The success of Prime Video’s Fallout TV show has spilled over into the video games upon which it is based, boosting player numbers in even decades old titles.
Has it got any better? I played it once at launch on Xbox, and needless to say I havent ever gone back to it. Can I play in a private world with just friends or do I have to be subjected to the ill treatment of other players?
Yes. But it’s still not Fallout 5, if that’s what you’re after.
Can I play in a private world with just friends or do I have to be subjected to the ill treatment of other players?
Private worlds only come with a subscription, though I’ve never had anyone interact with me in public worlds on the PC outside of doing the multiplayer events.
I mean, you occasionally see someone running by at a city.
I thought that I wouldn’t like having to interact with other people, but that hasn’t been an issue. What is that it’s a multiplayer game, so the traditional style of the game, where you’re kind of the center of the story and can change the world, doesn’t really happen. You never forget that you’re in a multiplayer world – things like event notifications and nukes going off and such kind of reduce my sense of immersion.
I just remember when I first played, I exited a vault and after like 3 crashes and assets that just wouldn’t load in, I saw some players and they just intantly killed me, no questions or anything. And then when I respawned, I met different players that did the same thing. I didn’t even have any actual gear on me.
So, the game technically has player killing, but it’s been massively reduced since the early game, as it was pretty unpopular with the users. You can just turn off friendly fire in the options, and that stops it in virtually all situations. There are some locations, like the power plants, that you can take over from enemies and other players can take from you, though it’s rare that I’ve seen that happen. And if you create a locked door in your CAMP and someone lockpicks it, they get a bounty and can be killed.
On PC, I’ve found it to be pretty stable (probably the most stable in the series, by Fallout standards). I’ve seen a few bugs, the most-irritating of which is that sometimes you can’t pick up an item from a corpse and need to look away and then back at the corpse to be able to pick it up.
The loading of assets is considerably less smooth on my system than with the Starfield engine. Starfield can keep a buttery-smooth 165Hz. Fallout 76 will get momentary frame rate reductions. Also, the occasional graphical artifact; haven’t seen that in Starfield.
Yeah I can’t say I was thrilled to be getting killed like that. Reminds me of why I don’t play games like Ark, Tarkov, etc.
I didnt notice any problems with Starfield on Xbox either. It was weird, with Fallout 76 there were protectrons that were like, phasing in and out of existence, and things like entire buildings just being completely invisible despite the containers and debris assets inside them loading just fine. But I didnt have these issues with Fallout 4 or 3. New Vegas I could never play because on my PC any time I tried to leave the beginning town the game would just CTD. Though I hear NV is the most unstable title.
Yeah I can’t say I was thrilled to be getting killed like that. Reminds me of why I don’t play games like Ark, Tarkov, etc.
If you already have it, just flip off friendly fire in the options. It pretty much kills the PK aspect of the game.
I mean, players can grief, but it’s pretty limited.
Aside from some “safe” areas on the map, a player can drop a nuke on an area. You don’t want to be in an area when one goes, but you have plenty of warning to move. Late-game, nuked areas are mostly desirable, as enemies and plants there have more stuff, and it’s the only way to induce certain multiplayer events, but if you can’t deal with radiation yet, it can be a pain. Nukes are virtually always used to induce one of several multiplayer events, though, so unless you have a CAMP right in one of those areas, it’s rare to encounter nukes.
They can use a vending machine at a train station or city, and only one person can be using one at once. Same thing for player vending machines in CAMPs, where a player can sell off stuff to anyone who wants to buy it.
They could stand in a doorway, but fast travel generally makes that a non-issue.
They can use obnoxious weapons that generate a lot of explosions in a multiplayer event, which makes it hard to see; there was a while when some new weapons were able to do that. I don’t think that that’s currently an issue.
If they’re too powerful, they can kill certain multiplayer event bosses so quickly that other players don’t have time to do enough damage to “count” as having killed them. Optimal play is to slightly damage low-level enemies, which gives someone full experience when they die and lets other players have a chance at also damaging them. For a few bosses, there’s a minimum amount of damage required; optimal play is to get your damage in and then go off and be doing other things in the event.
I guess maybe someone could manage to drag an aggroed enemy somewhere on the map.
