I've worked in the game industry for 20 years as a game designer/ producer and creative director and I can say, If Bethesda had anyone on staff that looked so deeply into their design process and project goals as deeply as this video, Fallout 76 would have never shipped in the sorry state as it did. This video is a master class in a critical analysis of core system design and, more importantly, franchise integrity. Bethesda, if you're watching, this video is the solution to your Fallout 76 issues. Hire him now and pay him well. Bravo sir....long time watcher and subscriber, much respect!
He has other video-essays on different games that are just as insightful. Jon is amazingly sharp for someone with a 0 Perception stat . I think the education in classics yields an analytical mind, that sees details clearly within the bigger picture.
@@Nimno74 Oh yeah, I have watched nearly all of his videos. This one though....insightful, informative, excellent design instincts... as I said....this is a Master Class level design and franchise perceptively driven evaluation. Hireable for sure.
@@TheJodyhicks Granted, it is easier to take a pre-existing thing, and see how it can be altered, than to create something from thin air, but I'd love to hand a lot of game ideas I have over to a think tank full of people like Jon.
You're certainly right, but I imagine some of FO76's current state is also due to the "You've taken too much time, finish up something in the next week/month/whatever and ship it!" effect, with the financial guys dropping the hammer and forcing a compromised version to be released.... To some degree, an analysis like Jon's is easier in hindsight, _seeing_ the problems the current design causes and going from there. Perhaps a longer development cycle would have allowed some of this retrospection to happen internally.
I'm a single player game person, I've never played (or wanted to play) an always-online MMO. I don't like the idea of being at the mercy of server issues, other people, time zone issues, etc. All that said, I'd break my streak in an instant if 76 operated like how you've outlined.
server issues, other people, time zone issues, just got 76 for $15 on sale and none of these are any issue, They have improved a lot I'd give it another year and try it on sale you might have some fun
In my opinion, the reason you never wanted to play one previously is because something like this doesn't seem to exist. You want a game like this in your gaming life, but can't fill that void. Gosh I wish 76 were like this. Kind of why I never actually picked up on 76. I watch people's videos and read news about it, but been sticking to playing FONV, FO4 and outer worlds as of late
multiplayer is just not what fallout people wanted sounds great on paper but when it comes to gather no one likes it and it not easy to do. All I ever wanted from a fallout is a co-op were a friend if they wanted can join my world and i can do the same to them bit like far cry does it that would of worked not a online only MMO with no same world and all run on servers and no story no humans and tapes you care nothing about to get quests.
@@giggity4670 . Bethesda apparently did take the criticism as constructive feedback and made all of these changes that he wanted. Nuclear Winter was dropped and so no more Battle Royale. Thankfully, the Vault that was used for it, Vault 51, was opened as an explorable Vault and I'm so glad that they did this. Zax as an Ai that decides the Overseer and bases decisions based on equations is easily one of the best Vault ideas in the franchise. It operates as a co op game that can be played solo and you can run into realistic scenarios where most of the time (99%) it is useless to fight enemies like Super Mutant Behemoths, Mirelurk Queens, and Scorchbeasts alone. At least at level 30 even. These guys are best fought with a team. The community is the best I've ever seen. High level players tend to give away ammo, health supplies, and will even help build/rebuild Camps for others. The game is extremely good now. Scorchbeasts are the Dragons of the Fallout franchise as they are gigantic Bats.
"If players have to take perks so the don't have to bother with a game mechanic, maybe that gameplay mechanic shouldn't be there" Yes that is my biggest pet peeve in a lot of games.
@@ryanchungus8972 I know I am late but I don't think that is the same. This is because normally a perk that slowly regens health is usually more for a tactical purpose than a not being bothered purpose. It means that I can carry fewer healing supplies or have a worse medicinal skills as the limited supplies can go to combat. So I don't think it us bot being bothered more than being clever with what you have . compared this to the lockpicking perks in skyrim which are all nigh completely useless. However they make it a lot quicker to open locked doors so I belive they are badly designed. One in being clever and the other is being lazy/forced to by the game design.
@@harrisonchauhan3875 lol np. I definitely think there should be a balance of perks. Lock picking removed, for sure. I'd love useless but fun perks, like a musician perk in skyrim to play a lute in some way((perhaps from the bards college))
34:51 "These days it's a giant pile of rubber and asbestos I'm sitting on" I think Jon needs a new gaming chair, his current one doesn't sound comfortable or good for his health.
When i first started, ppl would just give me random stuff. I thought they were doing it out of the kindness of their hearts, but now being lvl 50, they were giving me their stuff they didnt want to go to waste. Now im doing the same cuz just throwing out a legendary item seems wrong.
Not exactly. People want to be helpful, and it shows when they craft ammo, guns or armor for you, on the spot. They may also take your weapon from you, improve it, and then hand it back to you. The more experienced players remember very well how they struggled in the beginning of the game. Other than ammo, and a few other items, there is no need to give away stuff, because you can usually scrap or sell an item. With mules, you can even hold on to legendary gear, while you are waiting to turn them into scrip.
@@alohamark3025 yeah it was a very fun time there was this one golf area where a few high level characters cleared it out and set camp and when me n my friend found it there was like 15+ people trading guns and armor some were upgrading like you said and we were all trading as many mods as we could. It felt like the experience we should have been having all along
It is possible he had to go to eat, pee, make food, go check who came for a visit etc so he paused and when he returned, simply continued recording and talking. It is easy to eliminate seams with modern voice/video editors and make it look like you talked half of the day.
Hi Jon, there are two things you should know about me before reading the rest of this comment. 1. Sometimes I will watch RUclips videos longer than an hour, but I will usually fall asleep at some point for a few minutes. I’m old (56). I was gaming back when the only games around were board games and pinball machines. So frequent napping is a thing. 2. I love the Fallout franchise, but have not played a single minute of Fallout 76. Having said that, I watched every minute of this analysis, and never took a nap. You are to be congratulated on putting together a thorough and constructive critique of a game on a scale I’ve never seen before. And keeping it interesting and engaging throughout. (insert applause) I know you put a lot of work into this, and a lot of love, and it shows. Thank you for that. As for Fallout 76, I knew I would not play it, mostly because I’m just not really social enough to have ever enjoyed online gaming. So I experienced the Fallout 76 world by watching your gameplay, and that of other RUclipsrs. The problem that stood out to me the most when watching all that gameplay, was what you covered in Part 5. The fact that everyone is dead, and that everything has already happened, means no matter how well the story is told the player can’t really have any direct influence on it. I have always loved the fact that my actions in Fallout games have a direct impact on people, and the story that is unfolding at the moment. I became a part of those stories. I can certainly enjoy the telling of a good story that takes place in the past, but I’m completely unable to participate in it. That’s mainly why I haven’t played this game. Well, I have to stop now so I can jump back into RDR2… where I am having a decidedly bad influence on the people and the story. Sorry for the long comment. Thanks again for this amazing video.
Hell, I'm 33 and I feel asleep a couple of times watching this over a few days. Nothing to do with the quality of the video, mind. Maybe I'm prematurely extra old?
Well I'm 21 and actually I spent 2 days to finish this video properly, so don't think that's an issue at all. Bid you a good day sir, hope you always be in the positive part of the internet, always nice to watch some heart-feeling comments on these well-made videos.
The best part about Fallout 4 Survival Mode was that it actually made Settlements useful: they served as rest stops, providing storage space, a place to sleep and save, collect food and water, and even assistance in combat if you were being chased by enemies too powerful for you to handle alone. If you connected your settlements with Supply Routes, your designated Provisioner would even patrol the road reducing the number of hostile creatures along the way. Survival Mode also made the Brotherhood Vertibirds a useful mode of transportation because it effectively worked as a sort of fast travel.
Thought I'd comment before watching. Most of us know how much work went into this, so well done MATN. Hope it does even better than you hope! And it's only a day late (sarcastic grumbling....)
+Cheetarah Yeah, i just re-watched his Fallout 3 Video yesterday so when i saw this in my Notifications and it's Length i hoped for a Video in the same Style and Quality
wow, that idea for a single player "before" and multiplayer "after" around the 1:45:00 mark would have been an incredible idea. even if it was a shorter main quest than a normal game. that would have been awesome
Yup, I'd probably like to be a hardened killer in single player for a bit so my multiplayer character would have more reasons to track him down like it's a litteral scorched dude who is really good at killing
The community has been requesting a single player with co-op mode for years. That the request was blatantly ignored in favor of going the exploitative MMO, industry route speaks volumes about the state of video gaming today. "I think we were a little surprised how few people wanted to take part in PvP and how many more were interested in PvE together," said Pete Hines of 76. Really? And how's that Pete considering the aforementioned request of which Bethesda was well aware. The executives of Bethesda and Viacom couldn't have proven themselves more out of touch with the core appeal of Fallout or the player community they actually helped create if they'd tried. smh
This. This is a love story. The amount of research, thoughtfulness, and sheer effort put into this video underscores the great love Jon has for a franchise that has inspired so many. Every gamer, no matter if they play or even like Fallout, should watch this, even if only to appreciate the magnitude of what Jon has just accomplished. This is a masterpiece. Thank you, Jon. This will remain as one of the absolute best videos I have ever watched, only coming second to your video of "Why Fallout 3 Is Better Than You Think," because that game has a special place in my heart.
So my take away is the following. 1. Jon should just become a game developer already cause he’s got better ideas than some of the people at Bethesda. 2. The majority of this rant was so he could get on top of a satellite. 3. He still loves his landmines.
I dont like people not hard to turn an ash monster from passive to hostile Not hard to change the weapon system Not hard to spawn lots of robots and scorch beasts Not hard to just decrease the frickin camp placing range to form a town
I dont like people of course it’s unrealistic to use every single idea. He was just pointing out that MATN had many ideas that could be pitched to Bethesda to make the game better. No pitched idea will go in the same way out of your mouth into the game. There will always be changes. Improvements, compromises.
