Fallout 76

Crni Vuk said:
I fear the day when all of us old farts are dead ... and the Fallout 3 fans are the old farts replacing us ...
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Don't worry, I shall be one of the old fucks who's going to scream at the top of my lungs how Fallout 1 is THE best Fallout of all time.

Edit: btw, the Codex managed to leak 76's dialogue system. Here it is:
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TL;DW notes for the F76 Noclip documenarty and some more info of it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fallout/comments/8qsx8s/complete_notes_from_the_noclip_documentary/
(Watch the complete documentary yourself here. It's really good, and definitely worth a watch.

-----General-----
  • BGS Austin are the main guys behind this game. The Maryland (Rockville) studio is involved, but they have been putting in tons of work into Starfield as well, and 76 is mostly Austin's baby after the initial design phase. They started working on 76 when they were still Battlecry studios, and began development during a time when Rockville was still working on Fallout 4 (and later beginning production on Fallout 4 DLC and Starfield). Rockville's role is largely creative.

  • The two Fallout 76 leads worked on Star Wars Galaxies, The Old Republic, and Ultima Online between them both. The lead programmer for 76 was the client lead for SWG. They're experts when it comes to building multiplayer, and painstakingly rebuilt the engine from the ground up to support multiplayer.

  • BGS Austin was absolutely crucial in the development of this game. Rockville doesn't have the experience required to pull something like this off because they are a singleplayer-focused studio.

  • From the beginning, the map was planned to be four times bigger than Fallout 4. This is in part due to new tech that enabled them to render longer distances; they wanted lots of open space to explore.

  • West Virginia was chosen because A) it was still East Coast, and B) it was a place that would be almost completely untouched by nukes. This would give them the opportunity to have living forests, tons of different types of wildlife, and more diversity than normal when it comes to different regions on the map.

  • It was also chosen because as they dug deeper into local stories and folklore of West Virginia, they found out there were so many cool conspiracy theories, monsters, and creatures that have been part of the state's history. They felt this was a perfect match for Fallout 76. The Grafton Monster, Flatwood Monster, the Snallygaster, Mothman -- the list goes on.

  • The Mothman specifically is a unique creature that they don't want to spoil other than saying there will be stages to him. "Maybe at the beginning, he's just stalking you". Creepy!

  • There are way more creatures in 76 than all other Fallout games. Giant sloths, two-headed possums, and intelligent plants were all mentioned.

  • The mutated creatures are more dramatic because it's so soon after the bombs fell, and the radiation is at its most powerful. They like to think that not all of these creatures were able to survive into the time period when the other Fallout games are set.

  • Raiders are out. The important reason for this is that they found with raiders, players would spend a lot of time just trying to discern whether or not a hostile human was a player or AI. They didn't want this, so they created a faction of half-feral ghouls called the Scorched, who are hostile, but still sane enough to use weapons and armor. These will be the main gun combat with AI in the game, which is described as a "central pillar" of the Fallout experience.

  • The map is huge, but there are six distinct regions to the game that are each a different difficulty/level, for a natural progression. "They mentioned: A hollowed-out mountain top, soggy floodlands, a festering toxic wasteland, swampy woods, and a colossal mountain range that bisects the entire map."

  • The new weather system can encourage or deter you from entering a specific area. Maybe you want to head to the mountains, but a major rad storm is sweeping through the area right now, making it much more dangerous to do so.

  • There is a lot of open space in this map. This means that when you find something, they want it to feel like you're finding something that's been hidden from the world for a long time. There are tons of different places to find. Some of the ones they mentioned were everything from quiet cabins, abandoned wood mills, treetop watchtowers, flooded mines, and abandoned barbecue joints.

  • ^This is IN ADDITION to the fact that you will find whole abandoned cities and towns like previous Fallout games. There are also the missile silos, and a crashed space station (Van Buren!).

  • The world is larger and more detailed than any previous game. This is due to massive engine improvements. New systems for propagating forests, a vastly improved dynamic lighting model, subsurface scattering, and far more complex animations for creatures (who need to react to being attacked by multiple players at once).

  • You'll start the game in a relatively nice, green area. Another more hostile area they showed is a region full of factories that's covered in a nasty white powder, from the chemicals that the factories were full of being released.

  • Lots of vertical landmarks. The giant excavator shown in the trailer was here. They let you orient yourself easily. More verticality than previous games, since Fallout 3 and 4 were both very flat lands.

  • They have their version of the Greenbrier Hotel, which housed a real-life nuclear bunker. Their version has a large golf course connected to it, and has its own story which they don't want to spoil.

  • More clothing than ever, and you have to discover a lot of it in specific spot. An example they give is that there's a real-life town called Helvetia, which is home to a festival where they make paper mache masks. They made ten of them for you to find when you visit the town in Fallout 76.