Sometimes people don’t bother to try to complete some events, just want to kill enemies for experience. That’s not really bad per se, but doesn’t help complete the event for people who are interested in that.
Certain game-mechanic-exploiting builds can be affected by other players sharing certain perks. Like, some players use a build where they intentionally suffer almost the maximum amount of radiation damage such that they have a very low cap on their health. This makes them fragile, but with the right perks, can provide enormous benefits. Another player on a team can share a perk that cures radiation damage over time, which cures them but causes the benefits to go away. People doing that tend to get kicked off teams.
Some people try to create “trap CAMPs” that cause a visiting player to die one way or another. Like, maybe they have a door that opens directly off a cliff or something. Bethesda normally fixes mechanisms that people figure out, and the penalty for death is pretty minimal anyway – just need to go back to pick up any scrap that you were carrying.
I dunno. I really haven’t seen much by way of griefing. Most of what people do is use items that give buffs to themselves and nearby players for some time. They usually wait until a multiplayer event and then activate them. That’s a positive. People have been pretty nice, in my experience. But, then, I’ve almost always had friendly fire off.
People in the reviews say it’s gotten much better since release but it’s still an average game at best. Private servers are only available if you pay a subscription.
Private servers are only available if you pay a subscription.
You don’t suppose there are… other …means of private servers yet, are there? Or is the game just that bad that even nefarious folk have no interest in it?
Like, pirating it? I doubt it. I mean, Bethesda’s got the server code. Someone would have to reimplement all that.
Plus, it looks like it’s on sale for like $8 this week on Steam.
If what you want is to play in a modded world, you’re gonna be disappointed – you’re gonna want Fallout 4 for that, not 76.
76 encourages being in a team – the team-based perks are better then the non-team-compatible perks, and you can use some of the perks that your teammates share. Plus you get to use their CAMPs and/or tents as free fast-travel destinations. What usually happens is that people who don’t want to play on a team just join the first casual team with an open slot, maybe share a perk, and then proceed to ignore the team for the rest of the session.
World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies, and City of Heroes all have private servers that are run off of server emulators, that’s more what I was getting at. Because usually pirated copies cannot connect to official servers, so their only choice is to use private server emulators like that.
Its just too bad Fallout Together has been getting literally zero development for years now.
So, the subscription benefits are pretty limited. I haven’t subscribed.
You can play in a private world, but I haven’t found a lot of reason to do that. You generally benefit somewhat from having other players for multiplayer events, and outside of that, they’re pretty much a non-factor. IIRC you can tweak some world parameters for those, can’t recall what.
You can slightly accelerate getting some in-game items that you can get anyway.
You can get a “scrap box” that can hold an unlimited amount of scrap. Some people apparently get this for one month, stuff it with huge amounts of scrap in a month, and then cancel their subscription. They keep the scrapbox, can take stuff out just can’t add more to it. There isn’t all that much you can do with scrap. Maybe if you’re super-into building pretty CAMPs.
You get a small inflow of “atoms” to use in the store for in-app purchase via playing. A subscription will give you more. Most of the stuff you buy is not all that amazing (to me, at least):
You can buy some mostly-cosmetic items to decorate your CAMP. Some people…really get into playing SimArchitect or something with their CAMP. Like the Fallout 4 settlement building in a smaller radius, but you can do it almost anywhere and people can show off their CAMP. I don’t care about that (though I have seen a handful of other people’s CAMPs that are amazing. I remember one that looked like a big ship in the Mire.)
You can get more SHELTER maps. These are kind of a private building area that you can reach from a hatch in your CAMP on the main world. I don’t care about this. The differences between these are basically cosmetic. Some are bigger, but you really aren’t space-constrained. I think that they were originally intended to play into a survival aspect, where you had to hide from radstorms underground or something, but most of the game’s survival aspects were nerfed after players didn’t like them. Radstorms are very weak and very rare.
You can get alternate weapon skins. This is actually useful, because if you have multiple weapons of a type with different weapon mods, it’s nice to be able to distinguish between them.
You can get some alternate, cosmetic, outfits. Given that I usually have a first person camera and don’t play with anyone I know, this does little.
The main reason I would be interested in a single-player environment would be Fallout 4-style modding, which isn’t really an option in Fallout 76, even with a private world, or if players were a pain, which I really haven’t found them to be (and I’m pretty unenthusiastic about nearly all multiplayer games. I play Wargame in single-player mode. I honestly don’t think that a private world is likely to buy most people much.)
