The Best of Fallout

 

As surreal as it is to say out loud- by the time this blog comes out the Amazon Fallout series would have debuted and we'll know well and truly whether or not Johnathon Nolan has pulled of what, frankly, sounds impossible. (Making a good Fallout TV series that both respects the source material and introduces a wider audience.) I've been impressively sceptical throughout all the marketing stages, but that was because I already knew I was going to be watching the show- so the chief point of the marketing, to draw my watch, was irrelevant. All that was left was the hunt for any indication that this show had been mistreated or placed in unfit hands and so far... I'm not sure. But I don't want to air such feelings, I want to talk about the best of what Fallout was so we can celebrate more coming to our post-apocalyptic wasteland after all this time waiting!

The original Fallout was brought into existence as a spiritual successor to the original Wasteland- and in that vein I found their command of portraying the harshness of the Wastes to be Fallout's biggest strength. The tribes, gangs and roving packs of mutants creates this kind of survivalist-western vibe, alongside the overbearing reminder of the scarceness of common essentials. That the entire story is about securing the water for your tribe is a grounding factor cutting through all the silliness and black humour that would come to characterise the Fallout franchise later. I think it's the spirit of this original game that keeps the franchise from devolving into the out-and-out tryhard comedy that Borderlands has become. Not that the original Fallout doesn't have it's share of absurdities, mind you- but it was really Fallout 2 that defined those original twists.

Fallout 3 cannot, in my opinion, be under-represented for the influence it had on action adventure RPGs. Before Fallout the very idea of a RPG, with inventory management and levelling and all that good stuff- was the pure purview of fantasy. People were still stuck in the mires of what Dungeons and Dragons stood for when it was introduced all those decades prior, despite the fact that many more modern set RPGs had been fully realised in the years since. (Cyberpunk, Shadowrun- there were options!) What Fallout 3 did so well was bring those concepts, creating your own character, living a life of consequence and customised outcomes, and brought it to a generalised audience through a widely accessible genre type. For all that I think Fallout 3 did wrong in it's direction- I will never call it over-rated. The game had it's part in play in the journey of the craft.

New Vegas was pretty much the game that defined what every RPG could be for the next ten years. Oodles of potential to be whoever you were amidst a wild and untamed post-war society balanced between various factions of different shades of thug. New Vegas was all about creating a world without ultimate forces and providing tools to the player to veer practically whatever direction they wanted to create the world they wanted to. New Vegas is a bit much when you first play it, but all it takes is a little bit of experimentation to learn the true range of what is possible with a little bit of creative thinking. And that's just narratively. The world is also the franchise's best in terms of individual character writing, ambitious side quest lines that introduce you to unforgettable side characters, brilliant DLC support with the single best written lore story in Fallout history hidden away within and... it's the best Fallout game ever made, nuff said.

Fallout 4 was the game that really nailed a comprehensive look to the Fallout universe. Whereas New Vegas will remain my favourite, and because it was built on the bones of Fallout 3- I consider that look to be what Fallout is when I imagine it- Fallout 4's redesigns hit every single nail directly on the head for creating the most tangible vision of what Fallout could be. I understand fully why this was the world that Johnathon Nolan sought to bring to life when he started on the show. The functionality of the Vaults, the genuine 'mech suit' iteration of power armour, the bestial remodelling of mutated Yao Gui and Deathclaw- that is the Fallout we always saw in our minds eye- and seeing it brought to life is a special kind of brilliant. 

76 was the Fallout game that introduced some of the most contentious parts of the lore that... I suppose broke up the stigma of this franchise being a coherent narrative. I mean there was a time when the Fallout wasteland was this ever-stretching blossoming cornucopia of new stories and ideas that could spring up game after game, but Bethesda have been so enamoured with the Brotherhood of Steel for so very long it's become clear they'll shoehorn those tincans into literally anything that they can. 76 has been the dissolution of the brand, and from that has come a lot of new ideas- which is something worth celebrating I guess. We've got a whole new branch of the Brotherhood that spawned half a continent away from the Maxon branch by way of radio. We have every company and their mother developing their own suits of Power Armour. Note, I didn't say 'sprays for power armour' such as you find in Nuka World- I'm talking brand new fully unique sets of Power Armour. Every private company in Appalachia has one of their own now! And... I guess we just don't have to care anymore.

Along the way I suppose it's worth celebrating some of the other games that have struggled along in relative obscurity lending their little this and that to the franchise as they're fazed out of canonicity. At the very least Fallout Shelter is worth a shout-out for being the most successful Fallout game of all time. Yes, that is the sad truth of the mobile market. The game is sick though, I understand the appeal. Pretty sure they heavily toned down the drop rate of legendary settlers though. Of course, the best of the best Fallout has to offer will always be their mods- for which New Vegas is the reigning king. The Someguy Series of bounty-hunting mods, Tale of Two Wastelands, Enclave Rising, Autumn Leaves, Fallout California... and I suppose Fallout: The Frontier is worth a mention. The community for Fallout is so brilliant and huge they go out of their way to make the Fallout they love! Isn't that great?

Now with Fallout being passed into the relative mainstream through Amazon we've lost a bit of that control over the franchise as fans. I wonder what will become of the little gaming franchise that could, of the dozens of self-developed stories and adventures that turned our wasteland heroes into unique little nuggets of legend. Will Amazon now own a portion of this franchise? Will they wrangle the rights to start developing their own Fallout content? Will there be a breakdown of Western Civilisation driven by a collective desire to see Jeff Bezos release the rights to make a Fallout New Vegas 2 to Obsidian- a conflict that rises to such a crazed fever pitch that the powers that be have no recourse but to fire thermo-nuclear missiles upon their own constituents, plunging the world into nuclear fire? Probably not. But you never know.

Wait, Fallout 76 is redeemed?

 No one told me

Elder Scrolls online and character migration

 'The players are never right', apparently...

The Elder Scrolls Online made it's latest proclamation during the Bethesda/Microsoft hybrid conference amalgamation, and I would be lying if I didn't say it was probably one of the least interesting sections of that presentations next to Forza, depending on what you like out of your game genres. The Elder Scrolls online is so much of a known quantity these days that it's hard to really get excited as an outsider for it's new year-long expedition into one of the various remaining nooks and crannies' still left over on the Tamriel map. That being said, the Zenimax team did reveal a new class coming to the roster, which is something that ESO doesn't do very often, so that alone is going to draw some curious eyes. But as for my eyes, even if I wanted to look back at the game I left behind, the end result would be me just shrugging my shoulders in frustration because increadibly, in the year of our lord 2023, Bethesda as a company have stubbornly refused to adopt any form of save migration.

Gaming is a rapidly evolving medium these days that regularly jumps from newer hardware to new platforms with the regularity of the tides rising, nothing is capable of staying static in the world of evolving technology. But our save data for all of these online games, where info is kept server-side, can often get themselves tied to the consoles we leave behind, preventing a problem with preservation and longevity; both key pillars of MMOs. Maybe a console gamer is now a PC gamer and the reverse. How do you bridge that gap without losing players due to the slow march of time and personal circumstantial evolution? Well, the greatest minds of our age already pow-wowed to fix this. The solution is save migration, a system which has lingered in the public consciousness since the time of Mass Effect. It isn't automatic, and hardly flawless, but for online games that encourage you to 'main' a small group of characters for years on end, you'd have thought that basic save migration features would be a necessity, wouldn't you?

But you'd be wrong, wouldn't you! Because Bethesda seem utterly allergic to the very idea of porting progress from one platform to another, in a manner that I can't help but find utterly archaic in our modern age of interconnectivity. Now days we are constantly bedecked in smart functionality devices from phones to watches to fridges and light sockets, all of which talk to each with a complex web of networks and systems designed to work as intuitively and 'invisibly' as possible. Why is it that the modern world is so keen on bringing the typically mundane and static together, whilst the games industry with it's heart forged in the fires of this technically progressive world, seems so bitterly adverse? At first I bought the excuse, that Sony's unwillingness to open up it's ecosystem spelled stunted evolution for us all; but as Sony has slowly begun to reverse it's enclosed ecosystem and yet the boundaries remained, sights have to be retrained at the individual companies themselves.

Bethesda, though typically a single player company, have themselves a couple of ongoing multiplayer titles based on their properties and neither of them are open to cross platform play or migration. Fallout 76 in particular shut down any momentum towards players having the ability to migrate platforms, even as the older generation of the game struggles to provide a decent play experience that the new gen of consoles can offer. Oh sure, you can jump from Xbox One to Series X just fine, because Bethesda have to do next to nothing to facilitate that, but Xbox to Steam? No way, buddy; that's alien tech! What astounds me so much about this is, just like with Elder Scrolls Online, Fallout 76 is a universally updated game! Each version of the game maintains itself to the same update standard more or less, so it's pretty much the same game regardless of platform. Why is migration still such a taboo, then? 