  • A lot of stories and quests you'll find will be the locational stories that we see as unmarked quests in previous Fallout games. An example given is a firehouse in Charleston, and if you go there you can find firefighter gear, and take a firefighter training course. They want you to explore and discover these things yourself with your friends.
-----Gameplay-----
  • You can play solo, but at launch there will be no private maps. They fully believe in the idea of sharing a world with other players for Fallout 76.

  • There is a main story, there are plenty of quests, but they want this game to be about what you want to do on any given day. Maybe you want to explore a new region, or maybe you want to go hunt down that last rare component for a crafting project. Maybe you want to kill a creature for its drops, or maybe you want to set up a new C.A.M.P.

  • Events! An example given was a horde of super mutants attacking a farm. You get notified and can swoop in to save the day, and they want you to meet other players doing the same thing. You don't know what's going to happen, and they're okay with that. An example given was "maybe you see ten Yao Guai come in because somebody trained them in from across the map".

  • In addition to the C.A.M.P.s you can build anywhere, there are also public workshops that must be claimed. These are specific locations that you have to clear out, and once you take them there could be events that spawn. But they can also contain useful crafting resources: An example is a mine that, once claimed, allows you to get a regular income of lead ore. Lead = bullets. Being able to make your own bullets is very valuable in Fallout, and potentially to other players.

  • Your C.A.M.P is your portable, build-anywhere settlement. They're smaller than a full settlement, but can be placed anywhere on the map. If you join a new game, your C.A.M.P will automatically be where you left it. If by some miracle two people have their camps in the exact same spot (they stress this is very unlikely due to a player limit of 20-30 and an enormous map), it will be saved as a blueprint and you can put it down anywhere you want.

  • There are certain restrictions on where you can place your C.A.M.P., but you can place them almost anywhere. One example given was that you can't place them right outside Vault 76, because they don't want anybody to grief brand new players.

  • Crafting is a big part of the game. You'll be able to craft guns, mods, ammo, food, armor, power armor, etc. Everything that you could craft in Fallout 4, and way more. They want you hunting down rare materials to craft that next big item.

  • Talking about how they want survival elements to be a big part of the game, but never tedious or boring: "I have to brush my teeth every day, or they'll rot out of my head. I do NOT want to do that in a video game. I just don't care!"

  • You have to eat and drink to survive. Anecdote: Somebody stumbled into a herd of cats and said they'd never been happier to see cats because it meant they could eat!

  • Food rots over time, and your gear degrades and must be repaired.

  • Rads are different, and cause mutations. The higher your rad count, the greater the odds that you'll get a mutation. They're like traits from Fallout 2, where you get a buff to one thing, and a penalty to something else. They can be cured if you don't like them, and in the late-game you can become permanently mutated if there's one you really like. Most mutations are stat or gameplay changes, but some are visual.

  • You will be able to sell items you craft to other players. Crafting is a big part of the game and they want crafting specialization to be worthwhile and powerful. You can spec into cooking and make valuable food that other players might be willing to pay for.

  • Perk cards completely replace the perk chart from Fallout 4. Every single time you level up, you take a new perk card. Perk cards are divided among the primary SPECIAL attributes, and you can have a limited number active at one time. You can swap your active cards out whenever you want, and can share them with other players in your group. This incentivizes coordination in groups, where you can specialize to work well when grouped up.

  • One person in your group might be focused on survival stuff like crafting and cooking, somebody might be geared up for combat, another might be specced into building great defenses for your settlement, and the last might be built as a medic to heal other players up.

  • For crafting food, you find recipes all over the world to unlock new stuff to make. There are "orders of magnitude" more recipes in 76 than Fallout 4, and a lot of the items you craft are +/-. One food might make you more susceptible to disease, but give you a huge health buff.

  • They are exploring the idea of letting you set up a robot vendor in some kind of a hub area, so you can sell items to other players who visit the hub. This is not confirmed, they're still exploring it, but he reiterates that it's a live game and that they're thinking long-term.

  • There are anti-griefing measures in place, they don't want the game to be too chaotic. Aggressive players will get a wanted level, and the penalty for death is only respawning at a nearby location.

  • There are different ways to communicate with other players, including voice chat, an emote wheel, and even a photo mode that came out of a game jam.

  • They want to know when to control the player, but more importantly, when NOT to control the player. They want this to feel like a Fallout game. The other players in the game world are system they do not control, and they will not shy away from it. They embrace it. They said when players collide it might be messy for a bit, but they have levers in place to solve problems. They'd rather do that than play it safe. They want to try this, they can make adjustments later if they want to.

  • 24-32 players at once. It was a challenge deciding on how many players would be in the game, and how frequently they wanted players to bump into each other. They want meeting another player to feel special, so they didn't want it to be too frequent.