From my standpoint, the initial, up-front purchase price gets pretty much everything interesting.
EDIT: Oh, and if your concern is gathering plants and stuff like that, IIRC that’s per-player anyway. If someone’s gathered plants and they haven’t regrown, I don’t think that they look gathered to you.
I checked it couple months ago and it felt like a regular fallout game with npcs and story missions. Wasn’t a great coop though, since game didnt handle progress for each player.
Other players in FO76 are actually very nice. If your low level, high level people will just go up to you and give you things. PVP is optional and I never turned it on. You’re incentivised to join teams with many perks. You can just follow a team mate around and help them, and I’ve done that many times. Teams are temporary and small (max 4 players) so people are very open to you joining a team.
It’s fun for what it is. It has a very positive community. Lower level players are always gifted high level armor and weapons from vets when they see them. If you do decide to play, you can do most of the game and quests solo. That’s how I did it and it felt more or less like a regular fallout game. You should do the events even though you’re not prepared for them. High level players will make it so you pretty much don’t have to do anything and that’s where you’ll get your highest level rewards.
The card perk system is different and overwhelming at first. Basically good some good builds and pick one or two that fit your play style. Then you’ll know what to focus on.
My buddy for me into it a few years ago. It was fun for what it was, but it’s not GOTY or anything.
Tried it last month on PS5 and gave up. Frequent crashes, disconnections breaking ongoing quests; you log in and your camp is removed because someone else build theirs in that spot; shallow, linear, often annoying quests; overall feels empty, discouraging exploring; seems like all better items are earned for killing something and all you find looting surroundings is junk; very limited carrying capacity; repeatable enemies; constant push to pay for subscribtion; cosmetics breaking immersion like pride flags, xmas hats etc.; disappointing graphics.
Overall I’d rate it avarage - 6,5/10.
In plus: Fallout world and lore (the Fallout 4-esque one, not the classic 1 & 2), friendly community happy to show off their camps. Except that one high-level asshole who one-shot my noob character when I was browsing a stash box :D
Has it got any better? I played it once at launch on Xbox, and needless to say I havent ever gone back to it. Can I play in a private world with just friends or do I have to be subjected to the ill treatment of other players?
Yes. But it’s still not Fallout 5, if that’s what you’re after.
Private worlds only come with a subscription, though I’ve never had anyone interact with me in public worlds on the PC outside of doing the multiplayer events.
I mean, you occasionally see someone running by at a city.
I thought that I wouldn’t like having to interact with other people, but that hasn’t been an issue. What is that it’s a multiplayer game, so the traditional style of the game, where you’re kind of the center of the story and can change the world, doesn’t really happen. You never forget that you’re in a multiplayer world – things like event notifications and nukes going off and such kind of reduce my sense of immersion.
Oh I am fully aware its not Fallout 5.
I just remember when I first played, I exited a vault and after like 3 crashes and assets that just wouldn’t load in, I saw some players and they just intantly killed me, no questions or anything. And then when I respawned, I met different players that did the same thing. I didn’t even have any actual gear on me.
So, the game technically has player killing, but it’s been massively reduced since the early game, as it was pretty unpopular with the users. You can just turn off friendly fire in the options, and that stops it in virtually all situations. There are some locations, like the power plants, that you can take over from enemies and other players can take from you, though it’s rare that I’ve seen that happen. And if you create a locked door in your CAMP and someone lockpicks it, they get a bounty and can be killed.
On PC, I’ve found it to be pretty stable (probably the most stable in the series, by Fallout standards). I’ve seen a few bugs, the most-irritating of which is that sometimes you can’t pick up an item from a corpse and need to look away and then back at the corpse to be able to pick it up.
The loading of assets is considerably less smooth on my system than with the Starfield engine. Starfield can keep a buttery-smooth 165Hz. Fallout 76 will get momentary frame rate reductions. Also, the occasional graphical artifact; haven’t seen that in Starfield.
Yeah I can’t say I was thrilled to be getting killed like that. Reminds me of why I don’t play games like Ark, Tarkov, etc.