For the Elder Scrolls Online this problems seem close to an actual sin of design. The game is supposed to be MMO, the very concept of migration should be in it's very blood! I know that part of the charm of The Elder Scrolls Online is the subtle removal of visible servers which allows anyone to play with anyone else, thus removing the concept of server hopping as it exists in more traditional MMOs, but honestly that kind of reinforces my point in a different way. Can they really market the global connectivity of the game, allowing people across the world to connect with one another to some limited degree and allow enemy factions to fight alongside one another; when they don't provide even the most basic account migration option from console to PC? I understand vice versa, but not even a one way conversion? That smells like hypocrisy to me!

Each time the patterns plays out in the exact same way. These studios remain utterly staunch in their stance against external player QOL procedures until such a situation where it becomes a necessity to their bottom line. If there was a new Xbox releasing with a distinctly incompatible server makeup to the Xbox of today, you can bet that Zenimax and Bethesda would scramble over on another to build some sort of bridging technology to ensure the generational jump would occur as seamlessly as possible. But today, in peace times, Bethesda are happy to laze about and grow fat laughing about the struggle thier fans have to go through if they want to migrate their progress and characters from one platform to another. Inexplicably giddy at how their years-long games need to be completely restarted if someone simply grabs themselves a change of hardware and doesn't want to fish out the Xbox just to play their favourite time waster game. It's maddening!

Bethesda are by no means alone in their rank laziness, a lot of prominent developers won't bother lift their hand unless it's already in the fire. But after seeing how easy it was for all those companies that found out Stadia was shutting down, during which they got together and built framework for a lot of save porting tech over the space of a couple of months, it becomes a really hard pill to swallow when contemporary studios declare it's too much work to figure out a clean save migration system to be used at players' leisure, not under the duress of an entire crumbling ecosystem. So instead of lauding the new Elder Scrolls update and brushing past the shortcomings, I'm dedicating this blog to my grumbling about inequities and unnecessary systemic omissions that bug me. Thank you so much, Bethesda, for not wanting my money bad enough to convince me not to buy your game on a new platform. I guess that is, unintentionally, somewhat conscientious of you.

Fallout 76 in 2023

 Where did that bring you? Back to me.

'Where you start doesn't matter; it's where you go from there.' Slightly bastardised and distorted words by video game director Todd Howard when trying to defend the dogs dinner that Bethesda made out of Fallout 76's launch month, and though I've spent years lambasting him the truth of the matter is that most games do try and make their money on the back half in the online space. Diablo Immortal gave itself away as a bear-trap of monetisation so that it could forgo profitable sales figures in order to grab the more consistent and perhaps even more lucrative model of locking a tiny selection of exploitable players in an addictive cycle of money sucking. Quite literally exploiting people with addictive tendencies and more money than sense; because the Diablo Immortal developers are the kinds of people who would have no moral compunction loan sharking if it offered a better pay-out then what they do today. Actually bad people, over there.

But for Fallout 76, excessive monetisation isn't exactly their end-game. More over it's another one of those pesky side effects of trying to maintain this game that doesn't lend itself naturally to recurrent pay schemes. Growing into it's 'place' was more of a matter of taking their spaghetti-string code of a game and turning into a 'Single player Fallout game with online features stuck on' like the original idea was supposed to be. Albeit, a single player Fallout that is helplessly stretched out past the point of tedium thanks to the heavily squeezed levelling process, pay limitations on fast travel and muddled narrative that lives and breaths thanks to the power of the retcon. Good lord does this game smother itself in retcon energy! You'd be forgiven for thinking this is a totally fan-written story with how daring it tries to slide itself into recognisable Fallout affairs to justify it's own exsistence!

Still. After all of the years, surely the Fallout 76 experience should be closer to that almighty 'completed' state that Todd Howard teased us about all those years ago? Or at the very least I should be able to see the difference between what the game was at launch and where it is now! Especially since I actually played the game on the cusp of it's second year! After the majority of the connection issues were solved and the broken elements were patched, I actually picked up Fallout 76 for cheap in one of the most shameful 'in-person' purchases I've ever committed to. I had to plead with the shop attendee not to judge me as they cut some serious side-eye my way. It was an experiment. A blind desperate experiment that Fallout retained some of the merit that otherwise would be lost in such a bold departure from the source material.

The early second year of Fallout 76 was much like the first year, because the team had to spend an extra amount of time patching the game and so couldn't start on their grand journey just yet. And for what it was, I actually think the base game did a fine job selling it's world narratively. You were literally the only few wanderers scouring a post-apocalyptic world since abandoned again, picking through the dead voices and following directions of ghosts to uncover the terrible infectious threat that managed to wipe the state clean of survivors just weeks before your ejection from the Vault. Though the isolation was the game's most regularly lambasted feature, in many ways it helped sell the seriousness of the narrative they were trying to tell where this scorched plague was the true bogey man of the post-world that only the handful of Vault survivors could hope to fight against.

And then the people came back. Like the second coming of man, the 'Wastelanders' update saw the return of NPCS to the world of Fallout 76 and with it a seismic change in the state of the world. Now the desolate waste of Appalachia was inhabited with people and factions and life. Not enough to constitute a post-apocalyptic society, like I always argued to be the strength of New Vegas' setting; but enough to subvert one of the core atmospheric themes of the base game. That started something of a trend which was continued by a new bunch of characters in Broken Steel, and will likely be expanded on in the future of the game isn't shut down abruptly because the Fallout 76 community has been officially identified as a 'small community' by Zenimax. (Pretty sure 'Elder Scrolls Legends' was a 'small community' too, and we all know what happened with that game...)

Playing Fallout 76 today, from scratch, (because Bethesda never bothered to bring any substantive save adapting options to the game despite the fact that each version of the game is updated synchronously, aside from the test build, so there's no reason why there shouldn't be options.) is a totally different kettle of fish. Now there are NPCs dotted all across the route to solving the Scorched pandemic, and the narrative of a land burnt clean of settlers rings a little hollower. I mean sure, some of the key locations the game sends you to are still barren as hell itself, particularly the flooded town house which I hate exploring with a vehement passion, but knowing there are dozens of living and happy citizens stuffed up in every errant corner makes it hard to take the overarching threat of the deadly scorch beasts quite as seriously as it was simply a year prior. I just have to pretend that Foundation hasn't been built yet.

Of course, that's just how the story of the game has changed; the general vibe is quite different too. A lot of the PVP heavy players of the game have fled for greener pastures after months of being totally ignored by Bethesda. Their personal PVP server was taken offline and the Battle Royale mode was scrapped for lack of interest despite being surprisingly functional. (And a stupid amount of fun. I miss it.) 4 or 5 currencies litter everything you do, the significance of which would be very much lost on me if I were as green of a player as my level seems to imply that I am. I can imagine a newbie being utterly confused by the 'Legendary exchange' machine fitted to every train station in the game. And then there's the battlepass 'seasons'. I just can't stand battlepasses, they're literal handcuffs begging people to play your game excessively and tying otherwise new content to their 'loyalty' tracks. But it's there, the only regularly updated part of the game these days aside from the Atomic Shop.

A year ago I had a real vision for what this game could have been, and for the ways it could have grown. Borrowing Zenimax's ESO formula would have worked wonders; expanding horizontally as well as vertically and feeding the various sectors of the community in order to keep everyone happy. The Fallout 76 of today is somehow conceptually narrower than the game used to be, with a community more resigned to the monotony of an online service than enamoured by the allure of exploration. Perhaps this is just the natural fate of any online game growing up and discovering where it's meant to be in life, or maybe this is a shrivelling up of an otherwise potentially decent experience. All I can say for certain is thus; I have the feeling that 2023 is going to be a make-or-break moment for the beleaguered title, and I'm curious to see how that plays out for it.

In fond memory of Fallout 76's Battle Royale.

Rest in Nuclear ash

Back when Fallout 76 first descended on a mostly aghast public, people weren't exactly receptive to the game that was in front of them. In fact a good chunk of them hated it. They hated the overly bloated world which stretched out points of interest so far from one another that a good several hours needed to be invested in the process of getting from one end to another. They hated the barren state of the world, having had all the NPCs exorcized from the map thus depriving the game of a chance to feel truly alive independent of the player's involvement. They hated the main narrative, being told entirely through second-hand audio logs, robbing any urgency from a plot that was otherwise one of the most 'save the world' style narratives that Fallout has had since 1. But most of all they hated the endless, seizing, jutting, bugs; the legacy of a project thrown together in an engine that could not handle it, led by a management team who were unfamiliar to this style of game.

It was a rocky start, and even the community that did grit their teeth and bear with the hold-ups were often left with their hands in their pockets wondering what there even was to do in the game. I mean sure, you could run the nuke silo's everyday and kill the Scorchbeast Queen, and people absolutely did, but what else was there? Running the ski lodge for tokens that you can gamble on getting a 'Fancy' skinned weapon? Those odds were way too low and the output way too underwhelming. Grinding various daily and repeatable quests? Barely took more than an hour back then to clean the map if you knew what you were doing or had a semi-competent second player backing you. Schematic hunting. That's about the high and low of it. We could hunt for schematics which gave us more weapons to craft or, much more importantly, new furniture to shove into the tiny build budget allotted to our personal towns. We were starved for stuff to do.

