Fallout Shelter's Unfortunate Pay-to-Win Paradox

with the smash success of Amazon's Fallout show there's been a massive influx of old and new Gamers hopping into the universe across the multiple Fallout games on Steam Fallout 4 has had the largest leaping concurrent player count going from an average of 20,000 concurrent players to over 160,000 in a matter of days Fallout 76 bless its broken little heart obliterated its all-time concurrent player count by over 30,000 players on April 21 the rest of the Fallout franchise has followed in similar fashion with varying degrees of success but today's video isn't about Fallout 4 New Vegas Brotherhood of Steel or Fallout pinball for that matter it's about their paired down sanitized citybuilding stepchild from 2015 fallout shelter while the game was originally a mobile only game it was eventually ported to PC the Xbox One the PS4 and even the Nintendo switch despite the many ports and versions of the game at its core fallout shelter remains a mobile game with its simplistic gameplay simple visuals city building structure premium currencies and the months or years of grinding that are required to get anywhere in the game the pitch of the game is simple the bombs have been dropped in the world has been glazed like a Christmas ham you as the player or the overseer of a numbered Vault of your choosing and and are tasked with the duty of growing the structure into a behemoth of post-apocalyptic engineering to grow your Vault you have to balance three main resources water food and electricity each resource is produced by its own Vault sector and each Vault sector needs Vault dwellers laboring in its bowels at all times to produce their goods replicating fallouts rpg-based stats system each dweller's strengths are represented by the acronym special standing for strength perception and endurance Charisma intelligence agility and luck as overseer you want to match each skill with its corresponding room for example if a dweller's highest stat is a level five in strength you'll want to assign him or her to the generator room so they can crank to their heart's content and power up the Vault faster most other production rooms have their own preferred stats as well for the diner for example maybe you'll want to assign dwellers with high agility so they can dodge the insults and dining parh hurled at them for every overcooked Burger the barracks themselves don't technically have a preferred stat because they're just living quarters but Pro tip High Charisma gets your dwellers laid faster and thus produces more worker ants into your underground Colony so far so good simple decent hook and wrapped in the magical follow package things do get a little more complicated though as the overseer you have to balance all of these resources and the Dwellers producing them if you build too many rooms before you have enough enough generators to supply them you're going to start losing power but if you build too many generators before you have the Dwellers to properly operate them you'll find your Workforce stretched too thin and may run dangerously low on power food or water complicating things even more your Vault could suffer from a number of random calamities fires infestations or even Raiders blasting holes through your not so impenetrable vault door to be best prepared for survival in these situations your little inbred Vault babies need to be dripped out armor and carrying a weapon that you've either crafted or scavenged from the Wasteland and speaking of the Wasteland there's more to fallout shelter than just the Vault itself from the beginning of the game you can send any dweller you please out of the Cozy cold concrete confines of their cell and into the harsh and unforgiving Wast of the over realm starting out this is super basic you drag and drop a dweller outside the Vault and select his Loadout weapons stems and rataway packs before patting his head and pushing him on his way he travels in real time and updates his Pip Boy log with information to let you know how he's doing once he's drained his resources and health you can call him back and he will deliver you caps and any other items he's found in his journey But Here Comes the first notable speed bump when you send a dweller outside the Vault he needs to be walking for at least a dozen real life hours for the juice to even be worth the squeeze frankly once you reach any level of competence in the game it's closer to a few days then there's the return trip which takes just as long so let's say you sent out a dweller for 3 days into the Overland and he manages to collect a variety of armor weapons and scraps but he's injured and out of stems it's time to come back but as soon as you hit the return button you realize you have to wait another 3 days for him to reach the Vault before you even get any of his goodies now there are pets that you can collect and they have Perks once assigned to dwellers one being a dramatically increased return trip speed but they are very rare and difficult to come across outside of spending money on animal crates or starter packs these timers are not limited to basic Wasteland exploration though once you unlock the overseers control station you'll be able to assemble a team of up to three dwellers and send them on missions into the nuclear desert once again you will be up against a timer ranging wildly from 30 minutes to over a full day for travel time missions are all nearly identical with a very simplistic grid based building in which you just tap one room at a time and let your crew idly fight enemies the only interaction that you have during these battles is the occasional optional critical hit mini game and having to stim pack your crew keep moving talk to the proper people collect the required items and kill the necessary enemies to complete the mission then make the obscenely long trip back to your vault at this point the Keen Observer might realize I failed to mention one key thing about about these weight times they can be skipped for the right price in this case that price is nuca Cola Quantum Fallout shelter's inevitable premium currency this precious resource can be acquired in a few ways including from Wasteland exploration Mission Rewards or lunch