Yes, Fallout 76 is an MMO but here’s why it could be the one for you
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Look, I’ll be honest with you: I’m not going to waste any time with ambling words because I’m so goddamn excited about Fallout 76 . Yes, it’s an MMO, and yes, that means there are going to be other people in it — but this one could be the MMO for you even if you’ve never touched one before.
Here are the facts. First off, the map is four times the size of Fallout 4, set in the hills of West Virginia, and you’re playing one of the vault dwellers who’s the first to emerge into the Wasteland on Reclamation Day, just a few decades after the bombs fell. That means it’s a prequel to all the other Fallout games, meaning new monsters, new environments, and a whole lot of naivety about how easy it will be to reclaim the wasteland.
You might have already known all of that, but here’s where all the new details come in. Get ready. It’s a MMO, but there aren’t hundreds of players on the same server as you, running around and generally breaking your immersion (a concern for all us MMO newbies). Instead there are a handful of players in the same server, meaning you can either form your own tight-knit community as you buddy up with them, make a bunch of new enemies, or just play on your own. Because yes, that’s completely something you can do. Halle-f*cking-lujah.
There’s all new rendering, lighting, and landscape technology, plus you can see weather systems as they thrive in the distance — perfect for when you’re scouting out areas for your settlement. Yup, you’ll be building your own pockets of civilisation in the nuclear apocalypse, and you can build them anywhere. Plus they’re completely movable, but you should be careful of getting too attached to them as they can be destroyed by all manner of beasties (and other players, of course). Or nuclear weapons.
Head to the nuclear missile sites across the map, and if you manage to get into the bunkers you’ll find those ever so deadly missiles.
But it won’t be a simple case of killing hordes of ghouls and striding in those doors — instead you’ve got to track down the codes for the bunker which can be scattered all across the map. Sometimes fellow players might have their hands on them, giving you a new chance to either make some new friends or pluck those codes off their dead body. Bombing a site in one of those 6 different regions with those nuclear weapons then means that you can go in and grab the new valuable resources that are irradiated with all that neon green goodness.
Death never means you lose your progression, or your character, so even if you end up on the wrong side of a nuke you always have the opportunity to pay off that big, juicy grudge you’ll be holding and visit the same firepower on your adversary. You can give Fallout 76 a go when the beta launches — no idea when that will be at the moment — but we do know that the Fallout 76 collector’s edition features a giant, wearable power armour helmet with a working voice modulator and headlamp.
Y’know, just in case you want to take your cosplay to the next level. And when is all of this Fallout 76 goodness coming your way? November 14. Get ready, folks — we have a wasteland to save.
Be sure to check out the E3 2018 schedule to see when the other major players will announce their news, and keep an eye on our list of E3 2018 games to see all the titles coming your way.
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While here at GamesRadar, Zoe was a features writer and video presenter for us. She’s since flown the coop and gone on to work at Eurogamer where she’s a video producer, and also runs her own Twitch and YouTube channels. She specialises in huge open-world games, true crime, and lore deep-dives.
Stop Calling Fallout 76 an MMO. It’s Better Than That
Bethesda
All over the internet, people are asking one question.
Contents
- The evolution of open-world games
- Worlds defined by the way we play
“Is Fallout 76 an MMO?”
The release of console-friendly online games like GTA V Online and Destiny has paved a path that Bethesda’s upcoming entry to the Fallout series can follow. It’s online, hosts large groups of players on servers, and supplies a thriving open world for them to explore. It has public events and a dynamic level system. It has both player-on-player and player-against-world combat. These are traditional elements of an MMO.
Yet Fallout 76 isn’t an MMO — and many games that have been defined as such in the past don’t fall into the category, either. Fallout 76’s identity crisis isn’t unique, but the way Bethesda handles it could become a template for games like it.
The evolution of open-world games
Pete Hines from Bethesda has said Fallout 76 is not an MMO, but if you do a quick Google search, you’ll find plenty of outlets and gamers that think otherwise.
This disagreement happens frequently, particularly with games that include an open world and online multiplayer. When these two words are mentioned in the same sentence, people are eager to categorize a game as an MMO. Yet that adds more confusion than clarity.