And that's when Bethesda decided to jump on the bandwagon of the day, a little bit late, and introduce their Battle Royale mode: Nuclear Winter. Coming from a Fortnite fatigued world and flanked by a plethora of other studios all trying to push their own ill-advised BR modes; (Dying Light even had it's own BR!) and thrown that atop of that hill of ill will that Bethesda's diseased game had already dredged up. It doesn't take a mystic to conceive why it was that people were less than optimistic for how this new mode was going to turn out. 'They're cluelessly chasing trends again!' 'If they couldn't manage a simple online game, how will they pull off a highly competitive mode?' 'This is going to be dead within a week!' I myself wrote off this Battle Royale upon announcement too, and I was actually enjoying Fallout 76 for what little it was worth at the time. I just didn't believe the promise. And then it came out.

I think the initial shock that shut everyone up right away was that the mode worked. It didn't suffer the endless desynch problems that the base game died at launch for, damage delay was minimal if it occurred at all, the spread of Fallout 76 weapon and their scaling felt right, the risk/reward of unique mechanics like 'Power Armour' felt almost tailor made for this balancing and the briefcase nuke mechanic was- well, actually I never came around on that mechanic and I still think it was dumb. But for the most part this mode worked much better than I thought it would. And whatsmore; it was fun too! In the way that gladiatorial BR bouts are always fun, I suppose; but when the vast consensus was that this mode would barely function, this slapped the dissent right out of our mouths. It was something to do, with a full spread of BR levelling systems which reward crossover cosmetics and caps for regular play and exclusive gameplay cards which could be earned and slotted to make builds and literally no mode-exclusive microtransactions! Okay, actually there was a Woodsman skin which was added to the base-game store and became something of a must-buy for anyone who wanted to take this seriously because of its natural camouflage; but apart from that this was a fresh and free mode which proved more than worth the time commitment.

Making use of just a fraction of that garishly oversized map which Fallout 76 was mocked for, Nuclear Winter boasted a huge play space with a variety of environmental variance which could account for differing play situations. Perhaps you'd be duelling around the lodge of death in the centre of the forest, or swapping sniper duels up the mountain incline; or maybe you'd have a skirmish on the huge intersecting overpass bridge which I feel like I ended up looting in about 9 out of every 10 matches. This map has ended up as one of my favourite places to do a Battle Royale just for the merit that it didn't feel like a BR map; it felt natural, dynamic and dipped with character, because it all pretty much was! Every other BR felt somewhat tipped to fit into that arena archetype to serves that style of game, and that works for them, certainly; but the homebrew aesthetic fit Fallout, and particularly the ramshackle community of 76, like a tattered, rustic glove.

I loved the mode, totally and absolutely. When Fallout 76 was really starting to bore me, and I could no longer justify the 20 minute walk to the nearest train station in order to pawn my scrap for a pittance in order to free my my storage limit for the hundredth time, I'd throw up my hands and decide to spend mt time having a blast rocking a mode which shouldn't have fit Fallout nearly as well as it should. There was nothing inherently flawed with the Battle Royale mode like there was with the base game, which meant the only failing was on Bethesda's side: their support. They didn't have enough of a focus on this mode in order to support it. Only one Battle Royale map works just fine when that map is a BR sandbox with elements you can shift around periodically in order to keep the player base on their toes and the gameplay loop churning, but when it's recycled from an established world and modifications are impossible; the team needed to make up their slack elsewhere. And they just didn't.

The pool of prizes was forever static, and the in-game store and soon-to-be-announced seasonal Battle Pass stole the idea of rotating reward pools, which is really something that would have kept Nuclear Winter fresh and worth coming back too. A second map was eventually introduced, but it was added into a rotation rather than just chosen to be the map for this season, meaning that people just preferred playing in the map that they already knew all the angles to and when offered a choice would just vote to stick to the classic. And despite all the new weapons and items that were being introduced to the base 76 experience, very few, if any, made it into the Battle Royale mode. In hindsight this all made it clear that Nuclear Winter wasn't something that Bethesda was seriously committed too, but I would have figured that the quality of the product would have won over a few spare resources from the development team. It didn't.

To this day I don't understand why Bethesda shuttered the Nuclear Winter mode in September 2021. It was receiving less attention, sure; but that was a challenge to change things up and relight that spark, not throw in the towel and go back and return to dust. Right now we have a Fallout game with an online mode featuring functional PVP, but no genuine benefit to engaging in that difficult-to-justify facet of design because the main game just doesn't make it worth the trouble. Without Nuclear Winter, that is a dead angle of the core game that is now utterly redundant. Fallout 76 now has a vestigial limp carrying it down. Maybe there might be a small arena mode thrown into the game at some point, or a special PVP/PVE dungeon with cool loot down the line, but unless Nuclear Winter is due some triumphant redesign and return in the future then these will always feel like placebo for an illness that already has an on-record cure.

The role of Streaming in gaming.

It reaches forever

As gaming starts to really develop into more of a mainstream presence, I find myself regarding and assessing the components that make up that community, which leads me to asking a question now and then: just how important is this to gaming. Know that I don't mean this in a derogatory way, but in as clinical a manner as possible; how has streaming and Internet culture influenced the growth of the gaming community? I've never been too far into the whole world of Twitch and streaming, so for me I've always been in the position of an outside observer, but I recognise it's significance. Just as much as YouTube has done wonders for spreading gaming culture further than ever before, Twitch has bought competitive gaming into the limelight in a way that traditional TV could never achieve and that makes it significant in the discussion of gaming in my book.

I think there is a certain 'interactivity' with Twitch that steps just one foot above even YouTube at times when it comes to the building of a community, and that makes it the perfect ground for the spreading of a shared culture. For Twitch, a platform ostensibly primarily focused on gaming, that means the shared love of gaming can enjoy extended proliferation over the globe. The act of being able to sit down, put on a game you love, and broadcast that experience for all the world to see is the sort of heart-to-heart that can really draw eyes. Whatsmore, in the wake of the pandemic and other events that I really don't feel like discussing, Twich has become something of a last bastion for the bored and lonely who lack the creativity and/or drive to sit down and make a YouTube and have the common sense to stay away from Facebook. The amount of folk from all walks of life that have jumped into the land of game streaming over the past few months or so really showcases the breadth and power of such a streaming service for the industry.

But speaking of YouTube, the term 'Streaming' isn't exclusive to a live feed that is broadcast to you, no, it also works for VOD. (Yes, I know YouTubers livestream as well, but the community isn't as tight knit so I'm overlooking that.) In terms of hobbies that they cater to, YouTube actually has a much wider net to cast over the world in comparison to the primarily gaming-focused Twitch, but that doesn't mean they've had a lesser effect on the gaming community. Indeed it seems that since the dawn of time, when man first crawled out of that primordial muck, there were 'Let's plays' ready and waiting for them to spend their hours watching, as well as 'jumpscare compilations.' (God, who remember's those abominations?)

Personally, as someone who has paid much more attention to the goings on over at YouTube, it's a lot easier for me to talk about the way that platform has helped shape the future of marketing. (Which isn't to denigrate Twitch's hand in that, I'm just less familiar with the specifics.) One of the most profound examples of this lies in the whole 'influencer' trend that has spawned out of the YouTube format. Seemingly 'ordinary' people with a wide variety of specific hobbies and preferences, all of which draw very specific crowds, makes for an ideal petri-dish for those that look to target their marketing efforts to their target audiences. (That is more cost effective afterall.) Out of this a practise has grown of teams reaching out to YouTubers who's audience fits the demographic of their games in order to slide directly in front of the right eyes. This is arguably what led to the smash success of 2016's DOOM and Mortal Kombat X; thus proving that the streaming platforms can be symbiotic in relationship to the industry given the right circumstances.

However that is not always the case. Streaming, in terms of Twitch and YouTube, is still a form of Social Media, and social media is notoriously difficult to predict and effect the mood of. As such, social media sites can be the perfect breeding grounds for a successful marketing campaign or the staging ground for a burn campaign that can sink you to the ground. Point-in-case; look at Fallout 76. A game which failed to land with practically anyone significant in the online Fallout community in it's initial reveal. (Which may be in part due Bethesda's wanton misleading advertising that people picked up on quickly.) Now of course, the game was a mess at launch and rightly deserved a lot of it's criticism, things were so poor, in fact, that the team spent a great many months desperately scrambling to fix things together.

In the year and a half since, Fallout 76 has been forged into a decent title that perhaps still isn't exactly deserving of it's namesake, but certainly isn't the dumpster fire it started out as. But as a momentum-based construct, the hearts of Social Media aren't ever really interested in changing their minds about a product, once they have an opinion they have it for life. Now you could argue for days about whether or not this is a good or bad thing, whether this is deserved accountability or blind bandwagoning; but the effect is that when a mistake is made on the global stage, the folks of the various streaming platforms will use that leverage to drive your game into the ground. Just look at Fallout, as I've mentioned, and the way that all of that game's good improvements are ignored over any perceived wrongdoings. When Bethesda announced their 'battle pass' systems, the entire Internet latched onto it to call Bethesda greedy and manipulative for throwing yet more monetisation on a game not deserving of it. Only that wasn't the case, as Bethesda then came out and clarified that the Battlepass system would be free for everyone, and how did the community respond? Silence. No apologies, no backtracking, just silence.