Ohhh I'm excited for this. Another argument I haven't heard much of is that people are mad because many found Fallout 4 dissapointing, and were holding on to the hope that a great fallout game was coming. Many hoped it could be 76, but instead it showed us that Fallout 4 was the very best Bethesda could do. The reason I wasn't dissapointed in my 76 review was because I consider Fallout 4 to be one of the most shallow games ever made, there was no way that team was going to make a great game so quickly
I couldn't agree more. I remember being berated in the Bethesda forums for saying a voiced protagonist was a huge mistake. Recorded dialogue requires more data, and severely limits the roleplaying aspects. Where most conversations in earlier games had half a dozen multi-branching dialogue paths, the choices in FO4 were generally less, and branched much less often. I just wanted my old Int 1 character to blurt out "Icecream!" when responding to questions.
I do feel the core gameplay of 4 has been the best in the franchise. Crafting and exploration is the best it's ever been. 76 should have been that aspect on steriods
Oliver Standing NV might be more in line with the originals and is an overall more traditional RPG, however it was made by Obsidian. Of all the BGS FO games (3, 4, 76), I still firmly believe that 3 is the best Fallout game they’ve ever made. 4 wasn’t bad by any means, hell it fixed a ton of issues from the old games and made the factions way more developed, but many changes to simplify the formula made the game feel way less like an actual Fallout RPG and more like action adventure looter shooter thing. Again the game is absolutely fantastic and I’ve put in a shit load of hours into it, but still.
Patterrz Wait...you watch...but... THIS HAS HAPPENED ON BOTH FALLOUT ESSAYS! NEXT THING I KNOW FALLOUT BROTHERHOOD IS BETTER THAN YOU THINK WILL HAVE A COMMENT FROM PEWDIEPIE
I remember when you mentioned Jon in I believe either your Dark Rising Nuzlocke or your versus with Mo in Blaze Black. Ever since then, I've been watching him for a long time! You're a true legend Patterrz, win all of those versus and locke's!
Hey, aren't you the guy who does Pokemon videos? Wait a moment... You ARE the guy who ran a nuzlocke a while back that I listened to and you've complained that all your comments want you to fail while there is a youtuber called Many a True Nerd who did a thing called Fallout: New Vegas You Only Live Once which basically was a nuzlocke but with guns and that's how I started watching this channel all these years back. Huh. The youtube world is small indeed.
William Redding Lol the whole point of Fallout is to show how shitty the world becomes due to Nuclear War. Years later they put an idiot in the Game development department, fired all the previous developers of fallout, and said lets make Nukes fun again!
James Bautista Yeah, but I figure that if Bethesda is gonna have player controlled nukes anyway, they might as well take the artistic opportunity, and the nuclear shadows might bring a bit of the original tone/theme back. I generally think that the nukes should function like they did in New Vegas, but ruin the whole map instead of just two isolated locations.
James Bautista The world doesn’t take 500 years to rebuild after a nuclear holocaust lol. You’re dealing with nuclear fallout which disappears after like what, a year or two, not nuclear waste itself
When the game trailer was first released and it showed beautiful West Virginia forests and player-launched nukes, I thought the story was going to go exactly as you described with the nukes, that even in a place where the bombs didn't fall and wildlife and trees still stand (which is so rare in Fallout games as a whole) that the evil of man (players) still inevitably drives players to scorch the last bits of the old world left and permanently doom the world even when we had a chance. Instead, we got "oh sweet a nuke let's go grind some flux."
I mean, we can find subtext there. The game may not scream at you for doing a bad thing, but you *are* nuking a preserved slice of healthy land for your own material gain. The message is conveyed through your own actions, showing not telling.
As someone with a strong interest in games design, long form /dissertations/ like this are absolutely wonderful. As much fun as it can be to poke fun at F76, and how useful and valid it can be to point out it's boons and failings from a technical level; analysis and possible solutions are just way frikkin better!
@@greybayles7955 Waaay ahead of you, but thanks for the recommendation anyway! Mandalore isn't too bad either, but is more short-form and general about more niche games.
*TODD HOWARD* (praise His name) wears a leather jacket and has cool shoes. He needs no help from those cowering before his gaze. The women love his peanus.
Well, 7 months later and I can confirm- they did watch it. Then they thought to themselves: Jon thinks we can be more, what if we can be even less? What if we can put up a $100 pay wall for a private server and bleep the consumer completely?
I found this to be a much more refreshing critique than the witch-hunt based reviews I’ve seen from other RUclipsrs. Thanks for all of the effort you put into this, Jon!
fallout's pre war story where greed lead to death is the sole reason 76 didn't find it's potential, Bethesda wanted money and didn't actually care about what they were making or doing
@@BuzzyB34 Ironic, huh? Guess it's true what they say, "Bethesda *never* understood Fallout." Noah Gervais' critique/review remains my number one recommendation to anyone thinking of playing it.
perhaps make it a settlement. Mobile, armored. a place of stability, a point of power. in a peaceful server, it is a mobile hub that encourages trading and travel over a wide area, like the traveling merchants; in a nuclear hellscape, it is the only place that is safe from the radiation and pollution, a place that raiders will target, and people will have to defend and keep supplied.
@@spacebear4742 In a nuclear hellscape of raiders and bandits, the raiders have mounted turrets and an artillery piece onto their trainline, bombing any poor unsuspecting settlement it gets too close to. You know, just some good old fashioned post apocalyptic fun!
here's a story from fallout 76: good edition I have a story from jon's FO76 single player, (though there would be no enclave) just outside the ash-heap, you see a free-state, a Responder, a raider, and a BOS paladin all sitting by a fire, the player will most likely be curious about why these factions that usually show such open hostility are just sitting by a fire, so they ask one of them why they're all together, and one of them tells the player character about how all their (same faction) buddies died venturing into the ash-heap, they all got lost but ran into each other,. when they first met each other they were going to kill one another, but realized that it would be stupid. so they started to work together to try to escape the ash-heap, the raider had given some pointers on weaknesses of the ash-creatures (that's what I'm calling them) from some of their raider friends stories about killing ash-creatures. the Responder uses their medical know-how to help them become more resistant to the ash-heap's air, and treats any wounds. the free state uses their survival/scavenging skills to keep the group fed off nothing but what they brought, and what they can find on unlucky corpses and finds a way to turn some of the ash into something useful (I don't know yet) and the BOS paladin's general combat skills keep the ash-creatures off their backs. and in the multiplayer, this group would still be alive, because they weren't at the big major battle (which would happen at the end of the game where all the factions fought over access to a nuclear launch site in order to nuke the other's bases, but it malfunctions and then the scorched rise and scorchify everybody in the vicinity, and since so many people were there, nobody left in appalachia could mount an assault on the scorched beast and died to the high number of scorched) and the free state member lead them to a bunker with tons of provisions to last all of them a lifetime, and then they just settled there, they could even act as merchants and sell you stuff. the entire point is to help enforce the whole working together moral like in vault 11, as they manage to work together and play to each other's strengths , allowing them to survive. while everybody else got themselves killed over idiotic rivalries.
extra add-on for fallout good edition, what if there were small raider camps dotted around the world, they could organize smaller, weaker, attacks on smaller, weaker, settlements, and to add some fun for the raider players, they can participate in raids (big or small) and gain some serious points for it, say you raid a town and succsesfully raze it to the ground. that town has a raid factor, which increases rewards for a raid, a raid factor can give experience and weapons, (the idea being you got it from the town or it was provided for you by the raiders) giving more incentive for people to join the raiders, also I think raiders and ex-raiders should have a perk increasing their damage in PVP (it will be less effective for ex-raiders due to being out of practice) the idea would be that as a raider you can win potentially harder fights and level up faster than normal players, and then when you leave the raiders, you won't be killed as often by raiders as they will see your ex-raider status and back off because you would be more of a threat than normal players. the tradeoff being not liked by many of your peers and potentially murdered in revenge for previous death. though I think the bounty should be gone after becoming an ex-raider unless you killed anybody, but remove the base 100 cap bounty.
There's a reason MMO's lean so heavily on the social aspect. Right now it's like they want the worst of all worlds with their balancing of single vs multiplayer experience rather than trying to get the best of both. My point? I'd love to play your version of the game Jon :)
76 is trying to be great at everything and is thus good at nothing. You can't have an easy, casual environment while simultaneously being a hardcore survivalist experience, they're on a spectrum like hot and cold. Being more of one means being less of the other. Same deal with multiplayer and single player experiences. Same with trying to emphasize both lone wolf and party experiences (though you can to some degree be pretty decent at both given the citizens vs raiders scenario). 76 Needs to pick one aspect on each spectrum and stick with it, or else be mediocre at all of them. Just my conclusion though.
I feel like they could manage to have both. Maybe some of the more epic fights would basically require a team, and allow people who want a combat-focused experience have fun without needing to worry too much about survival (since they have a group backing them up), but make it possible to get by alone with sneaking and _sensible cowardice_ to get a more hardcore survival experience.
I just had a horrifying realization. The reason the weapon breakdown lottery was so unsatisfying was because Bethesda decided to turn each gun into its own lootbox. They were hoping the Skinner Box psychology would override common sense and get people addicted to the rush of random rewards in miniature. It failed spectacularly, and thank goodness.
Plenty of people still did. They even say they're "addicted to the grind" without batting an eyelash. (How one can become addicted to *grind* is quite beyond me, but grind addiction is nonetheless a thing.) "Pull the lever; receive a 'reward'" obviously works on the psychologically vulnerable. That's what makes the practice so utterly despicable: it's the psychologically vulnerable who suffer the most. The player community likes to absolve itself of any responsibility whatsoever for the sorry state of video gaming today. Fact is, it would change if people stopped contributing to the nosedive in quality along with the predatory and exploitative industry trends actually responsible for microtransaction nightmares like Fallout 76. It's beyond sad because there are the makings of a great game in Fallout 76. It might even still be salvaged along with Bethesda's reputation and standing in the community, but Bethesda is pretty obviously not interested iin that because it's ignored every single suggestion for turning that around it has received.
But going back to fallout 4 after playing 76 you realize that once you pick up one of a kind of weapon there is no reason to check another. In 3 and new Vegas you could repair your weapon, in 4 sure you can scrap it but the resources you get compared to the weight of weapons was awful.