More on open world games
- Open-world video games are getting too big for their own good
- ‘Red Dead Redemption 2’ review
- Leaked footage suggests an open-world Harry Potter RPG is on the way
Destiny is a perfect example. While there are areas of Destiny and Destiny 2 that have online multiplayer interactions, such as the Tower or Raids, these aren’t exactly locations where players can enjoy a living, breathing, interactive world that you’d find in a game like World of Warcraft.
Missions in Destiny are designed in a way that makes it impossible to encounter more than a small number of other players. In fact, most areas don’t require more than a specific number of players to tackle them.
That isn’t the mark of a true open-world game that supports massive multiplayer, where the entire experience is built around encouraging large mobs of players to take on obstacles such as raids, bosses, and large, thriving, locales together. Destiny does have elements of an MMO, along with features found in first-person shooters and RPGs, but these elements combine in a new way.
The same is true of Fallout 76.
Worlds defined by the way we play
So what the heck is Fallout 76, anyway?
Well, it depends on the player. Developers have realized when you give people freedom in games, they find unique ways to play. In Fallout 76, players can hop in solo or with a small group of friends and decide if they’re looking for something casual, challenging, or somewhere in between.
“What a game is, is what the players ultimately make of it. Our job is to give them all the interesting tools.”
In our preview, we found that even though co-op is encouraged, you’re never forced to interact with other players, so individuals looking for a classic Bethesda single-player experience have something to gain from Fallout 76, too.
Though not available at launch, Todd Howard has said that private servers are a long-term goal, making it even easier for players to tailor their Fallout 76 experience.
While Fallout 76 isn’t an MMO, it’s structure promises something greater. It combines online connectivity with more personalized gameplay, ensuring you’re not just another moving part on a map going through the same motions as everyone else, but a player with the power to impact the world around you — or not. The beauty is that it’s up to you.
With the promise of dedicated servers (something that MMO players always seem to look for), it seems Bethesda understands how to make an online multiplayer game appeal to the largest subset of players possible. In an interview with USGamer, Todd Howard explained Bethesda’s approach to Fallout 76. “I want them to see the world as their oyster,” he says. “What a game is, is what the players ultimately make of it. Our job is to give them all the interesting tools.
We want to design a really interesting world for them to collide with.”
That collision is the point of games like Fallout 76 and Destiny 2. The scale is smaller, and the world less persistent, but narrowing the scope makes each player feel they have more of an effect on the virtual world around them. Fallout 76 seems designed to take advantage of this particular formula which, if successful, could become a roadmap for many games to follow.
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Bethesda Releases Fallout 76 — Game Release Overview
On November 14, Fallout 76 was released by Bethesda.
Not being a fan of the “old school Fallout”, as well as not being a supporter of the “remake” from Bethesda (I prefer the TES series), I have played hundreds of hours of various online survival games, so the task of studying and writing a review of Fallout 76 fell to me — to cut off fanaticism and look at the game neutrally. This approach seemed to the editors to be optimal, given what is happening around Fallout 76.
Familiar start
First of all, we are thrown onto a random server with 24 other players. At the moment there is no possibility to choose PvP and PvE server. The character editor is better than most similar games, but for those who have played Fallout 4, this is nothing new. I will say this: it is possible to create an attractive hero (early games from Bethesda had problems with this). At the same time, the lack of mod support will not allow you to get what you could squeeze out of Skyrim and Fallout 4. By the way, you won’t be able to run around naked with a stone in your hands — this is for you in Conan Exiles.
But you can change your appearance anywhere and anytime, even changing sex “on the go” is not a problem.
After creation, we appear in a bomb shelter where we lived after a nuclear war for 25 years. According to the plot, the caretaker opened the exit and left the shelter (which she had to do anyway, since electricity, food and water will stop flowing over time (as programmed). After examining the bunker and finding a magazine with the first task, we go in search of her, surviving along the way in the vast post-apocalyptic West Virginia
Body format does not affect performance in any way
Gameplay and convenience
Controls and interface are awkward. The first step is to change the assignment of the keys. A third-person view is added only to inspect the hero. Fighting in it is very uncomfortable, and the animations are terrible.
In combat, everything is slow, you have to wait 2 seconds from a shot to a sprint, so it is impossible to dodge monsters.