This is the same sort of treatment that Battlefront 2 went through during it's lifetime, despite how actually great that title turned out being; or what Anthem will go through when it relaunches after it's hibernation. Changing hearts and minds is one thing but changing the course of Internet chatter is nigh on impossible. Although that doesn't mean that smaller, less popular, communities can't find a home on Streaming sites every now and then. The entire Internet, including myself, practically vomited when The Culling returned with it's laughably asinine business model, and yet that game still has a rotation of Twitch streamers who play it. (Sure, that rotation is of about 4 people, and none are Online as of the time of me writing this, but that still counts for something, right?) Even this small gesture is enough to stir the pot of community and provide some grounds for games to grow from.

And all of that isn't taking into account the games that owe their success to the sharing of streaming and VODs, like Undertale, Doki Doki Literature Club, Surgeon Simulator, I Am Bread, and all games of that ilk. So at it's most basic level, the streaming landscape is a potential wild card ruled by trends and gut emotion and cowboy lawlessness, but at it's best it can be an amplifying beacon that shares itself with the world. Somewhere within that mixture there lies the face of the modern game community, and perhaps a hint of where that industry might head in the future. Of course, this is just a perfunctory glance into such a world and there are plenty more specific branches of this topic that I intend to touch on. But that's for another blog.

I Hate: Fallout 4 Radscorpions

King of the Scorpions

I'm going on a rant. Can I go on a rant? I haven't really tried this out on the blog before but I'm biting the bullet this time. I never thought that one of the series that I would start on this blog would be focused on executing rants but I do have a few things to get off my chest and what better forum is there than here. As such I've devised a little irregular blog topic wherein I ponder on those little nitpicks that do more than irate, but illicit actual rage from the player. (I.e. Me) Maybe that will open up an opportunity to talk about ways these gameplay decisions could have been avoided, or suggest improvements. But even if neither of thus are feasible; at least I'll find it theraputic enough to rave to myself on the Internet. (Is there any more noble a sport?) Although, just to be clear; I'm talking specific aspects of games that drive me wild, even when the rest of the game is solid. (Afterall, there's no point ragging on bad features of bad games.

With all that said; you guys remember Fallout 4? Back when that game was still fresh I remember losing my mind over a great many features and baubles that Bethesda dangled in front of us with those damn trailers, with one of the more esoteric points of excitement being the way that the engine improvements allowed for whole new enemy animations. Now this may sound like a small thing, but being such a huge Fallout fan as I was I knew that this was huge! Previous games suffered from an ageing version of Unreal engine that made enemy attack animations very stiff and limited, whilst this new iteration would allow for the zombie-like Ghouls to literally hurl themselves through the air at you in a much scarier way. In many ways this was a complete overhaul of the monsters themselves, completely changing the way they acted and fought resulting in wholly different experiences.

At the time I remember quaking in my flip flops, fearing what sort of crazy change this would make to some of Fallout's most fearsome foes. Super-mutant behemoths would be terrifying! Mirelurk kings might actually present a threat! But most exiting of all, was imaging the world of difference this would do to the ironically blood-chilling Deathclaws. The change would be game changing. And it was. It changed the Deathclaws from being one of the most intimidating threats in the Fallout universe into a mild inconvenience. Yeah they hit hard, but they moved like a drunk dumpster now, they somehow became more predictable and dodge-able. (I miss when they just charged up to give you the biggest hug!) Of course, there was one iconic Fallout monster for which this change had the opposite effect, and you guessed it; It's the humble Radscorpion.

Now Radscorpions were nothing to shake a fist at in the old Fallout games either. Mutated Emperor Scorpions that had somehow spread across America and reigned terror on the people of the wasteland with their huge pincers and poisonous stingers; they weren't exactly teddy bears. In Fallout 3 they were quite the intimidating sight for the early adventurer, boasting resistance to most kinds of damage and, confusingly, no damage bonus in their stingers. (But it's so tempting... why shouldn't I shoot it?) Even by the late game they retained their scare-power with their powerful 'albino' variants. But they were ultimately a manageable threat every-time, you know that all it was going to take was patience, speed and a big-ass-gun. But that all changed when the Fallout 4 nation attacked.

"It just works" Huh, Todd? It just works? Is 'working' what you call the abomination upon humanity that you all call 'the modern Radscorpion'? In Fallout 4's development I can only imagine that someone in the team suffered from a small bout of concentrated malice injected directly into his psyche, an affliction he or she decided to relieve by significantly altering the formula of the Radscorpions into easily one of the most dangerous threats in the Commonwealth. No, actually I changed my mind; Radscorpions are the threat of the Commonwealth. Forget the Institute and Synths, that's baby stuff, what we should really be worrying about is the potential annihilation of the human race at the hands of immortal, teleporting Arachnids. Radscorpions are what would happen if the Pillarmen were innumerable and even more pitiless. Rumours say they can't die because even Satan doesn't want their ass down their. If Thanos snapped his fingers, the entire Radscorpion population would survive it as they are master to no one, not even infinity stones. (I'll stop.)

"You're blowing things out of proportion again, you unhinged loon; tell it like it is!" Oh, you doubt me? You dare doubt the supremacy of the Radscorpions? Let me enlighten you... In their revised Fallout 4 incarnation, Radscorpions move at three times the speed of the player (Makes sense, they're giant arachnids, afterall) but their transportation has another horrible quirk to it. You see, on the absolute off chance that you manage to break line of sight with them (Which you'd have to be freakin' Usian Bolt to pull off) they've borrowed the burrow ability from the molerats. Essentially this means that they burrow underground and then teleport beneath you before coming back up again. During their time submerged, Radscorpions are invincible, can cross huge tracts of land instantaneously, and reserve the right to hit you with their stinger in the same action as resurfacing. Speaking of getting hit...

Radscorpions not only do an unreasonable amount of damage (to be fair, that was always sort of their MO) but they also wave their stinger around like they're worried it's going away soon. (Which it most certainly is if I get my hands on the scaled bastards!) Their stinger hits with the kind of poison after-kick that puts 'New Vegas' Cazadores to shame, (and I never thought I'd say that) it's quick acting, strong, and in higher difficulties one sting can straight up kill you if not treated. Also, there's no cure so the only way to shrug off the poison is to pump a Stimpak and hope you out-heal it. (That's how medicine works, right? You don't address the problem, you out-heal the patient. I think I read that somewhere...) So we've established that the Radscorpions move incredibly fast (basically just teleport), overuse a supremely overpowered ability on the player and, to make matters worse, can cheese-hit you with that ability whilst teleporting. Can it get worse? Of course.

You see, enemies like this are not uncommon in games. Strong, fast hitting enemies are great 'oh crap' fodder for enemy design and titles tend to make use of that. That's why in every Dark Souls game there is one boss with a flaming sword and an overabundance of adrenaline to ruin your day. (Okay, maybe Dark Souls 2's 'Pursuer' doesn't exactly have a flaming sword but the principle is the same.) It works like this; the enemy hits fast, hits hard, but is a glass cannon. There has to be that weakness tacked on at the end otherwise you'll start feeling like this prison is hopeless. Seems no one told that to the Bethesda team, however, because they gave no such weakness to god-scorpion-san. Radscorpions are almost entirely laser proof this time around, the lasers literally bounce right off their shell. They are resistant to bullets, rad damage and even fire doesn't seem to burn them like you'd hope it would. (Then again, I suppose if concentrated lasers didn't work that's sort of a given, huh.) Your only option is to hit them like a truck, resistances and all, until you've expended an entire armoury worth of bullets into them; at which point they become so damn heavy from all the extra weight that they keel over and die. That is the only option.

To say that I hate these enemies is an understatement. I totally despise their entire existence. They feel like they were made for an entirely different game altogether, (one with dodging) and the only way they can be decently fought in Fallout 4 is by exploiting the heck out of the mechanics. And if you think that's bad; don't even try to imagine how painful they are in Fallout 76. In that game the developers had the presence of mind turn down their poison damage (thank god) but apparently not enough sense to remove their ability to spawn in packs. In fact, due to the way spawning works in Fallout 76, it's possible to come across a goddamn colony of them roaming the woods. If you're wondering "Wait, if all this is your thoughts about handling one Radscorpion, how in the heck do you manage a pack of eight?" You don't. You die. A lot.

So how could the Radscorpions of Fallout 4 and 76 be improved? Just get rid of the teleportation, honestly, it feels cheap. Imagine facing off against the last game in a Battle Royale only for him to teleport underneath you and whack you with a deathblow; you'd feel pretty robbed and that's literally every Radscorpion encounter ever. To be clear, this would in no way make them a fun enemy to fight, but it would at least make it feasible to approach them in your own way. (Something that Bethesda games use to promote.) As it stands, these monsters can only be taken down by overwhelming force, nothing else works. Running away? Nope, they can teleport. Stealthing? Nope, the second they take damage they teleport to it's source. Avoiding althogther? Kinda, but they have a bad habit of spawn surprising you anyway. So kill the teleport, and maybe one of the resistances, (There is no reason why bullets wouldn't crack their shell) or just cull their entire species altogether. Actually, yeah, do that last one. Okay, I've ranted myself back into relative sedation now. Screw Radscorpions, and I'm done.