As someone who hasn't really played Fallout 76, I clicked this video because I wanted to hear what the fuss was about, expecting that I'd watch for five or so minutes, but in reality, I ended up watching for over an hour before I remembered that I had things to be doing. Well done, Jon.
Finding this video in 2021 is interesting. You had made very interesting suggestions for changes and it's fun to see what kind of changes Bethesda actually made. Most of your concerns here have actual valid work-arounds now
Nice review. Speaking of improvements in Fallout 76, what about a new game based on Fallout 76 that is much different? In the new game arch is to address the obvious situation of odd mysterious reoccurring enemies, more less static conditions, lack of real progress in rebuilding USA, and constant grind of characters. -- Tentative title: Fallout Appalachian Revelation -- It Seems Similar To Fallout 76 But Has New Focus and Dynamics (less grind): Appearances like Fallout 76, but it takes place in near future (~ one generation after Vault 76 opens), and is very different in mood with new realization by many characters getting sick of grind, with new wandering prophets, rise of philosophy and spiritual ideas, resistance movements, civil strife, discontent, and desire for higher quality of life by most everyone, except by those who are power players behind the scenes. --- CAUSE and EFFECT: Most inhabitants notice things are way more complex (from their history books) than before the war such as now more currencies, less safe travel, still no long communications to other states nor nations, no decent factories, constant survival, no large farms, no modern hospitals, and so on. They question the grind and lack of real progress in rebuilding "freedom" in USA. Examples include hostile enemies keep coming and their lives are largely a grind (loot, shoot scavenge, beg, quasi-slave to factions) TURNING POINTS & ODDITIES: Inhabitants start talking in unique ways, trying new creative things and new odd things occur even more. Like inhabitants either start moving outside the map or they disappear, or are taken, or major waves of mutants or ghouls appear from unexpected regions; and certain factions attempt to completely clear large areas, and they try to make large factories or large farms, or science research centers, but this effort may be met with resistance by mysterious aliens or by certain factions. SETTING & TIME: About 67 to 126 yrs later after opening Vault 76, and inhabitants questioning lack of progress. THREE TO FIVE POSSIBLE ENDS (some blended together): 1. Focus on progress by certain inhabitants creates civil war to region, and largely wide scale destruction that seems similar to 2077. 2. New mysterious influences from edges of map and by interior agents show even more harsh dangers causing panic and either fleeing map area, or going into stealth mode, or going into new bunkers. 3. Major progress efforts made by players and NPCs in clearing large areas and by establishing hospitals, working labs, large farms, govts, factories, but these may get wiped out by mysterious aliens, or new nuclear bombs. 4. One or more factions or special groups becoming either very powerful, or very hated by many in the region, and that faction(s) gets wiped out completely. So, maybe this could be a reason the Appalachian Brotherhood was not heard of again later in future Fallout lore. 5. Any combination of the previous scenarios could occur in the possible ends. LESSON OF NEW GAME: Freedoms are very hard to win and even a grind is not a guarantee for freedom, and may even hold you back, and mysterious enemies may always be out there, and could even be in your midst. --- RECAP: Players and NPCs start to learn from Fallout 76 and start facing the harsh facts of grind and how repeating the past is not necessarily a solution for the future. They dreadfully realize there are still mysterious things going on that are holding them back even after all they have gone through. So, they must take on new dynamic changes and learn new revelations to truly be free, and to truly rebuild freedoms. -- Copyright (C) April 7, 2023 by KEK Freedom Heritage - All Rights Reserved -- Permission to Share If Credit Given
Such as? 'Pay a hundred dollars a year for an infinite, virtual stash limit despite that we swore the limit couldn't be raised because it would cause stability issues for the game?' Or maybe it was the ultralong and boring introduction to a new currency to grind? Or was it the "content" harkienng to nostaligia for a former DLC best played over again? Please, enlighten us as to what the "workarounds" of which you speak actually were.
Yeah exactly. The “game“ would require such an extensive rework that it'd be like making a new game. Even IF bethesda cared about anything other than your sweet money, I'd like it much more if they'd just focus that effort for their next game.
@@littlejohnny41 If bethesda actually cared about money, they'd put in the work to redo the game. Because that would literally bring in more money. They just wanted to cash in on the shitty live subscription and MTX trend.
Bethesda needs to hire this man immediately. I would buy a whole Bethesda friggin console and subscription service to play a fully functional version of 76 he describes towards the end.
SpeedingOffence I'm playing the Metro Franchise right now. If you need an alternative post apocalyptic game play Metro. its basically the fallout of Russia. just more shooty lol
They did. It is called rust where the players that are in a group can monopolize resources in a way to exclude those other people in a place that is barren and lacks conveniant resources
Jon’s point about vats and the tiny robots, I’ve rewatched this video a few times and it finally struck me that when I use vats in Bethesda’s other games, it’s because I am panicked at the quick moving close thing. The robots don’t work with vats because they are quick moving little things... uh...
I've never seen a critique video by someone who I felt legitimately loved the franchise as such as you do. All of them just talk about all the ways the game or the studio sucks and why they hate them and why no one else should play the game or support them anymore. You actually go through each issue in depth, why it's an issue, how it was handled in previous games, why that wouldn't work in the game you're addressing, but how it could be fixed with multiple different possible solutions. And not just multiple solutions, but how those changes affect other aspects of the game as well, and ways to mitigate those effects. It's seriously incredible to listen to. Bravo sir.
To satisfy single player people, multiplayer people, survival people and non-survival people, just make different servers for each person. People who want to play solo can, while multiplayer people can play with people that also want to do multiplayer. Same goes for survival. Sure, maybe it needs more servers to be up at a time, but it would certainly be better then compromising to two different kinds of people.
Whatever anyone's opinion on the game, well done for putting the effort in to make such an in depth video Jon. Your commitment to the fallout universe is admirable.
You could even say that repairing some weapons can give you a small chance to unlock a mod (because your taking apart the weapon and going through it so you will learn what happens inside and possibly how to improve it)
"Ok so the solution to carry weight problem is either to either remove all carry weight perks by giving free carry weight, or remove the perks and reduce the carry weight" Bethesda: "How about we start selling unlimited carryweight for 100$ a year instead"
More precisely You have a stash limit for server related issues, we can't do anything about that Oh wait, give us a hundred a year and have as much stash as you want, money powers our servers
Well in Fallout 1 and 2 you can use mods to add XXXX amount of carry weight. I have about 900 for Fallout 1 right now and it's glorious. In Fallout 3 and New Vegas I add 9000 weight with the in-game command console which is even easier. They can pay me to play any live service games which have become trash for rich people.
What do you think of Fallout 76? Some bloke: It just sucks, what more there is to say. Hey you hot pink-coloured egg carton, how about you Jon: Well let me give you short answer to that
One of the biggest issues for needing to scrap to learn weapon mods... is the Ultracite Laser Pistol, its supposed to be a big reveal and special weapon that the brotherhood had managed to develop for the Scorched problem, but not only is it a separate gun so any learnt laser plan isn't compatible, its also the only non legendary spawn variant of the gun in the game, so you HAVE to buy the plan for the gun from the Brotherhood vender in Watoga, and its VERY expensive to craft each one requiring a lot of the rarest materials in the game to craft!
I'm not disagreeing, but I want to add these mechanics are the shell most mmo's use to start their "end game content". Not defending it, not saying i would enjoy it (if i was at that stage), just saying it's not an uncommon mechanic and seems to keep streamers in games in the early days by adding a ridiculous long grind for some end game item until the developers can make more content.
Having extremes of player levels on the same servers makes the game miserable for low level characters after 10 hours or so. Considering if you’re level 15 and are in the same location with a level 80 character the enemies that spawn will be to high for the level 10 player. Also even compared to previous fallout games the enemies are extreme bullet sponges.
Technically, but it works better. You trade 1 iron and leather strap you found for a 5 gold shitty iron dagger that raises your general smithing ability the equivalent of looking for 2 minutes at a git on the front of a book smithing. Then you can either sell the dagger, or spend a shitty soul gem to increase price (also increasing enchanting) again, low, but still there. Then you can improve it for one more iron (up to legendary) for more smithing. Then you can sell your,amazing shitty dagger to someone for 2 things. Gold and speech. Every action you took in that took something away, but gave you something more permanent in return. I always have felt if they just took the fucking leveling system from Skyrim, imported it into fallout, Shoot an enemy 100 times? 1 point to whatever type of weapon you're using Sell a valuable piece of prewar,tech for 5000 caps? A couple points to barter and your caps. You want to level up your speech? Level it up by doing the diplomatic options instead of fighting, even if the option is just minor like disputing the price of an item, or lying to someone so they give you 50 caps if you wanna be a bastard. I just feel Skyrim was 2nd best in is world and characters and people. And 1st best in its mechanics. Combining the two into a centralized single player experience like a traditional fallout game, having the option that works canonically for playing online as an option with Skyrim like improvement as you do them mechanics would just make an online fallout game so much more fun knowing you actually have to shoot your gun to be good with a gun.