It is necessary to use bugs with obstacles (mobs get stuck in them) and hills, as well as narrow shelters where monsters cannot get through. A simple example: I killed a level 28 boss while being level 8, successfully standing on a hill where he can see me, but cannot shoot. Enemies are sometimes numerous and after the first shot they run from all around. It is convenient to shoot only with semi-automatic or automatic weapons. Sniper rifles are practically useless, because they do not allow you to quickly kill the enemy, and he, along with his aggressive friends, will still get you.
There is a changed V.A.T.S. system, by activating it with the Q key and having spent endurance points, you can automatically fire with a certain chance of hitting certain parts of the opponents body. It’s a pity, but you hardly use it, because after activation you stand still and remain without stamina.
Again, practically nothing new for those who played Fallout 4 and Skyrim, but for an online game, such shortcomings look much more critical.
Super Mutant Brute Stupid
The good old Pip-boy is used to call inventory, view quests, character characteristics and skills. This is a personal mini-computer on the character’s hand, designed to make life easier for the character. A person who is accustomed to the classic large interface has to understand a bunch of small tabs and any inventory call turns into a long search for food, water and the right window.
Apparently, this is implemented exclusively for fans, but not for newcomers to the Fallout world. The same applies to the terminals, which are scattered everywhere and are designed to issue quests. Their screens are uncomfortable and annoying. The only good news is that you can change the view to a more familiar one, but the number of tabs and their size will not change.
Survival
The first step is to pay attention to the needs that need to be monitored. These are radiation, food and water. Radiation directly depends on the other two, because the more you drink and eat (everything is radioactive after a nuclear war), the stronger the radiation acts.
And it, in turn, directly affects the indicator of health points. In the future, by increasing the level, needs and requirements can be minimized by choosing the appropriate skills.
The mayor of this city is computer
After leaving the shelter, you can go on missions or act according to the classic scheme — build (construction also migrated here from Fallout 4), swing, fight in a clan or alone. But even if you decide to do quests, the chances of meeting other players along the way are high, especially in the «mean» places for farming.
Upon reaching the fifth level, open PvP is activated and everyone you meet will try to kill you. Players are being killed at every turn in a variety of ways, and the sound of gunshots heard from several kilometers away is always alarming. Of course, it won’t work to shoot anyone right away, because an interesting system works: damage is dealt weakly if there is no return fire. Only by making a return shot the duel mode is activated.
But after death in PvP, you can press the revenge key, after which you will immediately deal full damage to the offender.
The Altruist Bully gave me the initial weapons and equipment, although I just ran past
Sometimes you forget about this system and shoot back out of inertia. You should not paint what happens if the enemy is higher level. Luckily, the death penalty from other players and mobs is just the base building resources that are left where the corpse was.
The developers talked about penalties for finishing off, for example, if the user hit mobs and was left with low hp, and he was finished off. In this case, the killer is highlighted on the map with a red star with a designated reward for the head in the form of caps. Other players can attack him with full damage. In 20+ hours I have never seen anything like this on the map and can’t tell you how much fun it is.
In general, fighting in PvP is quite inconvenient due to the unresponsive combat system, so it seems boring.
Power armor looks powerful
Group content
For convenience, all players are highlighted on the map with dots and they can be immediately invited to groups. Having united in a «party» of up to four people, it becomes noticeably easier to survive. In addition, it allows you to wage wars and participate in random group events. Exploring the world (and sharing loot) is also more fun together.
Importantly, only in a group you can launch nuclear missiles, mines with which are scattered all over the map. After obtaining the encrypted fragments and deciphering them, and then finding the key card, users can launch a missile with a nuclear warhead, leaving radiation at the site of impact. This increases the strength of the mobs and the quality of the loot mined from them in the region. The Scorchbeast Queen appears at the crash site, an endgame boss full of loot. All buildings at the site of the explosion are destroyed. Players in the missile’s area of effect receive a warning and can get out of the impact within the allotted time.
Unfortunately, all good things come to an end. And if it is interesting to wage wars and explore the world in Conan or ARK, then the meager content of Fallout 76 (PvP in the company of 4 people, lack of dungeons, etc.) quickly gets bored.