boxes which are the game's loot box equivalents nearly any weight time in the game can be entirely bypassed by using nuca Quantum Wasteland travel times Vault dweller training times and weapon or armor crafting times can all be bypassed entirely by fining out the required Cola one small Saving Grace for the game is the fact that new rooms are built and upgraded instantaneously without any wait time whatsoever but this feels like a small victory when you begin to embark on the tediously long Wasteland Quest requiring over 10 hours each way for your dwellers when I first began playing Fallout Shelter I quickly realized that many closer missions only required that I use one nuca Cola to reach my destination and one to return while they paid out three Cola in total this meant that I was able to use Cola both ways and still return with one in Surplus these missions were not all that common though and as I progressed this simply became more or less impossible to do consistently by Design progress began to slow Wasteland trips took longer Vault dweller numbers began to stagnate and new rooms were being built less and less Meanwhile my cap coffers were slow to stockpile at this point many a player may be tempted to check out the in-game shop after all there are many mouthwatering offerings on display here the aforementioned nuca Cola Quantum can be obtained for as low as 99 Cents for six or $99 for a th000 and for the record spending 99 Cents for only six nuca Cola almost seems as insane as spending the $99 for a thousand of them the shop also has lunch boox loot crates pet carriers and robots to help you out all sold in various package sizes and prices Now look farbeit for me me to defend exorbitant inapp purchase prices but as far as the cost to Value goes Fallout shelter's not the worst which to be clear is not me trying to suggest that the game isn't attempting to bend you over a railing and smash the cash out of your pockets with its lengthy list of MTX purchases but at least you have the comfort of knowing that it could be worse to the average player of fallout shelter this is where my ramblings end it's a fine game as far as mobile fair is concerned if you enjoy Fallout and are looking for a slow bur mobile game to sink a few minutes a day into I genuinely would recommend fallout shelter it's cute and easy to learn mostly mindless and can pass the time effectively when you have a few minutes to burn however there's another side of this coin that I think is worthy of discussing and that is this [Music] as it turns out follow shelter is really easy to modify and not just on your computer but on your phone as well it is quite literally as easy as plugging your phone into your computer dragging your game's save file into a browser based values editor adjusting your desired values and dragging the newly created save file back into your phone's directory the process is the same for the steam version of the game except you don't need to plug in your phone at all just drag and drop from your local files and you're good to go using the save file editor you can mod in as many nuca colola Quantum bottle caps lunch boxes pet crates or robot assistants as you want further you can click boxes to level up every Vault dweller to their max level unlock every room from the start and make every weapon recipe available whether you've collected the blueprints for them or not it's difficult to say why there's no protection whatsoever to prevent the in-game shop from being bypassed and the game to be so utterly broken with so little effort but I didn't ask why that was the case when I booted up my freshly modified save file in Vault 101 and drooled over the stack of 50 lunch boxes and 1,000 nuca Cola Quantum that greeted me after I let in the five Mr handy robots waiting at my door and assigned them each a floor of my Vault I set about completing as many Wasteland missions as I could possibly muster there are a lot of missions in in this game and it would take weeks or months easily with consistent daily play to make a decent Headway through them yet within less than a week there were only a few storylines left using nuca colola Quantum to skip every we time I could knock out entire sets of missions in a fraction of the time it would normally take to travel just one way to a single Quest it was euphoric using training rooms I could max out my dweller stats in seconds to make their work as effective as possible my progress was limited only by my tap wallet and my dweller's growth rate so I began implementing breeder couples whose job it was to remain fulltime in the barracks and put the beds to good use I found a cat in one of the illegitimately obtained pet carriers that gave the dweller to whom it was assigned a 70% chance of birthing twins an absolute win in my books and sure enough out popped two little fellas ready to grow up into nice strong power plant workers eventually caps also began to stockpile quickly 15,000 30 60 80,000 and more those Mission payouts were substantial unfortunately my storage space ran out very quickly at the rate I was collecting new items weapons and armor and I became very familiar with the sell common items button that is so thoughtfully included in the return menu because of my surplus of caps I easily built more storage and continued to grind out mission after mission it was a blast fallout shelter is a very simple game but the gameplay Loop was engaging my little irradiated rap brain more more than ever now that I felt like I had cheated the system in some way and it wasn't just Placebo either the break neck speed at which I was progressing was intensely satisfying I was drunk on Power and Quantum Cola but unfortunately like all highs a low was soon to come and The Hangover from this gluttonous gameplay consumption was a rough one when I was a young lad my father had a Nintendo 64 my dad is no gamer in any real sense of the word but apparently back in the day he dabbled somehow he managed to get all the good games except Zelda which I had to later find on my own he owned Super Mario 64 Rayman 2 The Great Escape and banjo kazui along with the sequel banjo Tui among other games in my early teen years I discovered the Wonder of M emulation my first emulator