@@chrissimon5810 I wouldn't consider invalidating literally all loot (including daedric artifacts which were meant to be pretty much unrivaled in Power) as well as the entire idea of a build with a stupidly overpowered enchanting system "1st best in it's mechanics"
For me personally, I stopped playing because the game has "no point" to it. To summarize. 1: I don't enjoy the quests. They don't catch me, they bore me, I even stopped reading through the logs and stuff after a while cause I just simply wasn't interested and I felt absolutely nothing. No decent story and no NPCs removes immersion too. So quests = 0 for me. 2: I felt like there is no challenge. Even with spending over 90% of my points in inventory enhancing perks so I can maximize what I can carry, I still found the difficulty to be... lame... couple that with the lack of any serious consequence for death, and the game takes away any sort of feeling of threat and danger and with that, takes away immersion as well. Then, out of nowhere, you stumble across some high level spawns because some level XXX player with no life and thousands of hours played is in the area and triggered some ultra-high spawns (again, immersion fkt in the ass), and you start dumping about half inventory of ammo into one of said spawns to kill them, and they drop a pipe pistol... So challenge = 0 for me. 3: Looting is a core mechanic of the game... that the game punishes you for... It's like they had two different teams working on the same game and they went beyond their way to make sure those teams can't communicate with each other until the game was released. On one hand, one of the only things you can "do" when you visit a location/POI, besides killing the spawns there, is to loot the place... and so you do, and then you haul all the shit you looted all the way back to your base, and you discover that once you dump the shit you looted from your perk-ehanced inventory into your "stash", it will immediately fill up all your stash and you no longer have any room to store your loot. Sooooo.... that's it. There's no point in looting any more because you got nowhere to store your loot. And you can't sell your loot either cause vendors are limited to 200 caps, they offer atrocious prices, and the most accessible ones are always sold out (have no credits left) cause other people already sold to them... Soooo... without looting, the only thing you can do in a location now, is just kill the spawns. That's it. You go somewhere, you kill the spawns, you don't even bother looking around for loot anymore cause you're just getting pissed at all the rare materials you're finding and that you know you got nowhere to store... and you move on, dying a little bit on the inside... Looting = 0 for me. 4: Survival mechanic is non existent.... where's the "survival" aspect in this game? I mean the mechanics, seam to be there, as lame as they are, but they just fail to do anything. It's dumbed down to such a sub-casual level that it becomes irrelevant. Survival = 0 for me. 5: Exploration? Where's the exploration feeling from the Fallout games? That sense of amazement and discovery? Well... once you realize that everywhere you go there's NOTHING but a bunch of enemies to kill, a bunch of loot that you can't pick up cause you got nowhere to store and POTENTIALLY, MAYBE, a bunch of boring computer logs that you don't really need to bother reading cause they don't really lead to anything that directly affects you (unlike other Fallout games where many locations had their own puzzles weaved into the logs and locational stories that often unlocked hidden areas of a location and revealed interesting unique gear or valuable loot stashes/treasures or even secret larger story/quest arcs, or npcs and all sorts of wonders)... So besides seeing nicely designed places.... exploration = 0 for me. 6: PVP? LOL. NOPE! Wth, are we even going to talk about this? Level 300 with power armor and plasma gatling vs level 10 guy with pipe pistol and vault tec suit... Level auto-scaling!? Wtf? NOPE... just nope... this is such a hairball I'm not even going to touch on what's wrong with it. PVP is just not a thing in this game ok!? PVP = 0 for me. 7: Base building? Erhm... sure, I like to build a nice base. Spend hours upon hours making a masterpiece, and I'm gonna build this here, and then this here, and then I'm gonna... Oops, sorry, you've reached your limit... But, but but, BUT, I just started.... No butts! You've reached your limit! Now be a good boy and do like everyone else running around the map doing events to level up. That's it with building for you ok!? You're done! Base building = 0 for me. 7b: I'm not done with the base building... What kind of a fing game makes the buildings disappear when the player is offline!? Why the flying fk would you go with a "server-less" architecture if you KNEW you were going to have player owned buildings. How the fk do you want people to build a sense of community when every time you log you're thrown on a different server. Yesterday you walked by a cool player house, and he had a garden and you picked corn, and sat down on a bench, and watched a beautiful sunset, and you went to take a shit, and when you came back you were standing on a rock surrounded by a bunch of trees cause the guy logged out... so much for having neighbors and forming a community and discovering player-built landmarks... 8: Sooooo in the end!? In the end.... you level up... and you level up... and you visit all locations, and you do all your quests and all events and everything... aaand.... that's it. You can just keep doing the same events over and over and continuing to level up... without any reason at all besides showing everyone how much of a no-lifer you are compared to the other no-lifers around you that sunk thousands of hours into pointless xp grinding... It's like an MMO WITHOUT the end-game dungeons and raiding... At least in an MMO you'd do challenging and fun end-game dungeons, to get high-end gear, so that you can then go on even more challenging end-game raids with even more people and in this epic multiplayer events. But there's none of that here... Sure, you could call dropping a nuke and killing the damn bat thing a raid event but that's just a very, very, very, very shallow experience compared even with the most basic MMOs out there. The point being... there's no point... the game has no point. NONE. I could write for many many more hours and get into the details of every single thing that's wrong but... why even bother. This game can't be saved. It was an experiment, and sadly it failed. And there are so many different things that are wrong that it's just unrealistic to speak of solving it. It's just a complete mess and no amount of time investment or development will make this game into a decent game.
Now that’s some essay-like review that actually trying to fix this game. I haven’t played 76 and only understand it through gameplay footage, but this is really noble cause, for that you have my respect.
Well shit, if Fallout 76 actually were like this it would probably have been one of the best online experiences to date, let alone a fantastic fallout game
(Sorry for going pretty much on a rant here) I fully agree, a game as described would be a cult hit and from a design perspective quite sound if balanced well. Though it wouldn't have as much widespread appeal, it wouldn't be as casual an experience. Most fans of the franchise and and many fans of gaming in general want less casual, more interesting games. Yet let's not forget that more-so than the content, the money drives development and publishers (let's not forget that Zenimax, being the publisher and thus having majority say in decisions, is responsible for the bad decisions as much if not more-so than Bethesda, although this doesn't mean Bethesda isn't at major fault themselves) want as many people to play their game as possible, especially if the game is going to have microtransactions. However a casual game will attract a lot of people, that will play less often, and stop far sooner, while a hardcore fanbase may be smaller, but play more often and stick with the game for far longer. More hardcore fans would also be the ones more willing to buy your microtransactions more-so than casual players. More players on paper sounds good for profits, in the short run, but a smaller but hardcore fanbase can be far more profitable in the long run. I've also been programming for almost 16 years, and I by far am no where near what I would consider a great programmer, yet even at my current skill level, none of the ideas he suggested in the video are that difficult. In practice there would be major balancing that would need to go on and many revisions, but fundamentally from a mechanics perspective none of it is particularly that hard of an engineering challenge, and the framework and fundamentals for most of it already exist or are close to existing. The features themselves are quite simple for the most part, but the main problem in getting any of this done is that every decision needs to be approved in most environments, some studios will allow their designers and programmers to prototype ideas to present, or even work on a separate branch to implement into the game without approval without them being merged into the primary branch until approved, even so for even seemingly tiny changes the amount of bureaucracy that is involved is immense and getting approval of small ideas, let along large ones can take large meetings with investors, publishers, executives, etc and can take weeks. Bethesda from what I understand is a fairly casual environment compared to many large studios, but they still answer to Zenimax, who would function like described. Bethesda has a few advantages here, with the main studio being more relaxed for the most part and more casual environment, local decisions can be made faster, but not major ones that affect the core of the game. However the second advantage is that it's an online live service. As least in theory this would grant more freedoms in design as the game has already sold or reached most of it's playerbase/has already launched and deadlines aren't as much of a factor, in fact live-service games practically live on content updates. The reason I say in theory however is because this game launched in such a state that the reception of it was so negative, chances are that Zenimax won't let Bethesda take any major monetary risks, and changing the game this dramatically would be a massive risk, it would be a major investment, into something that both hasn't been explored much before, and also may not recoup the investment cost due to its reputation. A live-service that launches to positive reception will likely be given far more creative freedom by it's publisher(s) and their investors, the less, the less. That being said if they could roll out parts of this at a time that reduces the risk over having it as a focus, new content and new safe content is highly likely to drive some monetary gains allowing Bethesda to take a couple risks at a time. But if a turnaround takes too long the game may never be able to recover and the game has been out for a significant amount of time and hasn't progressed in many important areas yet. Also honestly Bethesda seriously needs to clean up it's engine, not necessarily make a new one of use a new one, but overhaul many aspects of their current one at least, as they've just piled more and more stuff on top of a very inefficient and old infrastructure that pretty much no one really uses anymore, this has led to their engine being extremely bloated and messy and being in general a pain to deal with. Tasks which are trivial in most other engines, or even making one from scratch are far harder to do in the Creation Engine, and modders, who have had to use the tools can contest to the tedium and problems with the tools and engine. The game looks okay for the most part, but lackluster textures, models, animations and lighting/materials are everywhere, and while that's not a deal breaker, to have low-fidelity graphics you'd expect the game to run quite well as it's not as graphically intensive (or shouldn't be if done right), yet it doesn't. The game runs poorly on even the most powerful systems and has since launch, and has only gotten marginally better. Worse graphics in addition to worse performance isn't very acceptable and is almost exclusively because of how fundamentally problematic their game engine is at this point, using decades old rendering logic with some modern effects and changes thrown in on top of it. It would make their games faster to make, easier to make, less buggy, allow more complicated features to be possible to add without insane amounts of workarounds or hacky solutions and insane effort.
I have a story from jon's FO76 single player, (though there would be no enclave) just outside the ash-heap, you see a free-state, a Responder, a raider, and a BOS paladin all sitting by a fire, the player will most likely be curious about why these factions that usually show such open hostility are just sitting by a fire, so they ask one of them why they're all together, and one of them tells the player character about how all their (same faction) buddies died venturing into the ash-heap, they all got lost but ran into each other,. when they first met each other they were going to kill one another, but realized that it would be stupid. so they started to work together to try to escape the ash-heap, the raider had given some pointers on weaknesses of the ash-creatures (that's what I'm calling them) from some of their raider friends' stories about killing ash-creatures. the Responder uses their medical know-how to help them become more resistant to the ash-heap's air, and treats any wounds. the free state uses their survival/scavenging skills to keep the group fed off nothing but what they brought, and what they can find on unlucky corpses and finds a way to turn some of the ash into something useful (I don't know yet) and the BOS paladin's general combat skills keep the ash-creatures off their backs. and in the multiplayer, this group would still be alive, because they weren't at the big major battle (which would happen at the end of the game where all the factions fought over access to a nuclear launch site in order to nuke the other's bases, but it malfunctions and then the scorched rise and scorchify everybody in the vicinity, and since so many people were there, nobody left in appalachia could mount an assault on the scorched beast and died to the high number of scorched) and the free state member lead them to a bunker with tons of provisions to last all of them a lifetime, and then they just settled there, they could even act as merchants and sell you stuff. the entire point is to help enforce the whole working together moral like in vault 11, as they manage to work together and play to each other's strengths , allowing them to survive. while everybody else got themselves killed over idiotic rivalries.