The Fallout 76 2020 roadmap

Rebuilding Fallout?

Well smother me in tar, stick on the feathers and call me a no-good lying pony-faced dog solider; because I've been playing a lot of Fallout 76 of late. I know, I said that I would probably be done with it by now but hindsight, and stockholm syndrome, makes fools of us all. Inexplicably this title has ended up on my rotation of daily grind titles and I cannot just write that off as a fluke, I have to admit that some of the more subtle changes of Wastelanders had a bit more staying power than I realised. (Mostly the Gold Bullion being tied to events, that was a smartmove on Bethesda's part. Wait, did I just say that something Bethesda did was smart? That doesn't feel right...) I think it's encouraging to see just how much effort and thought went into Wastelanders in order to revitalise Fallout 76, point-in-case; Bethesda wasted absolutely no time in putting out a roadmap for the year of 2020. (Striking while the iron's hot? They're learning!)

Now, of course in recent years the whole 'roadmap to success' model of detailing the future of a live service has come under supreme scrutiny. Years ago when this was used for smaller indie titles like Starbound, these served as a great grounding tool for the development team as well as to provide sufficient reasons for the audience to support these projects. (In return for rewards like extended features) In the modern day, however, they usually just serve as a way to make wild, even vague, promises about what you will receive from a game in order to keep you interested even if there's no way in hell that it'll ever deliver. Just look at Anthem and the way that their Roadmap fell apart because they promised too much without making sure the base game was working. It's basically the equivalent of drafting a business plan exclusively for your audience. (Only ours has to have bright colours and pictures because we're all twelve.) Yet Bethesda have proved that they can execute on their roadmaps, at least mostly (those Raids still offline, Bethesda?) so maybe you can give them a little credit. If nothing else, it shows how they see Wastelanders as a beginning over an endpoint.

This block of content that we're currently in is easily the one that has received the most buzz and that's likely because of how it's the one with the most details. (Although one such detail was blown a little out of proportion) Yes, that's right; Fallout 76 will finally be implementing a Battle Pass system in their 'Seasons'. Now I'm not going to do you the disservice of explaining what a Battle Pass is again, but I will detail the general response because I think it's interesting. In their post detailing how 'Seasons' will provide actual items and skins as a reward, Bethesda commented on how the first season will be free, which set off so many people it's not even funny. Take a look at the Internet and you'll see oodles of people slamming Bethesda for adding another monetary system to Fallout 76, all because they specified that 'the first one' is free, without any evidence that the later ones wouldn't be. I personally demonstrated uncharacteristic restraint (or probably just very characteristic laziness) in waiting for an official response from Bethesda and guess what; the other Seasons will be free too. Yeah, it was just unfortunate poor wording on their part. (Obviously. Have you seen literally the entire rest of this game's life cycle?)

As for the other items in this block, it seems that Bethesda are committed to finally solving the longest awaited player QOL features, which is a great bedrock for this next year of content. Public team finding is a big one for me, Fasnacht festival is a nostalgic look at the first time that Fallout 76 really started to nail bringing the community together (Also, if the spawn rate of this event is anything like it was last year, we're all gonna be Gold Bullion rich by the end of this event) and Meat Week is... I didn't really like Meat week, but we're getting it again so... yay... For me, the big new feature are the legendary perk cards which hope to solve the issue of redundant levelling for many people once they fix their build. As a crit sniper myself, (No, that build is not very effective; thank you for pointing it out) I could really use a few bigger perks to add to my character and become a bigger presence in some of the harder events. I just want to successfully build my glass cannon, and I think legendary perk cards might be the first step to that weird dream coming true.

The 'One Wasteland For All' block is probably the most eyerolling from where I'm sitting, because this is literally the arc that all of these games seem to take. They start out as traditional RPG's with online skeletons thrown on top; meaning level-lists and damage scaling, only to realise that community is better encouraged without that barrier to play and so they remove that. (whilst calling it a feature.) Zenimax pulled the same stunt for ESO with 'One Tamriel' and now Fallout 76 is following suit with practically the exact same labelling. (Just another example of how Bethesda simply refused to learn from Zenimax's mistakes when originally putting 76 together.) All that being said, I won't pretend like this isn't the right move for the game and I do encourage it, although for me the much more interesting footnote is the one about the teaser questline that will be introduced here in order to build hype for the next big step of the game.

That's because in the Winter the Brotherhood of Steel finally return to Appalachia with Fractured Steel, the second big event for the Fallout 76 landscape. (I couldn't be more excited!) It's crazy to start seeing the actual things that make Fallout unique come to the game, and it's heartening to think that a solid journey is being planned out for this title. Even when Wastelanders hit and the bones of a Fallout world were built, it still felt hollow without those timeless factions like the Brotherhood, Enclave or the Followers of the Apocalypse. Bethesda tried to create their own factions with Foundation and, the imaginatively named, Raiders; but let's just say there's a reason why this franchise keeps coming back to it's routes. (Yeah, the new factions are about as well thought out and deep as a puddle.)

As a bit of a lore hound I will admit that I am slightly ruffled by the mere existence of this branch of the Brotherhood (they were founded on the West Coast) but I've had a year to get over that fact now and all I want is more content. Additionally, this block will come with some new allies to get to know and by then I might actually have enough content to make a 'the best companion in' blog, so you could say I'm personally invested. It appears as though Bethesda have framed this to be the next big step forward for the game, and in that case it's actually quite interesting that it's coming as soon as this Winter. They're not waiting until next year to hit the fans with another shock to the system; it's quite the momentum their building and I'm curious whether or not it's something they can keep up.

In conclusion, I approach this roadmap with the same muted optimism that I did with the last roadmap, only this time with the vague hope of something more. The endgoal of the last roadmap was to perform a successful course correct and get this game to a state it should have launched in, and to that end I feel they've performed adequately, however the next roadmap will really show if the game they've made has the potential to ever be something more. A lot of the shortcomings of Wastelanders has been forgivable given the size of the shift in direction, but I don't think the same can't be said if Fractured Steel isn't to the quality they promise. However that turns out, folk like me will be along for the whole ride, so I'll have my fingers crossed that Bethesda know which route to take this time.

Fallout 76: Wastelanders Review

Almost Heaven...

Okay, didn't take too long but I've finally managed to get myself through Wastelanders so you know what that means: I get to play Kingdom Hearts again! (Oh wait, I'm playing 'Chain of Memories' which means I have to remember all that card crap again. Nuts.) But for the immediate that means that I can write up a little 'this-is-whats-up' blog about everything that Wastelanders has to offer, whether I feel it's a success or a failure, and what I think this update means for the future of Fallout 76. But before I get into any of that I'll give you one thing for free; I played Fallout 76 long enough to experience all of that and was excited to do so, therefore they've already done something right. Although I'm not about to pat Bethesda on the back quite yet, there are some places to improve upon. (but I'm getting ahead of myself.)

Let me start by addressing the plotline of Wastelanders, which I was actually rather impressed by. (Although I think the team a little oversold with how much "your actions will have consequences." But then this is a Bethesda RPG, so what do you really expect?) Rather than double down on the strangely high stakes of the base game's narrative, (You are literally told that if you fail there could an 'extinction level event') this game takes a somewhat less personal story that feels more in line with something that Obsidian might come up with. (Although Obsidian probably would have added a few more dimensions.) Essentially, two main factions end up coming back to Appalachia after a mysterious transmission tells them about a secret treasure hiding in the hills. (No, you never learn who sent that transmission and it's never set up as a mystery to ponder on. So I guess is doesn't matter?)

The story itself makes some interesting additions to the Fallout lore; I mean there's nothing groundbreaking here but I feel there's a little bit of potential, and that's something worth commending. The only real thing I have a problem with, and this bugged me hard; it's the way that one of the 'post game' rewards is the right to buy the rights to, and then build, T-65 power armour. Ex'freakin'scuse me, Bethesda? T-65 is it? We've already established that T-45 PA was the one in use for the military before the war, and meanwhile T-51b was the height of active military equipment, with that being the armour which soldiers were sent into Anchorage wearing. In Fallout 4 they stretched that lore even more by introducing the T-60 armour which was literally designed and made months before the bombs fell, and somehow it only became widely distributed 200 years later. (Okay, I guess I'll buy that.) But now T-65 armour exists and my lore brain makes me want to die... but I digress.

Irregardless of the story, I have to put my hands together for the collection of just really fun missions that Bethesda managed to thread together for this game! One of the biggest issues with the base Fallout 76 package was the way in which every single mission amounted to little more than a fetch quest, and whilst there is still a little bit of that in Wastelanders (Which I find odd. You'd think they'd want to distance themselves from that design model altogether) they are inter-cut with actual levels where you go through dungeons and fight encounters, sometimes alongside other characters, who are useless, but actually have personalities. In fact, this whole expansion reminded me of the Automatron DLC from Fallout 4's main quest, only with several high level boss fights. Some of my personal standouts for the missions was Johnny's little prison-break con, Ra-Ra's vent adventure and the final vault raid. (Yeah, I can actually point out several really fun moments in this game, whereas before I most certainly could not.)