was 604s which is a Mac based emulator that I paid $10 for and still have the receipt in my email inbox from nearly 15 years ago on 64 I beat Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda aing of time for the first time in my life I played a number of other games but being young most of them were hot garbage and not worth even mentioning in the second phase of my emulator experimentation I discovered project 6 C 4 for Windows machines and the plethora of options that came along with it especially the cheats I discovered the cheats while playing banjo kazui if you aren't aware larger titles like banjo and Mario have cheats that are built into the emulator and are as easy to enable as checking a box the exploits for banjo included enabling an infinite hack for any resource in the game instantly 100% completing a save file and most pertinent for today the ability to hit a single key and begin levitating I began experimenting immediately I loaded up on eggs gold feathers and health then headed out to the nearest world to have some fun the rush of feeling the game's restrictions peeled away was fantastic and I found myself on a rampage destroying everything and everyone I could after a while though I needed more I went back to the cheap menu and enabled press L to levitate hopping back into the level I never hit my L bumper with more enthusiasm and sure enough banjo and his bird took to the skies I began to go up watching the solid ground that I'd been confined to only seconds before rapidly growing smaller below me Collectibles and enemies began to disappear as the render distance became unable to process the heights as I floated outside the bounds created by the developers the map became a small paper thin shell and the illusion of a world began to disappear here here's the thing I'd gone too far and the magic was ruined I was no longer having fun banjo kazui is a collectathon game and I had cheated in every collectible there was no point in collecting more there was no point in using the moves I had learned to navigate the platforming because I could float anywhere I wanted and maybe worst of all the world itself felt like a shallow playground held up by only popsicle sticks and Goodwill Not only was all immersion broken but any reason to play was gone even if I wanted to complete the game this way there would be no satisfaction in it to do so would be like completing Dark Souls with god mode or Super Meat Boy with no clip enabled there's just no point to any of it I'm sure you see where I'm going with this coming back around a fallout shelter the game has its own built-in limitations caps as currency waiting times as buffers and Vault dweller scarcity to make Vault growth an active Pursuit with a small fee you can bypass one of the biggest factors inhibiting your growth time and make no mistake this is what really matters to progress I have opened nearly 100 lunch boxes in My Vault and it hasn't contributed a fraction of the progress that my initial infusion of 1,000 nuca Cola Quantum has in Fallout Shelter time is the single biggest factor that sustains a player's interest it's textbook delayed gratification yet I didn't want to wait nobody wants to wait I wanted to feel that dopamine hit hit me upside the head again and again in the case of fallout shelter though the ability to bypass time itself very quickly reveals the game's paper thin walls as money and material stockpile and you build the same three resource plants again and again you realize there's no end game at all the first hour of the game is more or less the same as the last hour you play perhaps a year later this is true of shelter more than it is many other mobile games in Clash of Clans your base actually becomes stronger and you contend with new enemies and thousands upon thousands of unique based designs and battles you can collaborate with friends and partake in Wars fallout shelter only has three levels for each room and you only upgrade the existing room so you have the resources to add more rooms which serve no purpose other than allowing you to build more of the same rooms and saying it out loud seems very obvious but without the ability to skip wait times quests that provide powerful weapons could take days and full mission sets might be a week or more instead of just minutes the slow pace distances each goal from the next and causes you to look at the game in a more microscopic and granular way the gameplay Loop doesn't feel so meaningless now none of this is to say that mobile game weight times are a good thing these timers exist to make you feel exactly the way I did and to drive you into the shop to spend money on useless items that could ironically ruin the game mobile games are built upon very care carefully balanced dopamine loops and once you ruin that dopamine Loop you will likely find the game itself just isn't that good ultimately that's where I sit with the game fallout shelter just isn't that good unlike my experience with banjo kazui the veil that I lifted can't be put back down I do still play it on occasion mostly just trying to wrap up the Wasteland quests but for me the game works in exactly the capacity it should burning a few seconds while I wait for my Fallout new Vega save file to load ladies and gentlemen if you are watching this or or listening to this that means one up two things one you skipped to the end of the video which is kind of weird or two you watch the whole thing in which case dude thanks that was that's pretty poggers of you this is normally where I'd read a raid Shadow Legend sponsorship or World of Tanks but I don't have one of those so instead I'll just say hey maybe go listen to our podcast deep Pride gaming it's on Spotify and apple podcasts all the big podcast platforms it's hosted by myself and my friend RJ we just talk games and game news reviews Rose retrospectives the like otherwise thanks for watching and hopefully we'll see you again soon

Channel: Deep Fried Gaming

Views: 79,342

Keywords: #Fallout, #Fallout Shelter, #Bethesda, #Fallout4, #fallout New Vegas, #Pip Boy, #Vault-Tec, #Vault Dweller, #post-apocalypse, #nuclear war, #fallout 3, #bethesdasoftworks

Id: My-kPdgTkRU

Length: 19min 29sec (1169 seconds)

Published: Sun May 12 2024