@@DreadKyller I always use wrestling logic when it comes to these kinda games. The hardcore fans will buy it regardless, you have to draw the casuals in. It doesn't necessarily make the product better but mass appeal is the goal.
Yeah, the only thing that was implemented was mediocre stories, and very repetetive endgame content. Now they're just full on doing these 'seasons', which have more in common with Path of Exile than a Fallout game.
Private Servers won't have the resources to run even half the player number you see currently in the game due to the horrid engine. Not to mention how the delusional permanent(objects) and temporary(npcs) entity additions will crush them even faster.
@@sedlinasera3891 Its probably based on linux, I'll bet people will find solutions and optimizations to run smoothly, and private servers can be run just for you and your friends...
Fallout NV: We're going to add nukes to a DLC that give players the option use a nuke on their opposition. This will force players to weigh their choices and decide if they want to use the nuke and destroy them with possibly terrible consequences or do nothing with the nukes and risk possibly loosing the battle of hoover damn or suffering further casualties. This demonstrates the ferocity of nuclear weapons and gives the game a darker, more realistic feel and also give some commentary about how weapons of mass destruction can do terrible things in the wrong hands. Fallout 76: whats a sin of matt tic lol nuke whatever you want
Ian Henderson Let’s be honest, the nukes in Lonesome Road were pretty pointless and only opened up high level combat arenas. Almost exactly like 76, except without rare crafting components.
@@CrimsonKnight77 I find myself in the minority it seems, but I freaking hated Lonesome Road. I thought that was a very weak DLC. Only reason I wasn't pissed about it was because I got GOTY edition super cheap.
Finally someone saying what I’ve been saying all along! What about the rebuilding? My own notion was that the Vault could serve as a hub, containing blueprints, tools...a space to work together and actually rebuild. Water filtration, solar power, etc. But this guy is way more ambitious, logical, imaginative-envisioning a game people could immerse themselves in for years! Bravo, sir!
Daniel Cohn-Bendit for real since the game launched it’s just been complaining and I stopped keeping up w it because of that but this video brought my attention to how amazing of a game this could’ve been.
This would be a great idea for a Fallout 5: a traditional single player mode, then a multiplayer segment that serves as a sequel to the main story with all the features you described.
Bethesda has been a mess for some time, we can only hope Microsoft can shape them up to be at their best. My only experiences with Beth is TES while on the other hand 76 became my first fallout experience (sadly). so it's kind of funny to me to discover that 76 is their worst game ever now that I'm lvl 111, it didn't seem too bad at first. But then you notice things. Things that were thoroughly discussed in this video lol
@@larryhoover2541 I'm sorta already in that process to be honest lol Uninteresting enemies, scenery, quests and combat... No incentive to keep playing. Beth really screwed up with this one, and I doubt I'm gonna try the other fallouts now because of that. Whoever is in charge of Bethesda content should just quit and let someone with real passion run the show. Their games suck, probably because they've been using that shitty engine they don't want to let go of. It kind of make me wonder how this company is still around 😒
@@Mestephra Fallout 3, NV and even fallout 4 have a lot of redeemable qualities, and if you have them on PC, its even better as the modding community really makes some good stuff. I would recommend checking that stuff out if it is at all possible for you!
@@larryhoover2541 I've heard some good about them, maybe I'll give them a shot. I'll gladly take some of the spite back if they're that good as people say. It sucks that my first impression of fallout had to be 76, after lvl 50 I find I just idle a lot. Launching a nuke the first time was cool, but afterwards I realized that was pretty much the only cool thing to work for. Just having different guns or cosmetics don't impress me much, innovative content and creativity does. The Scorch Beast queen is a boring "wait and shoot" for something that's supposed to be a major battle in the game (she's big, so why can't she grab n yeet people? Or send us flying if directly caught in her misty blue dash of disease?) The wendigo colossus is a stand and shoot, and yet with legs like his he could totally kick people around into the air. He does have his scream/fear mechanics but it's kind of a weird thing to have in a fight like his but at least it's something. I just wished these (and most) enemies had more special actions, AI and tactics. Adding AI personality would be a cool thing to see, enemies could diversify their behaviour making most encounters seem somewhat refreshing. But thats just my take. Anyone can go on about what could be, I just wished Beth would act on those ideas
@Forsaken Pumpkin wtf cyberpunk was a shitshow built on unethical labor from start to finish 76 still sucks and has implemented a plethora of gacha mechanics and other base systems requiring monetization to bypass?
they did put in efforts, with the folklore being variants of a monster, not to mention the world design, just because the internet say it's bad doesn't mean every part of it is, like come on, have you learn to grow up? that's the equivalent of hoping your child to born with every skills that exist on our universe. fallout 76 is a flawed game, in many ways, it's not perfect, not to mention zenimax is the one taking control of monetization, not bethesda.
while all that happens BGS was also forced to rush 76, yes it is rushed, it wasn't planned to be bad from start, which is oddly enough leads to bethesda softworks delaying DOOM ETERNAL, hence saving both id's reputation and DOOM ETERNAL itself.
Also make said service delete fucking everything. According to our charts this should make them buy more if they have to start over. Also ban MATN from future Bethesda online services for showing us up like those pricks Obsidian did......twice.
This video really made me reflect on this My biggest problem with this game is its gorgeous, it looks so good, I've always loved the aesthetic of 4 and this just took it further. I didn't even know all of the problems you've mentioned I couldn't persist with it, what a mess, such a shame but for me the biggest kick to the nards comes in the form of the fact that it actually looks fantastic. I would sell my soul for them to just put this map in fallout 4
The game world is gorgeous (or, at least, it was until they made lighting and assorted other changes) and a pleasure to explore. It also contains some of the best environmental storytelling ever to appear in a Bethesda game. The artists and developers themselves did a wonderful job with it Too bad that's all there is to it.
OH MAN! The releasing a single player campaign set 10 years before 76 then releasing the multiplayer set after everyone dies..... that would have been BRILLIANT! Now I'm incredibly sad this didn't happen. :(
All I could think of for your stalker idea was the giant lag spike when all the enemies spawned for the attack. I have no confidence that a basic enemy ai could stalk properly, especially in a group. Stalking a player is difficult to program without it being a scripted event so you would be limited to just audio cues with no spawned monsters until the attack. I like many ideas in this video but they require a level of stability that I think is currently out of Bethesda's scope.
The Ash Stalkers are cool, but I found the mechanics more interesting then the creature. Reminds me of Silent Hill and the Mole Miners would be perfect for that! They attack, or don’t, and we wouldn’t know why... until it’s too late. Maybe part of the area quest would be to discover how they can navigate the Ash heap. Requiring us to follow them underground and learn about them. Maybe find out they worship a Giant Molerat Queen and you gotta acquire a tame molerat and with it you can better navigate. Otherwise the lack of area specific diversity was a problem for me. Each area had the same enemies, at one time or another. Ya know?
It's so rare that I see a criticism of something that is at the same time actually constructive. I get to hear negativity everywhere I go in the world today, but I can always come back to this channel to feel something positive again. I don't know if you'll see this comment, but thank you for that, it really does help.
@@littlejohnny41 i can say rn its improved slightly since launch, less bugs, human NPCs new story lines and some other things worth giving a double check
I appreciate you taking the time to make a video like this. Most people played the game, didn't like it, or the monitization model, and just wrote it off (which is completely reasonable.) I feel like it could have been a great game, they just went and fucked up horribly. I was one of the people who for YEARS now has been saying "I wish they would make a coop Fallout/TES game, I'd have so much more fun with friends!" and I wanted to love Fallout 76, I really wanted to. But what we got was.... not what I wanted from a coop Fallout/TES game. I kept playing it for probably nearly 60+ hours, but... I just couldn't continue. Most of my friends had stopped playing, I had a few times where I crashed before the base 10min auto save time, and lost a lot of progress, I couldn't get any of the damn mods I wanted for my weapons of choice, the silly limit to how much you could store in your stash, etc etc. I really did want to love the game, I ignored all of the "Fallout 76 BAD" talk in the community, and kept going, but Fallout 76 just wore me down to the point where I uninstalled it and haven't looked back. I really hope they learn from the mistakes and make an actually good Fallout/TES coop game sometime soon, or the modding community manages to figure it out well enough to be playable.
int3r4ct I don’t get why they don’t just add a co-op mode to one of their games after making an already good game. They would need to change the way some things work but it would be way better than 76 or ESO
@@JohnDoe-nf7up just saying, if you spent more than 60 hours on a game you obviously enjoyed it enough for the money you spent. And if you didnt enjoy it, then you're dumb for having kept playing it.
Makrill0 considering I picked it up when it was like 50% off, I 1000% got my money’s worth out of it. I just wish it was so good that I wanted to put 100s more hours into it.
Posting to improve your engagement score with the almighty algorithm. Was looking forward to this one. Just try not to drive yourself into the ground in future. We want you to keep making great videos, and not die from an overwork induced heart attack.