It’s easy to find a group
Upgrading
With each new level, it becomes possible to upgrade the characteristics called SPECIAL in the game. There are seven of them: Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Dexterity and Luck. As the attributes are pumped, the number of perk cards that can be applied to it also increases. Perks are issued in sets after each level and, in turn, affect all aspects of the game: from the chance of loot to damage to enemies. They can also be pumped by combining the same ones. Of the interesting features, it is worth noting the ability to share perks with other players. I have never seen this anywhere.
The number of stars indicates the level of the perk
Craft
One of the biggest pluses in the game.
It is extensive and includes ammo, potions, food, weapons, and armor. Everything is created and sprayed on special workbenches, stoves and cauldrons that are scattered around the world. It is not entirely clear how, 25 years after a nuclear war, in an abandoned base or at an airport, you can approach any set of tools and immediately start creating. The boilers are always burning, there is gas everywhere, even the plumbing is not damaged and there is electricity everywhere. If in the same Conan Exiles or Rust at least some importance is attached to realism (we create workbenches ourselves), then Fallout is more arcade in this regard. As for the ingredients, they are both rare and easily accessible. And for rare ones you need to go to distant lands.
Exploring the world
The map in the game is large, you can’t move fast, you can only travel on foot. Endurance in the initial stages runs out very quickly, but thanks to bugs with lags, sometimes you can run endlessly. Various biomes are present, from forests and deserts to swamps and toxic valleys.
Each is dominated by unique mutants of different levels, from which experience and equipment are stuffed. There is no scaling like in other Bethesda games, and therefore I had to spend several minutes looking for mobs of equal or higher level, since low-level creatures give little experience. Some of them are located only in enclosed spaces, the entrance to which is carried out with a load.
I am pleased with the high level of interactivity, which is why periodically there is an interest in exploring the world. You can play musical instruments, sit in an armchair or on a sofa next to a corpse, drinking your favorite bourbon. And by doing this, we can get additional positive effects.
After the fifth kilometer, I began to doubt whether her heart could withstand…
Who is it for?
After hundreds of hours of Rust, Conan Exiles, ARK: Survival Evolved, and Dark and Light, Fallout 76 looks bleak. Combat system, inconvenient menus, lack of endgame content as such, boring PvP with 24 players on a huge map.
One gets the impression that this is an experiment that was forgotten to be labeled as early access.
Maybe mod support coming in a few months will change things. Mods are a big selling point that has made Bethesda games perfect for years. But there are questions. Can the game survive these few months? Will the mod community be attracted?
At the moment, Fallout 76 attracts only with its setting, beautiful world and excellent soundtrack. Otherwise, this is a mediocre Survival, designed for no one knows who. The game has a future, but with reservations. To unlock the potential of Bethesda, there is a lot of work to be done to create content and attract the mod community.
Lineage II / Three years of life / MMOzgoved
Sometimes a strange feeling arises deep inside me — I feel nostalgia for Lineage 2, being inside this very Lineage 2. Surely, psychologists have an explanation for this phenomenon, but I will not even try to interpret it from my amateurish point of view.
I can only say that it reminds me of a situation when you dreamed of something good, you wake up and find that what you dreamed is not in the past, not in the future, and not in an unattainable fantasy, but right here.
Lineage 2 smells like summer. Perhaps because fifteen years ago it was in the summer that I first met her. Or because next summer, also a very long time ago, we were lying in the warm grass on the slope of the Crimean mountains with my new friends from the “line”, and, breathing deeply the smell of wildflowers, made plans for the virtual future. All this was very reminiscent of the famous illustration from this MMO, so it mixed both spaces even more. We were there and here at the same time. Lineage 2, for all its ossified imperfections, remains almost the only and largely unattainable space for others, made for a long life and true friendship.
No, I understand everything. How much can you, right? It’s time to dig in. After all, this is still the same Lineage 2, which many have left behind long ago.
I also have a lot of complaints about this game, which no one can fix for anything. The only thing that can be done with this MMO is to embalm it at a certain stage of development and prevent it from decomposing with late chronicles.
Then what are we discussing here? Yes, we are talking about life. Three years of play that have been lived here without interruption. After all, you can write a lot of beautiful words about summer grass and strong friendship, but they will in no way affect the desire of each individual person in the team to come every day for the past three years to the world where it seemed they had been playing for years before.