I didnt notice any problems with Starfield on Xbox either. It was weird, with Fallout 76 there were protectrons that were like, phasing in and out of existence, and things like entire buildings just being completely invisible despite the containers and debris assets inside them loading just fine. But I didnt have these issues with Fallout 4 or 3. New Vegas I could never play because on my PC any time I tried to leave the beginning town the game would just CTD. Though I hear NV is the most unstable title.
If you already have it, just flip off friendly fire in the options. It pretty much kills the PK aspect of the game.
I mean, players can grief, but it’s pretty limited.
Aside from some “safe” areas on the map, a player can drop a nuke on an area. You don’t want to be in an area when one goes, but you have plenty of warning to move. Late-game, nuked areas are mostly desirable, as enemies and plants there have more stuff, and it’s the only way to induce certain multiplayer events, but if you can’t deal with radiation yet, it can be a pain. Nukes are virtually always used to induce one of several multiplayer events, though, so unless you have a CAMP right in one of those areas, it’s rare to encounter nukes.
They can use a vending machine at a train station or city, and only one person can be using one at once. Same thing for player vending machines in CAMPs, where a player can sell off stuff to anyone who wants to buy it.
They could stand in a doorway, but fast travel generally makes that a non-issue.
They can use obnoxious weapons that generate a lot of explosions in a multiplayer event, which makes it hard to see; there was a while when some new weapons were able to do that. I don’t think that that’s currently an issue.
If they’re too powerful, they can kill certain multiplayer event bosses so quickly that other players don’t have time to do enough damage to “count” as having killed them. Optimal play is to slightly damage low-level enemies, which gives someone full experience when they die and lets other players have a chance at also damaging them. For a few bosses, there’s a minimum amount of damage required; optimal play is to get your damage in and then go off and be doing other things in the event.
I guess maybe someone could manage to drag an aggroed enemy somewhere on the map.
Sometimes people don’t bother to try to complete some events, just want to kill enemies for experience. That’s not really bad per se, but doesn’t help complete the event for people who are interested in that.
Certain game-mechanic-exploiting builds can be affected by other players sharing certain perks. Like, some players use a build where they intentionally suffer almost the maximum amount of radiation damage such that they have a very low cap on their health. This makes them fragile, but with the right perks, can provide enormous benefits. Another player on a team can share a perk that cures radiation damage over time, which cures them but causes the benefits to go away. People doing that tend to get kicked off teams.
Some people try to create “trap CAMPs” that cause a visiting player to die one way or another. Like, maybe they have a door that opens directly off a cliff or something. Bethesda normally fixes mechanisms that people figure out, and the penalty for death is pretty minimal anyway – just need to go back to pick up any scrap that you were carrying.
I dunno. I really haven’t seen much by way of griefing. Most of what people do is use items that give buffs to themselves and nearby players for some time. They usually wait until a multiplayer event and then activate them. That’s a positive. People have been pretty nice, in my experience. But, then, I’ve almost always had friendly fire off.
That’s been my experience in pretty much every multiplayer game.
Which is why I now avoid them like the plague. Except coop. Those are usually ok.
People in the reviews say it’s gotten much better since release but it’s still an average game at best. Private servers are only available if you pay a subscription.
You don’t suppose there are… other …means of private servers yet, are there? Or is the game just that bad that even nefarious folk have no interest in it?
Like, pirating it? I doubt it. I mean, Bethesda’s got the server code. Someone would have to reimplement all that.
Plus, it looks like it’s on sale for like $8 this week on Steam.
If what you want is to play in a modded world, you’re gonna be disappointed – you’re gonna want Fallout 4 for that, not 76.
76 encourages being in a team – the team-based perks are better then the non-team-compatible perks, and you can use some of the perks that your teammates share. Plus you get to use their CAMPs and/or tents as free fast-travel destinations. What usually happens is that people who don’t want to play on a team just join the first casual team with an open slot, maybe share a perk, and then proceed to ignore the team for the rest of the session.
World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies, and City of Heroes all have private servers that are run off of server emulators, that’s more what I was getting at. Because usually pirated copies cannot connect to official servers, so their only choice is to use private server emulators like that.
Its just too bad Fallout Together has been getting literally zero development for years now.
So, the subscription benefits are pretty limited. I haven’t subscribed.