I've watched this so many times and I just can't get over the idea that a single-player first Fallout 76 with drop-in co-op allowing players to join their friends' single-player worlds would have been so much better. Saints Row 3 did this basically perfectly.
someone start a petition to get Jon in charge of the new 'super survival' mode, settlers VS raiders. seriously though, great work. It's nice to see someone be constructive for once instead of just bashing the game. I think your town idea is great, but you should be able to make raider settlements too (mabee limited to single settlements instead of towns). you could also expand the idea, where each town could be attached to a faction, like responder, BOS etc, or custom factions you make in game. This could lead to interesting scenarios like raider factions going to war, or BOS factions with different ideoligies like in new vegas. Wow, i got abit sidetracked there... Anyway, great vid :D
The segment where you talk about converting a single player game into a multiplayer one really got me thinking. It's a common criticism of a lot of the ongoing multiplayer games (games that don't have an "end" like a single player game would) that the devs don't really seem to care what their players think, and that they make intentionally grindy systems intended to be major time sinks. I think this highlights a critical flaw with the concept of "no ending" games. I think it's more obvious in MMOs, but FO76 tends to suffer from the same design mechanics. In a single player game, the devs are incentivized to make sure that players are having the most amount of fun they possible can. Those players will recommend this great game to others when they finish, and the revenue is generated as a function of the *number of people* who they can sell the game to.This is true to an extent with multiplayer games that have no end, but a larger impetus is put on the devs to *keep people playing* than to make the game a truly great experience. Multiplayer games live and die by their playerbase, so if players breeze through and enjoy themselves but then place the game aside... that's demonstrably worse for sales than if they enjoy themselves moderately but continue grinding along. Because of that I think the "endless multiplayer game" concept, be it an MMO or a game designed like FO76, will always end up as a war between players and developers, wherein developers are trying to keep things JUST fun enough that people won't quit, but grindy enough that they'll continue to beat their head against it. The entirety of the rest- be it good story, flashy mechanics, individual fun gameplay loops, etc... that's all there to act as cushioning around the extremely fine line of "Just fun enough to keep you grinding". And the truth is, players didn't enjoy Fallout 76 not because it was the only game that had this problem... it's just because they didn't balance the cushioning well enough. It became too obvious that the grinding was there. World of Warcraft is currently experiencing the same thing in BFA. The grinding is obvious, and the rewards and paltry and very randomized. So while I desperately want FO76 to do well, and I want the devs to earnestly look at each of your suggestions and implement many of them... I'm left thinking that perhaps actual old school RPGs and Endless Multiplayer Experiences are like oil and water. Even the most successful among them have continually dumbed down the RPG elements and embraced the grind loops. Anyways, an excellent assessment of FO76, where it went wrong, and how to fix it. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go cancel my WoW subscription.
I honestly believe fo76 is the result of incompetence. Either by management or developers and their hand got probably forced by the publisher. There were so many fundamental design flaws and technical errors on launch that you cannot talk it away any other way. They definately had no QA of the pvp system or ignored it completely, nor were they prepared to fix bugs in a timely manner. 3 months after launch it now is in a state where it is playable as a game, left with most design flaws but at least the technical side is kinda okay. I think the idea pitched by todd was a good call for "endless multiplayer game". In the end a multiplayer game can only be endless if content is created by the players, because there is no viable way devs can ever provide enough "satisfiing" content in the same time as it is consumed. Every hour gameplay is probably worth 100s of hours of devtime when you include assets, worldbuilding, lore, etc... Many successful games have found some way to enable players to make their own stories. i.e. Minecraft gives you an easy to use sandbox, mobas create new situations you not encountered before and constantly rebalance stuff so it doesnt get as stale, Arc could have been a well of learning opportunity for this game. BUT FO76 just doesn't give players enough tools to do that. The cooking and "player taders" are the best examples. There is no chat (probably because moderating 1000s of servers is not easy or cheap), the servers have not enough players on them to have enough customers, and there is no help to create 3rd party helping tools to deal with setting up trades like an API for websites. Cooking or crafting services in general could have been an awesome job to pick up, but as in the video described: It is just not worth it and everyone can do everything anyways. Indie games in EA like eco did player economy systems better. Where are social systems like clans? Where are party/clan camps that get raided (as another junksink)? Why do the workshops exist in the same world where there is an endless supply of respawning mats by server hopping - talking again about interlocking cogs and fundamental design flaws. There is one other thing that adds to this feeling of "not enough": There are now games with 5+ years of constant development in this "endless multiplayer" environment that provide you with hundreds of hours of worthy gameplay if you just pick them up now. This is a new thing! The first of those games that are still around came out around the early 2010s. So this generation grows up with that as a standard. So i think sandboxes are a good way for endless multiplayer (but of course - you need to work for rewards - so there need to be a reasonable grind in any case), its just that fo76 had the right idea with the wrong implementation by incompetent people. PS: Because its 2019 i feel i need to disclaim this: Calling people incompetent is more a factual statement than some hate against a specific group or individuals. It is used as a description of skilllevel based on numerous instances of nonfunctional perks, obvious bugs with open sourced fixes at launch, complete ignorance of the concept of save client-server-communication (aka why items could be duped soo easily), reintroduction of previously fixed bugs (you get laughed at when you do this kind of stuff in 2nd semester computer science) and while many of those things are fixed now it shows the technical inaptitude of the team.
Jeff B 100% agree. The game isn't really any more grind than any other multiplayer game. The drapes just aren't as pretty. I remember playing the Halo games and the Battlefield games and not being that good at them in particular, so to unlock new stuff meant grinding my face in game after game where I'd get murdered dozens of times...wow, my childhood was actually a lot darker than I remembered...
Bethesda needs to hire Jon to come up with ideas for the next Fallout game and/or fix F76. His ideas of how he’d do Fallout 76 is like my dream Fallout game.
ideas aren't the same as development. His ideas are mostly pretty impossible. Anyone can come up with a bunch of massive ideas for what a great game would be like.
Honestly I disagree they’re impossible. Incredibly difficult, yes. But everything he discusses is something that starts at the game concept level, before any programming has even started. Had these kinds of ideas been tossed around during the meetings before the game even began being programmed, most of these could have been able to be done. I’m not saying easy, but had try been proposed at the right time they could’ve been possible.
About the mod part, I think adding "Expertise" for each type of gun would help players focus on specific weapons and help them feel worth investing time in that specific type. Expertise can be earned by using the weapon to kill the enemy and as your expertise level increases, you gain access to more options to modify your weapons. This can be combined with the old system that along the way you still have a chance to earn higher rank mods when scrapping the weapon. This will at least ease the tension that eventually you will gain access to every mod of that weapon if your expertise is at the max level. This also makes the game feel more immersive for the player as the heavy weapon character that never used shotguns or rifles before still has to earn expertise from the beginning if they want to use a new type of weapon. Like the real world, we all earn skills through experience of doing each specific tasks.
But because he/she was still low-leveled and not specced into heavy weapons, when said character tries to fire it the Fatman miss fires and blows themselves up. xD
12:00 I had an experience similar to that too. I got a Two Shot .44 from the first legendary enemy I killed, and it did three times the damage of every other weapon I had, for the rest of my playthrough. I couldn’t continue with the game after a while, but even as I quit at level 12, my .44 did more damage per hit than Jons Black Powder pistol, even counting all the perks he had giving him the supposed edge. By the time he’d completed his character, he’d still only had about 10dmg on me per shot, of a gun I got at level 4. I’m sure the game had larger problems, but that’s the one that showed the most to me.
27 minutes in, and I agree about making it more survival orientated. Me and my friends currently are playing through the game from scratch with no HUD (having to do the old FO3/NV/4 way of pressing x to open a container to see whats inside), no fast travel and no teams, as well as only talking through area chat. Makes it so much more fun so far, and honestly walking back to my CAMP after a hard day of scavenging feels so good, it literally makes me think about what I actually want to bring back like "Do I leave the hunting rifle, and bring the level locked plasma rifle?" "what scrap am I going to bring back". It's real fun however when your controller disconnects while in-game, area chat breaks, so you have to leave and join back which is such a hassle. I played yesterday with my friend doing the Rose Quests (worst quest tbh) and we went into the wendigo cave together with mining helmets on and my friend went to scout ahead and his voice got more distant until I heard him sprinting back going "RUN THERES 2 FUCKING WENDIGOS". We didn't know which way they were coming from and had to sit back to back waiting. Intense as fuck and makes things way more memorable and enjoyable than playing the game normally.
@Dibidam85 Agreed. Sadly Bethesda only wants fanboy zombies, not the dedicated nameless fans that have been with them over the decades. Corporate and their hierarchy spawn want to monopolize all the creative power. They would never allow developers to listen to even basic feedback from true fans like Jon and his video here. In fact, Bethesda is currently doubling down on insanity: they are now hiring monetization experts for future games because they thought the weakpoint of 76's low sales was unoptimized microtransactions. (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻ (Personally a fan since Morrowind. I think I'm going to have an aneurysm. . .)
@@dragonhold4 fyi it has been stated on multiple occasions that sales and recurring revenue from microtransactions are not grouped into the same earnings pile. I guess what I'm saying is, please stop talking out of your ass.
The section at 1:11:11 resonated with me the most. I always felt that the different regions of the map, whilst visually different, just felt very samey in terms of challenge. I'd love there to be some environmental hazards in places like the Ash Heap or Toxic Valley, it would give players something to strive towards and there would be a sense of achievement and wonder and pride at getting there. Also, this video is a tremendous achievement. Well done Jon, you can be proud of this masterpiece!
Here's a sort alteration to your suggestions on zones and difficulty. Perhaps have each area have obstructions that cater to, not specific perks/tactics, but to specific SPECIAL attributes. So with your Ash Crawler suggestion perhaps rather than just sneaking it's all about agility. SO sneaking allows you to evade ash crawlers but perhaps they're slower so you can outrun them and find safety if you have enough agility. Perhaps your acid storm will quickly deplete the health of players with low Endurance but higher endurances might be able to just power through the storm. So now the difficulty is determined by your choices and what makes you special overall rather than specifically. AND this also means group play would be encouraged by essentially recruiting people as guides and protection. Low visibility, get a high perception guy to better evade enemies. Lots of terminals blocking easier paths, get a high Intelligence to hack them. This mean players can also gain access to new types of treasure and junk, maybe if you have high strength you can gain more access to the Strength focused area and thus junk that is more prevalent there. So maybe the strength guy has more access to adhesive, but the intelligence guy has better access to screws.
I've worked in the game industry for 20 years as a game designer/ producer and creative director and I can say, If Bethesda had anyone on staff that looked so deeply into their design process and project goals as deeply as this video, Fallout 76 would have never shipped in the sorry state as it did. This video is a master class in a critical analysis of core system design and, more importantly, franchise integrity. Bethesda, if you're watching, this video is the solution to your Fallout 76 issues. Hire him now and pay him well. Bravo sir....long time watcher and subscriber, much respect!
He has other video-essays on different games that are just as insightful. Jon is amazingly sharp for someone with a 0 Perception stat . I think the education in classics yields an analytical mind, that sees details clearly within the bigger picture.
@@Nimno74 Oh yeah, I have watched nearly all of his videos. This one though....insightful, informative, excellent design instincts... as I said....this is a Master Class level design and franchise perceptively driven evaluation. Hireable for sure.