With the improved missions come improved characters (although considering you never actually conversed with anyone in the base game, I guess literally anything is an improvement in that department.) The Raiders in Crater clearly have the sweep for the more interesting crew, with each personality being instantly likeable and memorable, (even if Ra-Ra feels a little like BTEC Tiny Tina) but even the ostensibly boring settlers at foundation get some character to them if you stick around. Of course, I ended up siding with the Raiders to see how flexible the morality could be (and because I just liked those guys more) and ended up being pleasantly surprised when the game allowed me to sort of play to both sides at the end. It wasn't in a way that made my choice of faction feel irrelevant, and it allowed me to feel like my character had his own agency, which is something I haven't been able to say since New Vegas. (So good job there, Bethesda, you did it!)

Unfortunately the same praise cannot be extended to the new ally system that Bethesda created, as those guys are literally just fetch-quest factories. There are four available in Wastelanders, although only two have actual names and questlines (So I have no idea why the other two were even implemented.) Sofia and Beckett both have serviceable enough stories to go through but in terms of actual gameplay it whittles down to 'go here and pick up this McGuffin so that I can then point you towards the next McGuffin'. For Beckett I observed 13 fetch quest missions straight before a finale dungeon, and Sofia's mission's were all fetch quests. Even narrative-ly these tales aren't exactly blockbusters, with Beckett's posing possibly the most telegraphed twist ever put to script. Sofia's, on the otherhand, is full of expository dumps that are poorly handled which makes it hard to really get invested in what's happening. (And why weren't we introduced to Emerson properly when he first showed up? There's so many problems with the storytelling...)

To their credit, however, Bethesda did go so far as to write friendship arcs and even romance if you're so inclined. They are criminally poorly written to the extent where I seriously wonder if the writing staff put them together out of protest, but it's the thought that counts(?) Either way, I think this is a system that has potential room to grow down the line when Bethesda remember how to write personal conflict again, and maybe we'll even see addendums to the stories of the two allies we already know, that would be interesting! See, somehow I'm already back to the point where I'm ready and willing to give Bethesda the benefit of the doubt, so that should show you just how much they got right with Wastelanders.

Point-in-case, they actually listened to the community and delivered much needed nerfs to some of the endgame content, to make it actual endgame content and not... postgame exploit-only content. Yes, that means the Scorchbeast Queen is actually killable without having to load up on TSE guns or stacking a bloodied build. (They also nerfed TSE, so that's nice.) They input actual instancing infrastructure so in the rare moments where you bump into someone else they won't have cleared your mission objective for you, and they fixed the area levelling so that you'll almost always be fighting enemies that are a challenge to you. As an additional note, legendary spawns seemed to have fixed so that endgame folk will actually meet three-star legendary enemies outside of scripted spawns. (I literally never ran into a wild three-star before this update.)

Speaking of Endgame, Bethesda remembered to work one of those into the game as well, whilst piggybacking off of events from the update's main quest in order to make things more seamless. Essentially this is just a new currency that you can earn from doing events and dedicate towards buying super rare plans. (including those 'raid exclusives' from last year before Bethesda shut down those raids for being bad and buggy.) Now, this obviously isn't the perfect solution for an endgame (especially since the amount of this currency that you can receive is limited to daily limits) but again, it's a start. Who knows, maybe once Bethesda swallow their pride enough to actually look at what other similar games do (You know, like your own sister company who make ESO!) they'll even start to realise how group dungeons might be a good idea. (But let's not overload them with ideas just yet, let them come to terms with what they've made first.)

So with my time diving into the Wastelanders done I suppose there are two questions that should be asked; will I keep playing and is the game now worth buying. And to answer that first one; no, I don't think I will. Don't get me wrong, I jell with all the things that Bethesda were trying to do but honestly I've already run out of ideas and the daily grind limit is stifling for attempted fun. I think that the overly large map sucks up too much time in transit, and if Bethesda just pulled travel fees from train stations everything might be just a tad more fun and accessible for those times when I don't have a spare two hours to reach and complete a single event. That being said, I would say that the game is finally worth buying, but still at a discounted price. (I've suffered from at least 10 disconnects in the past week, there's still work to do on their part.) So in summary, Wastelanders is a game, which is more than could be said about Fallout 76 for the last year of it's life. 

My first few hours with Fallout 76: Wastelanders

Once more with feeling

I'm running through the Appalachian woods, dodging around tree trunks hopelessly trying to avoid some new gross bloated monster spitting flaming bile at my dust cloud. (Sure, If I turned around I could probably stomp it, I am a veteran wastelander, but I'm playing along for the moment.) Finally I manage to stumble up an embankment and over the horizon I can see it, the populated settlement of Foundation, gleaming in the distance. Just a short sprint and I'll be able to be rid of strange mutant on my tail and get enjoy some hard-won R&R. But along the way the ground gives, I suddenly slip and barrel into a swamp just below my eyeline. Suddenly I'm greeted by a threat I'm much more familiar with; A diseased Mireluck Queen, and her brood, looking very perturbed that I just jumped into their home and right on top of their eggs. (Needless to say I roadrunner-ed out there)

Even with this new 'Wastelanders' overhaul for the Fallout 76 base game, the best moments of this game still lies in it's moment-to-moment surprises, but I'm happy for an excuse to talk about something positive regarding this game so I'll treat that as a plus. (Oh, and no Resident Evil this week. It's due to a heavy blog I have incoming so don't get on me too hard.) For the unaware; last week Bethesda dropped their official renaming of Fallout 76 alongside a change to the very fabric of the game itself: A litany of NPCs, human enemies, and questlines in order to make the great West Virginian wasteland feel just that little bit less empty. (Maybe you could even say that the game is almost at the quality for a 1.0 release now, but I'm not sure I'd go that far.)

This is Bethesda's big rallying call to their community to get back into the game, and they even took the time to visit the Reddit and state an official thank-you to the board for their support. (A little 'Fair weather fan' of you, Bethesda, but I appreciate the gesture.) Now is the time that Bethesda want to extend that olive branch to the public and show them that Fallout 76 is finally a game to be proud of, more than that, it's a game worth spending money on. (Although £100 a year for Fallout 1st will probably never be worth it, no matter how much overhauling they do.) So With so much riding on it, does Wastelanders live upto the promise? Is it the birth of a brand new age for Fallout 76, one where people can admit to being players of this title without fear of public ridicule? Can Bethesda ride this high into a new age of prosperity for the much-beleaguered Bethesda fanbase? Well it's certainly a start, but I still think there's a long way to go. (And I'm honestly not even sure if Bethesda can feasibly take it that far)

Coming back to Fallout 76 after so long was certainly a trip, doubly so since my last time with the game was spent almost exclusively in the Nuclear Winter 'Battle Royale mode' and not in the base game, so I had to get back into the swing of things. I was initially greeted by a hoard of angry (and I can only assume cannibalistic) mothman raiders looking to tear me limb-from-limb, so I can safety say that my interactions with the new folk could only go up from there. Then my biggest worry was getting back to my quaint mountain hideaway whilst praying that the new settlements hadn't unceremoniously ousted me from the home I'd held for about a year. (Luckily they hadn't, which is good. I'd hate having to introduce myself to the new neighbours by gutting them one by one.)

Next I had to meet the woman of the hour, the one person that I've actually been eager to meet ever since the game first launched; The Overseer. You see, this is the lady who set up that initial fetch-quest which drove the entire original plot line. This is the ass who sent me on a deadly journey around the Appalachia battling scorched and finding a way to quell their spread before something happened which could only be described as an extinction level event. All without so much as sticking her head around the corner once to see how I was doing. No, instead she just left a cookie crumb trail of holotapes with instructions whilst she went sightseeing through her childhood home. Online Speculation even went so far as to presume she had died, for if you follow her personal tapes in chronological order then the last one would be made just after her having been shot and wondering if she'll live to make another. But the old girl is tough, apparently, because now she's back and actually ready to meet me in person. (How very gracious of her highness.)

Right away I was struck by the dialogue system. Not because it was unfamiliar to me as a 76 player (again, it's been almost half a year) but because it was even vastly different to Fallout 4's dialogue system. (In a very good way.) Rather than being locked into 4 choices per dialogue, each mapped to a face button, players can actually have in-depth conversations where classic Fallout traits appear such as inquisitive questions and even speech checks. That's right! Finally it feels like the stats I've given my player are worth more than just simply enabling the best perk cards, they are actually important to my character in defining his personality, and somehow that made my character incredibility smart yet antisocial. (Unfortunately that only half reflects me.)

The rest of my time has been split between enjoying the new systems whilst refamiliarising myself with the things I use to love. Like hearing the voice of the maniacal raider-robot Rose over the intercom (Who was my favourite character from the base game) and building up my lovely little base in the woods where no one dares to travel. Although there are still some problems with the game which get in the way of my potential for fun and make me sort of want to put Kingdom Hearts back on. Some key characters get stick in T-poses, bouts of lag strike every once and a while and the lighting seems to have gotten worse to the point where almost every texture looks desaturated during the day. (Maybe they were always like that and I just don't remember.) Worst of all, however, is the AI which is unforgivably bad now that it's being shown on human enemies. Whereas before you could maybe rationalise things as "Well these scorched have had their brains rotted" or "These Mole people probably wouldn't understand human tactics anyway"; seeing human Raiders stand in the open and wait to be gunned down is pretty silly and makes me wonder if there'll ever be a world where Bethesda can make challenging content for this game that isn't just "Turn up the health slider and call it a day."