  • Players will be visible on the map at all times, in their words, for good or ill. They want you to be able to see other players doing an event or a quest, and then go along to help them, or maybe even to attack them (though again, there are anti-griefing measures in place that they will tune as the game goes on).

  • You can trade with other players that you meet.

  • You can immediately join your friends in their session or invite them to yours.

  • Party size is currently 4, though that is easily adjustable. They're aiming for 4-person co-op gameplay, but they also want to have bigger conflicts like 12v12 deathmatch.

  • They're always adding more content to the game. Right now they're working on the aforementioned team deathmatch mode for players who may complete every quest and want something to do.

  • Nukes nukes nukes. Nukes are endgame content that require you to play through the game's story and complete repeatable quests to find the launch codes. The story there is that the Scorchbeasts (the giant bats) are crawling up out of the ground, and you can seal the fissures with nuclear strikes. They're hard to access and will not be used constantly by tons of players.

  • Nukes are NOT A GRIEFING DEVICE. Their function is to create high-level areas wherever you want on the map, and you are actively incentivized to do this in non-populated areas, because you want to be the first one in there to plunder them. If you stay too long, you die!

  • It is very challenging and time consuming to obtain the code to actually launch a nuke. It requires playing through most (if not all) of the main story, and then completing a repeatable quest until you have every part of the code. Because of the opportunity this presents and the time investment, players aren't going to be dropping nukes left and right on other players: by doing so, you will have effectively wasted your limited-time reward by dropping a high-level, loot rich area on or near somebody else.

  • The Legendary item system returns, and places you nuke are excellent places to farm legendary items. Eventually, the nuked area will return to its pre-nuke state. Depending on where you nuke, you'll find different things inhabiting the area, because areas have different flora and fauna.

  • You can nuke other players. Todd is very excited to see what people do with the nukes, because they just don't know what's going to happen.

  • If your settlement is nuked, you can easily repair the damage. Again, nukes are NOT A GRIEFING DEVICE.
-----Post-Launch-----
  • After Fallout 76 releases, the Rockville studio will remain creative leads, but most of their work is going toward Starfield, along with their Montreal studio. Austin will be in charge of supporting the game for years to come.

  • Microtransactions are a thing. This is acknowledged as an unfortunate reality of supporting both dedicated servers and free post-launch content for everybody. They are purely cosmetic. Anything you can purchase with microtransactions will also be able to be obtained for free by playing the game.

  • All DLC/updates will be free.

  • The plan is for part of the Austin team to be working on regular content updates, and the other part of the team working on larger content drops. So you get frequent, smaller updates (new events, free items were some examples), and then major content updates every so often. That is the plan, and they will have to make adjustments based on what players like and don't like.

  • If they make something they really like and the players don't, they will not double down on it. Instead, they'll embrace the stuff that players do like.
Here are some notes that aren't from the documentary, but have been mentioned in the various interviews since E3:

  • You can quickly and easily repair damage if you are nuked, or join another session. This, in addition to nukes being very hard to acquire and potentially valuable with their rewards, makes them pretty much impossible to grief with.

  • VATS makes a return, and it functions in real-time. You'll have to be snappier about lining up your shots, but you can still build your character to specialize in VATS, and it still is great for players who maybe don't have the twitch aim, and want to rely on their character's skill more than their own.

  • Mods and private lobbies are confirmed, but post-launch. Since Fallout 3, there is always a delay between release and official mod support, and 76 is no different. Their main focus on launch is to have the base game running as well as it can, and then some time later they will add private lobbies that can be modded just like every other Bethesda game. They said they are 100% committed to this and that it is going to happen.

  • Pete Hines has said that there are tons of quests scattered all over the world. I've also heard Todd say that they make use of robots a lot for quest givers.
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How is there really a story? I can't see there being much of one... And somewhere I heard the nukes are end game content or something? I don't know if it was from noclip or not. The fact that it's end game content reminds me of Borderlands/Destiny/Division.
 
Pfft. Nukes being end game doesn't really matter.

Put together four committed players with nothing better to do than playing the game all day, and you will (probably) start seeing nukes falling in less than a month. :lmao:
 
Squadcar said:
The fact that it's end game content reminds me of Borderlands/Destiny/Division.
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Anyway, I can thank F76 for the spark up of activity here and on the Discord server. Couldn't have timed it better, spreading invites around a month earlier.
 
Squadcar said:
How is there really a story? I can't see there being much of one... And somewhere I heard the nukes are end game content or something? I don't know if it was from noclip or not. The fact that it's end game content reminds me of Borderlands/Destiny/Division.
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We're talking about the company here that thinks 'placing skeletons in awkard/interesting' positions is already good story telling so ... there is that.

And the text above also mentions a 'fire fighting' course that you can complete by finding fire fighting gear. The excitement is killing me here ...