@@TheJodyhicks Granted, it is easier to take a pre-existing thing, and see how it can be altered, than to create something from thin air, but I'd love to hand a lot of game ideas I have over to a think tank full of people like Jon.
Bethesda doesnt need any more armchair developers, they already have Todd Howard.
You're certainly right, but I imagine some of FO76's current state is also due to the "You've taken too much time, finish up something in the next week/month/whatever and ship it!" effect, with the financial guys dropping the hammer and forcing a compromised version to be released.... To some degree, an analysis like Jon's is easier in hindsight, _seeing_ the problems the current design causes and going from there. Perhaps a longer development cycle would have allowed some of this retrospection to happen internally.
I'm a single player game person, I've never played (or wanted to play) an always-online MMO. I don't like the idea of being at the mercy of server issues, other people, time zone issues, etc. All that said, I'd break my streak in an instant if 76 operated like how you've outlined.
That was absolutely my takeaway from this video!
server issues, other people, time zone issues, just got 76 for $15 on sale and none of these are any issue, They have improved a lot I'd give it another year and try it on sale you might have some fun
In my opinion, the reason you never wanted to play one previously is because something like this doesn't seem to exist. You want a game like this in your gaming life, but can't fill that void. Gosh I wish 76 were like this. Kind of why I never actually picked up on 76. I watch people's videos and read news about it, but been sticking to playing FONV, FO4 and outer worlds as of late
multiplayer is just not what fallout people wanted sounds great on paper but when it comes to gather no one likes it and it not easy to do. All I ever wanted from a fallout is a co-op were a friend if they wanted can join my world and i can do the same to them bit like far cry does it that would of worked not a online only MMO with no same world and all run on servers and no story no humans and tapes you care nothing about to get quests.
@@giggity4670 . Bethesda apparently did take the criticism as constructive feedback and made all of these changes that he wanted. Nuclear Winter was dropped and so no more Battle Royale. Thankfully, the Vault that was used for it, Vault 51, was opened as an explorable Vault and I'm so glad that they did this. Zax as an Ai that decides the Overseer and bases decisions based on equations is easily one of the best Vault ideas in the franchise.
It operates as a co op game that can be played solo and you can run into realistic scenarios where most of the time (99%) it is useless to fight enemies like Super Mutant Behemoths, Mirelurk Queens, and Scorchbeasts alone. At least at level 30 even. These guys are best fought with a team. The community is the best I've ever seen. High level players tend to give away ammo, health supplies, and will even help build/rebuild Camps for others. The game is extremely good now. Scorchbeasts are the Dragons of the Fallout franchise as they are gigantic Bats.
"If players have to take perks so the don't have to bother with a game mechanic, maybe that gameplay mechanic shouldn't be there" Yes that is my biggest pet peeve in a lot of games.
There's some things that are exceptions, at least to me. For example, slowly healing so you don't have to use healing items
@@ryanchungus8972 I know I am late but I don't think that is the same. This is because normally a perk that slowly regens health is usually more for a tactical purpose than a not being bothered purpose. It means that I can carry fewer healing supplies or have a worse medicinal skills as the limited supplies can go to combat. So I don't think it us bot being bothered more than being clever with what you have . compared this to the lockpicking perks in skyrim which are all nigh completely useless. However they make it a lot quicker to open locked doors so I belive they are badly designed. One in being clever and the other is being lazy/forced to by the game design.
@@harrisonchauhan3875 yeah, makes sense
@@ryanchungus8972 totally was not expecting you to respond 1 year afterwords. I guess thanks are in order.
@@harrisonchauhan3875 lol np. I definitely think there should be a balance of perks. Lock picking removed, for sure. I'd love useless but fun perks, like a musician perk in skyrim to play a lute in some way((perhaps from the bards college))
34:51 "These days it's a giant pile of rubber and asbestos I'm sitting on"
I think Jon needs a new gaming chair, his current one doesn't sound comfortable or good for his health.
Maybe but at least he is safe if there is a fire.
@@AspenBrightsoul or thunderstorm.
When i first started, ppl would just give me random stuff. I thought they were doing it out of the kindness of their hearts, but now being lvl 50, they were giving me their stuff they didnt want to go to waste. Now im doing the same cuz just throwing out a legendary item seems wrong.
Not exactly. People want to be helpful, and it shows when they craft ammo, guns or armor for you, on the spot. They may also take your weapon from you, improve it, and then hand it back to you. The more experienced players remember very well how they struggled in the beginning of the game. Other than ammo, and a few other items, there is no need to give away stuff, because you can usually scrap or sell an item. With mules, you can even hold on to legendary gear, while you are waiting to turn them into scrip.
@@alohamark3025 yeah it was a very fun time there was this one golf area where a few high level characters cleared it out and set camp and when me n my friend found it there was like 15+ people trading guns and armor some were upgrading like you said and we were all trading as many mods as we could. It felt like the experience we should have been having all along
I got a level 25 legendary metal armor... I was level 8.
Once when I was level 11, a level 275 player gave me 100 Rad X and 75 RadAway
Maybe it wasn’t around at the time. But why didn’t you go to the Rusty Pick?
still amazed he did this in one take, with one breath.
🤔
It is possible he had to go to eat, pee, make food, go check who came for a visit etc so he paused and when he returned, simply continued recording and talking. It is easy to eliminate seams with modern voice/video editors and make it look like you talked half of the day.
@@Cybernaut76 r/WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH
@@thomasjessewharton Jokes on u, he's joking
@@kaaz1010 jokes on you replying to a month old comment.
Hi Jon, there are two things you should know about me before reading the rest of this comment.
1. Sometimes I will watch RUclips videos longer than an hour, but I will usually fall asleep at some point for a few minutes. I’m old (56). I was gaming back when the only games around were board games and pinball machines. So frequent napping is a thing.
2. I love the Fallout franchise, but have not played a single minute of Fallout 76.
Having said that, I watched every minute of this analysis, and never took a nap. You are to be congratulated on putting together a thorough and constructive critique of a game on a scale I’ve never seen before. And keeping it interesting and engaging throughout. (insert applause)
I know you put a lot of work into this, and a lot of love, and it shows.
Thank you for that.
As for Fallout 76, I knew I would not play it, mostly because I’m just not really social enough to have ever enjoyed online gaming. So I experienced the Fallout 76 world by watching your gameplay, and that of other RUclipsrs. The problem that stood out to me the most when watching all that gameplay, was what you covered in Part 5.
The fact that everyone is dead, and that everything has already happened, means no matter how well the story is told the player can’t really have any direct influence on it. I have always loved the fact that my actions in Fallout games have a direct impact on people, and the story that is unfolding at the moment. I became a part of those stories.
I can certainly enjoy the telling of a good story that takes place in the past, but I’m completely unable to participate in it. That’s mainly why I haven’t played this game.
Well, I have to stop now so I can jump back into RDR2… where I am having a decidedly bad influence on the people and the story.
Sorry for the long comment. Thanks again for this amazing video.
Have you watched his similar Video about Fallout 3? its just as good!
@@Excelsius_Cerell I have not seen that, I'll check it out. Thanks.
Hell, I'm 33 and I feel asleep a couple of times watching this over a few days. Nothing to do with the quality of the video, mind. Maybe I'm prematurely extra old?
Watch Jon's Frost playthrough of Fallout 4. Great videos. Regards from the Carromkid.
Well I'm 21 and actually I spent 2 days to finish this video properly, so don't think that's an issue at all.
Bid you a good day sir, hope you always be in the positive part of the internet, always nice to watch some heart-feeling comments on these well-made videos.
The best part about Fallout 4 Survival Mode was that it actually made Settlements useful: they served as rest stops, providing storage space, a place to sleep and save, collect food and water, and even assistance in combat if you were being chased by enemies too powerful for you to handle alone. If you connected your settlements with Supply Routes, your designated Provisioner would even patrol the road reducing the number of hostile creatures along the way.
Survival Mode also made the Brotherhood Vertibirds a useful mode of transportation because it effectively worked as a sort of fast travel.
"The relationship between these pairs of games can be fascinating, and probably worth a video essay all to itself."
Oooh yes! Very much yes, please!
Nooo! This video was hard enough to make on it's own. When Jon promised a future video in the first few minutes, my heart sank.
I would absolutely wait for that video essay! Let it take a year because he only does a little each day! I need more excellent essays for my ADHD!
2:22:12
This Whole Thing.
It's just a long con so that you could build on top of the Satellite dish, isn't it Jon?
Yes, yes it is.
But I'm okay with that. :D
I think Jon shouldnt just build on top of the satellite dish, he should BUILD a satellite dish
Thought I'd comment before watching. Most of us know how much work went into this, so well done MATN. Hope it does even better than you hope!
And it's only a day late (sarcastic grumbling....)
your profile pic is the best! I still have my original release Cheetah action figure from when I was little
+Cheetarah
Yeah, i just re-watched his Fallout 3 Video yesterday so when i saw this in my Notifications and it's Length i hoped for a Video in the same Style and Quality
Hope it doesn't better than the Fallout 3 one. Because that was a worthy cause.
wow, that idea for a single player "before" and multiplayer "after" around the 1:45:00 mark would have been an incredible idea. even if it was a shorter main quest than a normal game. that would have been awesome
Yup, I'd probably like to be a hardened killer in single player for a bit so my multiplayer character would have more reasons to track him down like it's a litteral scorched dude who is really good at killing
The community has been requesting a single player with co-op mode for years. That the request was blatantly ignored in favor of going the exploitative MMO, industry route speaks volumes about the state of video gaming today.
"I think we were a little surprised how few people wanted to take part in PvP and how many more were interested in PvE together," said Pete Hines of 76. Really? And how's that Pete considering the aforementioned request of which Bethesda was well aware.
The executives of Bethesda and Viacom couldn't have proven themselves more out of touch with the core appeal of Fallout or the player community they actually helped create if they'd tried. smh
This. This is a love story. The amount of research, thoughtfulness, and sheer effort put into this video underscores the great love Jon has for a franchise that has inspired so many. Every gamer, no matter if they play or even like Fallout, should watch this, even if only to appreciate the magnitude of what Jon has just accomplished.