I sincerely want to understand why I can’t find even a fraction of the potential in other MMOs that even time-dried Lineage 2 has.
When I started talking about Lineage 2 again three years ago, mostly a good life and not from the variety of available options, I said something to the guys in the spirit: “I understand — we have played this game many times already, we know some locations as our own, we know most of the mechanics” .
.. and so on. Three years later, I can say that this turned out to be only partly true. For the most part, these three years have been a completely new experience. And a new confirmation of the sad fact — Lineage 2 is still almost a unique MMO, while working on a very simple principle: to give friends a real opportunity to spend time together.
In many MMOs, I see a very correct scheme for helping two strangers become friends. I continue to believe that this is the primary goal of an MMO — to bring people together, and I support this design in every possible way. But have you thought about what happens next? Then, when people have already become friends. When they feel good together, and they naturally want to maintain their social circle not in a chat, but at the level of the game. Are there many MMOs around us, even without additional filters for monetization, style, and other criteria, in which this space for friendship and joint activities is really large? In Lineage 2, this is the entire game world.
And, most amazingly, when I was introduced to the MMO fifteen years ago, it seemed to me a completely natural state of any online world. It couldn’t be otherwise.
When I came to MMO, it was clear from the very beginning that the company I wanted to build here would definitely not meet the global goals of game worlds. I understood that playing at high stakes requires a different scale, a different organization, even a different relationship. And I was clearly aware of what I wanted to do in my own way: I don’t want a hierarchy, I don’t want officers, formal relationships and other inevitable baggage of a large structure. I want to see only friends around me, a small team with horizontal connections, and not an “organization”. And the fact that my approach leads to obvious “losses of content” did not bother me at all. It was a conscious choice, a practical exchange.
It suited me well that people who put in much more organizational effort, inevitably going through even internal conflicts on an industrial scale, and should receive proportionally more than me for their efforts.
I understood that we would take some place in the overall mosaic, and it would be far from the top. I am writing all this so that you understand the depth of the problem, which is visible from the surface of the withered grape of Lineage 2, in which there is much more space than for our team. We literally do not see the space in which our team, small by the standards of large MMOs, could fit in today and could live there. Not three years, as here, but in general. Basically.
It’s not about opposition. Not in the strained «look at what a cool MMO I play, not like you.» I wish we all had a choice. But that is why it seems to me extremely strange a situation in which a small, by the standards of the past, company of fifteen people cannot find space for life in the MMO genre outside of a miraculously surviving fragment of the past. The fact that this space is in Lineage 2 just easily demonstrates the main reason why we are still here.
And the scheme does not look complicated.
Two people can easily play Lineage 2. And ten. And fifteen. And a hundred. It doesn’t matter which online you have. You can always find targets to play along with. Here, any friend of yours who comes online is a welcome participant in a joint game, and not «sorry, we’re out of space.» Yes, with a certain team size, inevitable fragmentation will begin, optimizers can optimize, “consts” will be stated. Everyone has his own path. But there is space for these paths.
In these three years, Lineage 2 has become the second MMO after EVE Online in terms of the duration of continuous stay of our team in one virtual world.
Comparing with EVE Online, I can also say that there were much fewer crises here, forcing us to look for new game formats after «souring» in the routine. Yes, probably, because Lineage 2 is simpler and much more obvious here. But, thanks to this, the tasks and the general vector of movement are clearer to everyone.
Long crafting projects that last for months, resulting in one single thing for someone on the team.
And many plans are in the pipeline. Only in the third year of the game we were able to become the owners of the castle. And without the help of allies, we would not have done this. Now we support the manor system in full operation on our territory, proving, first of all, to ourselves that all this can work in the format of a “non-zero sum game”, giving new opportunities to strangers and mutual benefit.
We continue to dream. This time about new lands that will appear very soon with the launch of the fourth chronicles in our world. Even after years, new people come to us. A life that you can’t tell about in bright colors without risking seeming crazy. The subjective value of small but important events cannot be conveyed. But this is not so important. More importantly, it all works together. The important thing is that here we can live together.
Do I want to see new mechanics, the development of MMO concepts, a modern look and getting rid of bad decisions, which are enough in Lineage 2? Certainly.