So far the story seems to place us in the position of the fun ruiner, who's job it is to rock up to these new factions rolling into Appalachia, kick down their doors and tell them to get a damn inoculation. (The filthy savages.) You see, none of them were here for the hell of the Scorched beasts and their reign over the first year of Fallout 76, so they don't know how easily they could be infected and turned into burn zombies, so we've got to break the bad news. (Which is mixed with good news if you completed the original campaign, because you've already made the vaccine through hours of sweat, blood and audio logs. Oh, the audio logs!) However, there are whispers of some greater mcguffin as folk trade rumours about a great unopened vault that is sure to be full of treasures. (Not sure how none of us saw it. Unless it's that vault in the north west which never opened and didn't have a texture on it's number, but I just thought we didn't talk about that door.) So yeah, this isn't exactly the citizen kane of story set-ups and it showcases the 76 team's weakness of falling back to "Let's do another Vault thing! That's a Fallout staple, right?" But hey, we've been playing this damn game for months with only the vague snippets of a storyline, so beggars can't exactly be choosers right now.

Aside from that there is a new dimension added to the CAMP system for now we have the Ally system to deal with. As we were promised, Allies are 76's versions of typical Bethesda Companions, only with much less versatility. Yeah, you won't be hiring a whole party of badasses to defend you from the horrors of the wasteland, but you will be getting buddies to help make your camp feel a little less abandoned every now and then. You can build certain ally items to draw these people to your camp and once they're there you can earn little quests off them to help their narrative along. Even when it's something stupid like helping Commander Daguerre scan for any survivors from her space program despite, you know, there obviously being none. (Can't we just break the news to her lightly?) However, this is this odd little stipulation that you can only have one ally at your camp at a time, meaning you can't make a little town of folk yet. (Maybe in the future.)

With the new folk coming to the world, naturally this means that some new settlements now exist and they are always fun places to explore in these games. Although these locations more mirror the 'survivor' style of Bethesda's Fallout rather than the 'societal' style of Obsidian's Fallout. (Which severely limits the storytelling potential in my eyes) So far I've seen the builder fort of Foundation, which places it's routes in the former workshop in the southern mountains which was one of my favourite locations in the old game, so it makes sense that Bethesda wanted to do something with it. As Foundation, the place seems pretty dry with a smattering of folk who seem very 'salt of the earth' and 'milk bread', but I've been missing that sort of interaction so it feels special to me. (Also, I've surprised to see that the 'Top of the World' mezzanine still hasn't got a makeover with NPCs despite being literally the perfect place for that. Maybe that's due for a later update, I dunno.)

Finally I had another go at 'Nuclear Winter' so I can confirm that's still as tight as it always is. Some changes have occurred since I last played, and I have no idea what any of them actually do, but nothing has happened to ruin the core experience so I'm happy. A new map has been added to the lineup and weaponry now spawns in with a coloured tint to their item name which I think is supposed to mimic other Battle Royales like Fortnite. (So that folk know which item is superior at a glance.) It's a small change but it make make things just that little bit more accessible to the inevitable influx of players that the mode will be seeing in the coming days.

In conclusion, I haven't a complete reversal of my feelings towards Fallout 76, nor the insulting way in which Bethesda treated and responded to the community in the months since, but I am enjoying the game once again and that isn't something I ever thought I'd do. If there's one thing I will say about everything this update has provided, it's that it all shows potential, and that may seem like a back handed compliment "Oh, it'll get there eventually but it's not there yet", but I'm being serious when I say that I don't think the prospects for this game's future have ever looked so rosy. If you haven't picked up Fallout 76 yet, I cannot in good conscience recommend you amend that for any reasonable amount of money, but if it's discounted to heck and you've literally nothing left to do then why not? It's better than bashing your head into a wall. (Put that on the box.)

My love/hate relationship with the almighty hype train

Hype, the final frontier

We've all been there; anxiously nashing their teeth in the wake of the upcoming release of the latest series of your favourite show, a new exciting movie or, to keep things on-brand, that new video game that's caught your eye and captured your imagination. In the right circumstances it can be a wondrous time where myth and legend swirl your mind as though anything can happen and you're expecting it all. Perhaps the mystery is what grabs you or perhaps you know exactly what to expect and just need it to be here now else you won't ever quite feel complete. Although it can also be a time of soared expectations and inevitable disappointments, wherein all that waiting and anticipation is doomed to result in a mediocre reception on release day, and you partially have yourself to blame for that. This, in a nutshell, is the dichotomous hype train. Toot Toot.

As one becomes ingrained in a community or a 'fandom' around a specific field of interest, it seems inevitable that you'll also catch the hype bug. In relation to gaming, if you're a fan of exploring worlds and playing new games then it's inevitable that you'll eventually hear an idea or concept for something upcoming that tickles the old taste buds. Typically, this might result in you thinking about that new title in your mind and trying to envision what secrets it might hold, where the developers might expand upon their previous works and how great it will feel to get your hands on. (Yes, I know I just defined 'Hype' to you. No, I will not apologise, I couldn't help myself.) This is good for developers and publishers, because it means that they've provided a suitable enough amount of marketing and presented it well enough to ingrain an idea into your head, and at it's most basic level that's the ultimate goal of all marketing. Hype is what allows for creatives to keep the excite for their games alive from the time of announcement to the time of launching without showcasing every little secret that game has to offer, it can make communities self perpetuating and fan-bases last decades but, as I hinted at, it can also have a negative impact too.

As Steven Spielberg was well aware of during the creation of 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind', and Chris Chibnall seemed pigheadedly unaware of during the crafting of Doctor Who season 12; the power of imagination is a story telling machine without peer. The whole expression 'less is more' is built around that truth and as such many writers and story tellers know that when it's possible it is much more effective to leave an open mystery than it is to close that gap, because nothing you can write will ever be better than what the reader can envision in their mind's eye. Unfortunately, imagination is the same fuel that 'the Hype Train' runs on, and that can lead to some substantial problems down the line. (Is the 'train' analogy getting old yet? I don't think it's old yet.) Hype forms around the mystery of the unknown, and when imagination is allowed to swell untempered, it can create an idealised expectation in someone's mind that will never be matched by the final product, leading to inevitable disappointment. For a gaming example of this just look to 'No Man's Sky' which was a title who's premise ran away with itself when the audience fell in love with it. (I mean, it didn't help that Sony were hoisting the title up as the next coming of Christ.) The Hype proved so infectious that even Hello Games caught it when crafting their trailers full of things that they hadn't yet been implemented, but the team just assumed that they'd get around to them, and their CEO Sean Murray, who went around to every single press event on the planet earth confirming features about the game that were still in the 'talks' stage. (Many of which were dropped.) And we all know what eventually happened with that game... it's kinda good now, but it took several years to get there.

Personally, I have experience with both sides of that Hype Train. (Although I'm so stingy that I rarely end up getting lumped with 'Buyer's remorse'.) Although this is likely not my actual first, the first time I remember being hopelessly caught up in hype-mania was all the way back in 2011 during the lead-up to Skyrim. Or to be accurate, in 2010 not too long after that year's E3. For reasons that would be too long to get into (Although I'd personally attribute it to the talented writing skills of Andy Farrant.) Skyrim was the first fantasy product that I really gelled with in a serious way. I read the preview about this game probably hundreds of times over and the second that I saw Bethesda's E3 presentation for that year I was wholly sold on the product. From that point onward I was literally marking down every single day until that game's release and absolutely could not function every day without it. (Which, considering that the game came out in November, likely means I knocked at least a decade off my life expectancy with all that anticipating.) On the day of the game's launch, which I had actually preordered for (Yes, that was my first Pre-order.) I ended up getting a detention in English which almost tore my soul from my body. I had waited this long, only to be held up over some missing homework? (Safe to say, I never looked that particular teacher in the eye ever again.) But when I finally got my hands on the game, at least I was satisfied. (Hell, I still play Skyrim, so the hype worked out for me I guess.)

However things don't always go that... Well? (Could that story be considered as 'going well'?) and sometimes all we are left is are products which we got our hopes up for only to have them be callously crushed by the hand of reality. For that there are so many examples off the top of my head; Watch_Dogs, Assassin's Creed: Unity, Ghost Recon Wildlands, The Di- what do you mean I'm focusing entirely on Ubisoft games? Oh right... And Fallout 76. Whilst I cannot say that I personally was sold on all of these games hook-line-and-sinker, I definitely know of certain groups of people who were and consequently were gutted when those games failed to deliver. I will say that I did have my hopes up for Wildlands, so that one honestly did get to me. (I even dared to hope for Fallout 76, fool that I am.) So with this possibility in mind the question that I'm left is simple; is the concept of 'hype' worth the fuss?

