking us to pay for the improved over time for that 76 it feels like the straw that broke the camel's back and it is for that reason and that reason alone that I am glad it exists fallout 76 is an unfinished unimaginative and unacceptable product that Bethesda should be ashamed of and having seen how bad this is I feel foolish for letting Bethesda off the hook so many times in the past no more I have gone from being giddy with excitement for Elder Scrolls 6 to being actively hostile if they are willing to sell the Fallout franchise this far down the river what's to stop them from doing the same thing with Elder Scrolls [Music] you

Channel: Skill Up

Views: 3,167,628

Keywords: skill up, skill, up, gameplay, games, guide, fallout 76, xbox one, fallout 76 review, fallout 76 gameplay, todd howard, fallout 76 ps4, fallout 76 review ps4, fallout 76 multiplayer, fallout 76 broken, fallout 76 online, fallout 76 review xbox one, fallout review ps4, fallout 76 glitches, the worst fallout, fallout 76 sucks, fallout review, fallout 76 rant, fallout 76 bad, fallout 76 xbox one, fallout 76 story, fallout 76 nuke, fallout 76 update, fallout 76 tips, impressions

Id: 7L1UAglcaa0

Length: 24min 27sec (1467 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 23 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Saying that Bethesda shit the bed with this game is a massive understatement.

These guys aren't Hello Games. They are a multi-billion dollar company with IP's to rival Blizzard.

I know when the next Fallout game or TES game rolls around the hype train will roll and Todd will spin his lies again. All I can hope is for more people to see what Todd and Bethesda are now.

Lying sacks of shit.

[u/diagnosedADHD]

I can't get enough of these videos throwing shit at Fallout 76. I already know what they contain, but it's absolutely hilarious seeing how terrible this game really is.

I wasn't a fan of Fallout 4 because of the dated engine and how similar the mechanics were to Skyrim, I'm glad I held out on this because it looks so much worse, and I don't know how they managed that.

[u/SigmaWhy]

it's insane seeing r/fo76, theyre so in denial that they're upvoting actual fake news posts about the games reviews

[u/Bamith]

I didn't like Fallout 4 for the most part, but if this game wasn't horrifically buggy, missing blatant features that I kind of need like text chat or an FoV option, and just terribly optimized... I could maybe enjoy it as a mindless kind of game that I don't pay any real attention to and waste time on.

It would also have to be around $25 or so considering what it is as well.

If it was that I could just maybe get over the game itself, even if I would still be disappointed in Bethesda as a whole.

[u/TicTacTac0]

Well that was far and away the most negative review he's ever done. It's not even close either. Still, great as always.

[u/Mijka-]

Meanwhile /r/fo76/ reaching high levels of hypocrisy (and maybe some forced PR "stats") trying to cope with all the money they lost.

I'm far for having seen everything on reddit but boy the whole sub is the definition of a circlejerk.

[u/scoff-law]

RIP, frog

[u/kraenk12]

Oh...I was looking forward to this! Thx

[u/MoskiNX]

To each their own - I’m having a blast with it 🤷🏼‍♂️