You can play in a private world, but I haven’t found a lot of reason to do that. You generally benefit somewhat from having other players for multiplayer events, and outside of that, they’re pretty much a non-factor. IIRC you can tweak some world parameters for those, can’t recall what.
You can slightly accelerate getting some in-game items that you can get anyway.
You can get a “scrap box” that can hold an unlimited amount of scrap. Some people apparently get this for one month, stuff it with huge amounts of scrap in a month, and then cancel their subscription. They keep the scrapbox, can take stuff out just can’t add more to it. There isn’t all that much you can do with scrap. Maybe if you’re super-into building pretty CAMPs.
You get a small inflow of “atoms” to use in the store for in-app purchase via playing. A subscription will give you more. Most of the stuff you buy is not all that amazing (to me, at least):
You can buy some mostly-cosmetic items to decorate your CAMP. Some people…really get into playing SimArchitect or something with their CAMP. Like the Fallout 4 settlement building in a smaller radius, but you can do it almost anywhere and people can show off their CAMP. I don’t care about that (though I have seen a handful of other people’s CAMPs that are amazing. I remember one that looked like a big ship in the Mire.)
You can get more SHELTER maps. These are kind of a private building area that you can reach from a hatch in your CAMP on the main world. I don’t care about this. The differences between these are basically cosmetic. Some are bigger, but you really aren’t space-constrained. I think that they were originally intended to play into a survival aspect, where you had to hide from radstorms underground or something, but most of the game’s survival aspects were nerfed after players didn’t like them. Radstorms are very weak and very rare.
You can get alternate weapon skins. This is actually useful, because if you have multiple weapons of a type with different weapon mods, it’s nice to be able to distinguish between them.
You can get some alternate, cosmetic, outfits. Given that I usually have a first person camera and don’t play with anyone I know, this does little.
The main reason I would be interested in a single-player environment would be Fallout 4-style modding, which isn’t really an option in Fallout 76, even with a private world, or if players were a pain, which I really haven’t found them to be (and I’m pretty unenthusiastic about nearly all multiplayer games. I play Wargame in single-player mode. I honestly don’t think that a private world is likely to buy most people much.)
From my standpoint, the initial, up-front purchase price gets pretty much everything interesting.
EDIT: Oh, and if your concern is gathering plants and stuff like that, IIRC that’s per-player anyway. If someone’s gathered plants and they haven’t regrown, I don’t think that they look gathered to you.
I checked it couple months ago and it felt like a regular fallout game with npcs and story missions. Wasn’t a great coop though, since game didnt handle progress for each player.
Other players in FO76 are actually very nice. If your low level, high level people will just go up to you and give you things. PVP is optional and I never turned it on. You’re incentivised to join teams with many perks. You can just follow a team mate around and help them, and I’ve done that many times. Teams are temporary and small (max 4 players) so people are very open to you joining a team.
Ill treatment? This is the most friendly game I ever played.
I mean sometimes I do go around leaving bags of poop on people’s beds so…
How ironic.
It’s fun for what it is. It has a very positive community. Lower level players are always gifted high level armor and weapons from vets when they see them. If you do decide to play, you can do most of the game and quests solo. That’s how I did it and it felt more or less like a regular fallout game. You should do the events even though you’re not prepared for them. High level players will make it so you pretty much don’t have to do anything and that’s where you’ll get your highest level rewards.
The card perk system is different and overwhelming at first. Basically good some good builds and pick one or two that fit your play style. Then you’ll know what to focus on.
My buddy for me into it a few years ago. It was fun for what it was, but it’s not GOTY or anything.
Tried it last month on PS5 and gave up. Frequent crashes, disconnections breaking ongoing quests; you log in and your camp is removed because someone else build theirs in that spot; shallow, linear, often annoying quests; overall feels empty, discouraging exploring; seems like all better items are earned for killing something and all you find looting surroundings is junk; very limited carrying capacity; repeatable enemies; constant push to pay for subscribtion; cosmetics breaking immersion like pride flags, xmas hats etc.; disappointing graphics.
Overall I’d rate it avarage - 6,5/10.
In plus: Fallout world and lore (the Fallout 4-esque one, not the classic 1 & 2), friendly community happy to show off their camps. Except that one high-level asshole who one-shot my noob character when I was browsing a stash box :D