One of the things that I love about 'hype' is it's ability to unite people over the love of a shared medium and/or product. I don't go out much today, but back when I had to I found myself occasionally drawn into unexpected conversations with people that I would never typically rub shoulders with. I remember going back and forth about the possibilities of Hyrule Warriors and that exciting teaser for the game that would eventually come to be known as 'Breath of the Wild', and it was Hype which facilitated that sort of discourse. Additionally, Hype allows us to get excited about the realm of gaming even when there's nothing coming out, in fact, for the last 20-odd years gamers have only made it through Summer because of hype, with those months typically being devoid of all except that year's E3. And I think that as long as one remembers to stay realistic than there's no harm in making guesses about what a future game could hold, it's actually quite fun.

But by that same merit it is all too easy for hype to descend into something less healthy once it becomes an obsession. Games which are announced too early or which fall into a development nightmare are often infamous for relying purely on hype to keep things alive, which can be a huge detriment in the long run. Fans find themselves building up their idealised version of the game to the point where they become irrational and inconsolable. Just look at Disney's tenure with the Star Wars franchise. They piggybacked off of the original trilogy of films which, by that point, was nearly 40 years old. Logically, there was no way they could continue that story in any way that could be satisfactory so the quality of the next two titles were practically inevitable. (One could argue how that's no excuse for how bad they ultimately were, but that's neither here nor there.) Some games are still stuck on that hype train and have a army of fans following them that have practically been driven to the limits of their sanity because of it, just look at the Star Citizen community. Those people truly believe that Cloud Imperium is on the verge of delivering the next gaming revolution despite all evidence to the contrary, and at this point it feels like those folk are too far gone to consider otherwise. They invested so much themselves, whether that be emotionally or financially, that they can't fathom looking at the dumpster fire that they've jumped into else they'll realise that they wasted all of that investment.

So is the 'Hype Train' good for the gaming world? Yes and No. I'd argue that a little bit of hype is great for any upcoming project, and half of the fun of creating a cool name game is figuring out how to inspire the imagination of your audience with it, so no harm no foul. However, just like with all things in life, over exposure leads to dependence and that is a relationship that is ultimately beneficial to no one. As you can see, I find it hard to come down on one side of this issue and that just might be the point; how could you possibly do anything about the concept of people getting excited, even if it is ultimately wrong? Well, you could do a 'Lena Luthor' and strip everyone of emotions that you consider to be 'unhealthy' through Project Non Nocere, (Jesus Christ, I just made a 'Supergirl' reference. Please kill me.) or you could just except that hype happens and just search for a way to come to terms with that. Either way, I won't stop hyping up Resident Evil 3 next month and the Internet won't stop hyping up Cyberpunk this October, so we all better just suck it up.

People don't want to PVP, Bethesda? I wonder why...

It's a mystery to everyone...

All my most anticipated games of the year are being graced with new Gameplay demos and playthroughs for me to shift through, and here I am talking about this one game that left me down to the highest degree. It's like I can't let go of my Ex because I'm forever trapped wondering what could have been rather than looking to the future. But there's no point beating around the bush; Fallout 76 is a game that I might actually be playing again in the next few months so I might as well start paying attention. (Oh god, I think I got a little vomit in my mouth just by typing that. How is that even possible?) I had hoped that my next blog on this game wouldn't be until the launch of Wastelanders, or rather two months after that launch so that Bethesda can iron out the inevitable game breaking, inventory deleting bugs. But the team hath summoned me once more by saying something so inherently stupid that I had to weigh in.

So recently Bethesda have been ramping up their Fallout 76 content in anticipation for what is essentially the 1.0 launch of the game; Wastelanders. (Get it? Because the original game was so broken that it couldn't possible be a final release? I'll be here all week.) With Wastelanders comes a renewed Appalachia as NPCs make their way back into the game. (And I can confirm that was 100% not their plan from the beginning as the 'isolation' of the game is actually one of the selling points on the back of the game box.) Now go to anyone who is an active Fallout 76 player or who has dedicated significant time to it in the past, (sigh, yes I am one of those people.) and ask them their thoughts on Wastelanders and you'll likely get some mixed to positive feedback. People are excited for this, Fallout 76 should never have launched without NPCs to start with, they are what made Fallout special as a franchise.

But ramping up marketing means getting back into communicating with the public, (Something that the Bethesda bigwigs have been smartly avoiding ever since the Fallout 1st debacle.) and unfortunately it seems that the team still haven't really mastered that yet. Afterall, I can only assume that's the reason why Pete Hines, the most public face of Bethesda, relayed how the team settled on creating Wastelanders after being "surprised" by the playerbase's reticence to partake in the PVP aspect of the game. Now to be fair to them, Bethesda did put in considerable thought and consideration towards PVP when creating this game. In fact, judging from the state of everything else it was the only aspect of Fallout 76 to receive any attention before release. So if we adopt the mindset of an undeveloped fetus that is entirely incapable of deductive reasoning or even higher thought, we might also be at a loss to figuring out why folk didn't take to the PVP streets of West Virgina. But let's analyse this situation with a little thing I like to call; a minuscule degree of brain power.

At it's heart Fallout 76 is a game that is built around the collection and hoarding of items in order to stave off your ever approaching death at the hands of everything from the weather, to other people, or your own biological functions. This means that players have to juggle keeping themselves fed, slept, hydrated, armed, and protected at all time. A lot of maintaining that comes from having a steady store of scrap on hand to build defences and keep guns running, junk which is at risk whenever you die as your player will drop it. Now that is what is called a risk/reward system and it is the basic building block to every video game under the sun. You need resources to progress with the game, or in this case to survive, but you have to put yourself in danger to get those resources. This is the first roadblock to people wanting to take part in PVP as it is arguably the most risky move that you can take, but I feel this is completely fine for any game as without a consequence to death there is no incentive to defy it.

Now all of that is how Fallout 76 is supposed to function, how it was built to, but in practice things don't always play out like that. Remember how I said that players need scrap in order to survive? What I didn't mention was the fact that scrap is everywhere and can be gathered with minimal effort on your part. That fact alone really invalidates the risk of death and makes it so that the only real thing that makes players want to avoid the big KO is the inconvenience of having to trek all the way back. (Or the server choosing to crash and kicking you, thus deleting all of you dropped junk.) But then, what's the problem with PVP? If there's no real incentive for losing than why aren't people giving it a go? Well the answer is actually hidden in what I told you, for you see: There's no incentive to winning at PVP either, so why even bother with it in the first place?

Most games with PVP functionality have some sort of progression system tied to them in order incentivise it or/and make it fun. If we look at games that are closer to Fallout 76 like 'The Elder Scrolls Online'; there is an entire section of the map entirely dedicated to PVP called Cyrodiil in which skilled players can wage warfare for the chance of winning campaign rewards. There's also a duel mechanic that offers titles and a newer 'battlegrounds' PVP reward that awards something I'm sure. (I never played it, didn't really have the friends to.) Fallout 76 lacks that wholeheartedly as the only possible reward for winning a fight against another player is the reward of their scrap. (Or a Caps reward. But Caps aren't all that important anyway.)

But then there's another factor to consider, and that is the shameless lack of balancing on the behalf of Bethesda that makes PVP just unbearable. Fallout 76's base game was built upon the bones of Fallout 4, which makes sense at first until you consider the fact that Fallout 4 is an entirely single player game, so how would that baseline title be morphed into a well balanced multiplayer environment? Answer: It won't be. Over a year into Fallout 4's life cycle right now and all the 'Metas' of PVP revolve around one thing; breaking your stats by exploiting ill-thought out systems and buffs. Most famous of which are the 'TSE' weapons which, due to literally no thought going into it whatsoever, allow a weapon to be buffed from two different stat increases, and the 'Bloodied build', which is so ridiculous I can't even be bothered to go into it right now. These builds allow for player's in PVP to essentially oneshot anyone they come across who isn't also exploiting systems, making PVP absolutely no fun at all for 90% of the fan base. The worst part is, these are the people who Bethesda have been tailoring the game towards, building content that will challenge their broken playstyles rather than the standard ones that everyone else runs. How is anyone without stupid stats supposed to take on the 'Scorchbeast Queen', or the 'Imposter Sheepsquatch'?

But here we are, more than a year past launch and Pete Hines is telling us 'We had no idea that no one would play our PVP, what a shock!'. Let me explain why, Pete: It's because the PVP sucks! Unfortunately, the consequence of this is that the base Fallout 76 experience is now being retroactively converted in a PVE game whilst all the PVP content is becoming side gigs for the team to release, and then promptly forget about the moment they stop being popular. (When was the last time that 'Survival Mode' got a substantial patch?) If they were really dedicated to making this game whole they would dedicate a team to the PVP aspects of Fallout 76 and find a way to reintroduce them back into the game, and heck, maybe that's the plan after Wastelanders; who knows? Now I realise that I've been ragging on this game a lot just now, and in the past, but let me be clear: I'm happy that significant change is just around the corner and I hope that things get better for Fallout. It's a franchise that I truly love and think would be capable of great things with the right ideas being thrown in and the right people working behind it. I just hope Bethesda can prove that they are the right people, because I'm not the only who's been questioning that of late. (Come on guys, prove us wrong!)