I also find it funny how often they say NUKES ARE NOT FOR GRIEFING! It will be very funn to see how creative people will be in finding ways to annoy, troll and kill other players, just because they can, and that's honestly a problem in a lot of MP games. Also finding the right balance between new and experienced players will be a nightmare.
 
Well, we can talk for hours about what Bethesda doesn't get or maybe doesn't WANT to get...Bottomline: Fallout is a God-mode RPG with Post apocalyptic elements. I am God and I create a character with stats I wish them to have according to my style of play and gradually build them up to do tasks so life in that setting can get easier for a large group of people(as many as that character and story can affect. It serves justice and the good way of life in its own, if sometimes crude way{but it's a post-apoc world right? so that is its excuse}).

I get a clean slate to do whatever I desire and that wouldn't hurt too much in the greater scheme of things since its an all-new world after all. Plus it is I that makes the rules in this world. Gradually it rebuilds through versions of organizations sometimes evil, sometimes good, sometimes in-between(within the setting meanings of the respective words). You have BoS, Enclave, Vault City, NCR etc.

The idea is that gradually it will be rebuilt by the people and become a better place to live in.

Then all of a sudden you get Bethesda who: compromises BoS to the point of near extinction. Merges Vault City with NCR. Eradicates Enclave. With V76 it seems its goal is not to have BoS or NCR either.
So they produce a MAD world(modelled after this one, so in many areas has similar consequences but run by crazy people or people that look like crazies cause Bethesda's understanding of the setting is SO POOR), with crazy rules, where you try to do all sorts of stuff to fullfill THEIR vision in exchange for trinkets and they merge that with the actual world which needed a different kind of healing method. Then they can;t understand how come "this doesn't work" since hey, they modelled it after the actual world, but in retrofuturism and all those changes and events that never actually happened(say, maybe Interplay was in the right track when they created all those new places to go with it as well??)

In addition they drop the "observant mode" and throw you in a pit of lions to do work, they should actually do themselves in actualizing their vision of what the world is about and pit each player against others in the process, when in classic FO at least you had organized rebuilding, by institutions and group of people. Then after they put people on each other throats for all sorts of reasons(even rebuilding which should be normal in a broken world they managed to make a huge issue out of with their implementation), kind of question "Why do people wanna do this solo mostly and not co-op or multiplayer?"(maybe if they get their heads out of their youknowwhat, could provide an answer).

In their version, one can do all sorts of stuff and especially in V76 another can go and "nuke" or brake it, just for the fun of it(and if this was really a real-like world as they envisioned it would result in both of you dying or being killed by a third more powerful one or one longer in the game).

And THEN you ask ME what is my F'ing problem with this game(s) and THEIR worldview?(I even have FNV-Unplayable cause of the FO3 pollution in it).
THEY belong in a sanatorium/institute for the criminally insane, the sooner the better!!!
Maybe the world was better if just tottally nuked. Vault doors shouldn't have opened for the Bethesda Vault "me thinks".
 
I will be paraphrasing:
Todd: "We implemented anti-griefing systems."
Todd: "We will not have private servers at launch. They will come later."
Todd: "When players die they don't lose anything and respawn nearby."
Todd: "Every player will be marked on the map so everyone can see where others are."
Todd: "Nukes shouldn't be used against other players or player bases because they take a long time to get, but they can."
Todd: "Nuke impact zones are where the players can get rare and powerful materials. They will be deadly and players can't stay in there for long."
Todd: "Nuke impact zones will revert back to normal eventually."
Todd: "If your base is destroyed, you can just repair it."

... ... ...

So... anti-griefing systems... But then it makes it so killed players "respawn nearby" and that they are marked on the map for everyone else... So what is preventing a griefer, that just killed a player to check the map and see their victim respawning nearby, to just walk there and kill that player again, and again and again?

Nukes are very valuable so players will probably not nuke each other since that is a waste? Not really, Not only can a powerful troll(s) (achieved the feat of getting a nuke) hit another player's base and enjoy it, it can also go there and get rare, powerful stuff. With the added benefit that the impact zone is deadly for some time before it reverts. So even if players can just repair their base, they can't stay there for long before it reverts back to normal.

It just works.
 
I think it was Pete that said you can literally pick where you spawn, so that just contradicts what Todd said...

Like, do these guys know what game they made? I don't get how details are still this vague and conflicting.
 
Let's see contradicting info from devs, Bethnet forums have gone completely wonky while the bethdrones engage in purge like posts to eliminate other individuals views.

Who wants to play a game that doesn't have any game mechanics established by the basis of design?
Apparently a whole lot of people that think Fallout means if you name something fallout it becomes Fallout.
So I think I'm just going to start uploading pictures with fallout stamped on it and wait for a legal notice to show up. It's basically what Bethesda is doing anyways.
 
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