This is a masterpiece. Thank you, Jon. This will remain as one of the absolute best videos I have ever watched, only coming second to your video of "Why Fallout 3 Is Better Than You Think," because that game has a special place in my heart.
So my take away is the following.
1. Jon should just become a game developer already cause he’s got better ideas than some of the people at Bethesda.
2. The majority of this rant was so he could get on top of a satellite.
3. He still loves his landmines.
Benjamin Perreault “MINES. MINES SOLVE ALL PROBLEMS.” -MATN during the yolo new vegas run
I dont like people ummmm no what would be hard about these ideas
I dont like people no that wasn’t the question give me an example idiot
I dont like people not hard to turn an ash monster from passive to hostile
Not hard to change the weapon system
Not hard to spawn lots of robots and scorch beasts
Not hard to just decrease the frickin camp placing range to form a town
I dont like people of course it’s unrealistic to use every single idea. He was just pointing out that MATN had many ideas that could be pitched to Bethesda to make the game better. No pitched idea will go in the same way out of your mouth into the game. There will always be changes. Improvements, compromises.
Ohhh I'm excited for this.
Another argument I haven't heard much of is that people are mad because many found Fallout 4 dissapointing, and were holding on to the hope that a great fallout game was coming.
Many hoped it could be 76, but instead it showed us that Fallout 4 was the very best Bethesda could do.
The reason I wasn't dissapointed in my 76 review was because I consider Fallout 4 to be one of the most shallow games ever made, there was no way that team was going to make a great game so quickly
I couldn't agree more. I remember being berated in the Bethesda forums for saying a voiced protagonist was a huge mistake. Recorded dialogue requires more data, and severely limits the roleplaying aspects. Where most conversations in earlier games had half a dozen multi-branching dialogue paths, the choices in FO4 were generally less, and branched much less often. I just wanted my old Int 1 character to blurt out "Icecream!" when responding to questions.
First of all, FO3 was their best Fallout game, not 4. Secondly, calling FO4 the “most shallow game of all time” is completely idiotic
@@afungai1649 FO3 was amazing one of the first I played but I have to say FNV is a little better just adds more gameplay and other things to do
I do feel the core gameplay of 4 has been the best in the franchise. Crafting and exploration is the best it's ever been. 76 should have been that aspect on steriods
Oliver Standing
NV might be more in line with the originals and is an overall more traditional RPG, however it was made by Obsidian. Of all the BGS FO games (3, 4, 76), I still firmly believe that 3 is the best Fallout game they’ve ever made. 4 wasn’t bad by any means, hell it fixed a ton of issues from the old games and made the factions way more developed, but many changes to simplify the formula made the game feel way less like an actual Fallout RPG and more like action adventure looter shooter thing. Again the game is absolutely fantastic and I’ve put in a shit load of hours into it, but still.
"Fallout 76 and what went wrong and how to fix it"
Wow, I'm surprised you managed to fit this all in only 2 and a half hours.
You say that as though there were issues with the decals aswell
Oh boy I am ready for this
Patterrz Wait...you watch...but...
THIS HAS HAPPENED ON BOTH FALLOUT ESSAYS! NEXT THING I KNOW FALLOUT BROTHERHOOD IS BETTER THAN YOU THINK WILL HAVE A COMMENT FROM PEWDIEPIE
yes this is a very cool idea
I remember when you mentioned Jon in I believe either your Dark Rising Nuzlocke or your versus with Mo in Blaze Black. Ever since then, I've been watching him for a long time! You're a true legend Patterrz, win all of those versus and locke's!
Hey, aren't you the guy who does Pokemon videos? Wait a moment... You ARE the guy who ran a nuzlocke a while back that I listened to and you've complained that all your comments want you to fail while there is a youtuber called Many a True Nerd who did a thing called Fallout: New Vegas You Only Live Once which basically was a nuzlocke but with guns and that's how I started watching this channel all these years back. Huh. The youtube world is small indeed.
Ygy yycygyfyyfyyyf
This is hands down, the best constructive criticism I have ever heard.
When a nuke is detonated, anything caught in the blast radius should leave a nuclear shadow.
Could be a good way to tell a story with the environment.
William Redding Lol the whole point of Fallout is to show how shitty the world becomes due to Nuclear War. Years later they put an idiot in the Game development department, fired all the previous developers of fallout, and said lets make Nukes fun again!
Im with you on that james
James Bautista
Yeah, but I figure that if Bethesda is gonna have player controlled nukes anyway, they might as well take the artistic opportunity, and the nuclear shadows might bring a bit of the original tone/theme back.
I generally think that the nukes should function like they did in New Vegas, but ruin the whole map instead of just two isolated locations.
I feel like you see what was lost for your character choice's
James Bautista The world doesn’t take 500 years to rebuild after a nuclear holocaust lol. You’re dealing with nuclear fallout which disappears after like what, a year or two, not nuclear waste itself
When the game trailer was first released and it showed beautiful West Virginia forests and player-launched nukes, I thought the story was going to go exactly as you described with the nukes, that even in a place where the bombs didn't fall and wildlife and trees still stand (which is so rare in Fallout games as a whole) that the evil of man (players) still inevitably drives players to scorch the last bits of the old world left and permanently doom the world even when we had a chance. Instead, we got "oh sweet a nuke let's go grind some flux."
I mean, we can find subtext there. The game may not scream at you for doing a bad thing, but you *are* nuking a preserved slice of healthy land for your own material gain. The message is conveyed through your own actions, showing not telling.
I mean yeah kinda but the nuke wears off
"The demands on your junk are much higher."
- JonMATN 2019
😂why is this not a top comment
Much like a good gigolo.
Especially balistic fibre which can only be found in military grade duck tape and military amo bags.
with bigger dick energy comes bigger dick demands.
FOR THE JUNK! FOR THE LUDD!
Jon, I would love to play your version of Fallout 76 😍
I think Jon's 76 would be worth the $80 price tag.
I want to play Jon 76
I am so glad you made this. I love a long discussion of what makes games tick (or not, as the case may be).
Time for Jon to become a game developer.
Jon-seph Anderson
As someone with a strong interest in games design, long form /dissertations/ like this are absolutely wonderful. As much fun as it can be to poke fun at F76, and how useful and valid it can be to point out it's boons and failings from a technical level; analysis and possible solutions are just way frikkin better!
@@NK-fh3st if you arent subbed to Joseph Anderson then you should go do that
@@greybayles7955 Waaay ahead of you, but thanks for the recommendation anyway! Mandalore isn't too bad either, but is more short-form and general about more niche games.
I just want a Fallout 76 singleplayer. It honestly makes me sad how you can't fix any of the megastructures! ;-;
You can’t make mega structures either
Fallout Jon Buren sounds like a pretty good game to play
haha i get the joke because of van buren being black isle studios's first attempt which became obsidian's new vegas haha
am i smart mommy
war? between towns
@Tri-Shake-Atops jon got banned?
This is GREATEST video ever made that Bethesda will never watch.
*TODD HOWARD* (praise His name) wears a leather jacket and has cool shoes. He needs no help from those cowering before his gaze.
The women love his peanus.
@@jeffdenza5759 "... peanus"
*WHEEZE*
@@jeffdenza5759 FUCK TODD HOWARD HIS LAZINESS RUINED THE BEST VIDEOGAME FRANCHISE OF ALL TIME
@@Chuked Best franchise? Please.
Well, 7 months later and I can confirm- they did watch it. Then they thought to themselves: Jon thinks we can be more, what if we can be even less? What if we can put up a $100 pay wall for a private server and bleep the consumer completely?
I found this to be a much more refreshing critique than the witch-hunt based reviews I’ve seen from other RUclipsrs. Thanks for all of the effort you put into this, Jon!
I think the final line says it all best about 76 in its current state
“That was a good idea till it wasn’t”
You have name Fixit, and anime gurl avatar. Bless you good sir.
fallout's pre war story where greed lead to death is the sole reason 76 didn't find it's potential, Bethesda wanted money and didn't actually care about what they were making or doing
@@BuzzyB34 Ironic, huh? Guess it's true what they say, "Bethesda *never* understood Fallout."
Noah Gervais' critique/review remains my number one recommendation to anyone thinking of playing it.
2:24:02 You made this entire video so you could make train lines in Fallout, didn't you?
You can't prove anything.
@@ManyATrueNerd I knew it!
I want to be in control of a train line charge a fee feed it coal and oil. Would be neat.
perhaps make it a settlement. Mobile, armored. a place of stability, a point of power. in a peaceful server, it is a mobile hub that encourages trading and travel over a wide area, like the traveling merchants; in a nuclear hellscape, it is the only place that is safe from the radiation and pollution, a place that raiders will target, and people will have to defend and keep supplied.
@@spacebear4742 In a nuclear hellscape of raiders and bandits, the raiders have mounted turrets and an artillery piece onto their trainline, bombing any poor unsuspecting settlement it gets too close to.
You know, just some good old fashioned post apocalyptic fun!
You basically made a new game.
Fallout 76: good edition
Fallout 76: Not Broken Edition
Fallout 76: For real this time
...
Fallout 76: True Nerd Edition
here's a story from fallout 76: good edition I have a story from jon's FO76 single player, (though there would be no enclave) just outside the ash-heap, you see a free-state, a Responder, a raider, and a BOS paladin all sitting by a fire, the player will most likely be curious about why these factions that usually show such open hostility are just sitting by a fire, so they ask one of them why they're all together, and one of them tells the player character about how all their (same faction) buddies died venturing into the ash-heap, they all got lost but ran into each other,. when they first met each other they were going to kill one another, but realized that it would be stupid. so they started to work together to try to escape the ash-heap, the raider had given some pointers on weaknesses of the ash-creatures (that's what I'm calling them) from some of their raider friends stories about killing ash-creatures. the Responder uses their medical know-how to help them become more resistant to the ash-heap's air, and treats any wounds. the free state uses their survival/scavenging skills to keep the group fed off nothing but what they brought, and what they can find on unlucky corpses and finds a way to turn some of the ash into something useful (I don't know yet) and the BOS paladin's general combat skills keep the ash-creatures off their backs. and in the multiplayer, this group would still be alive, because they weren't at the big major battle (which would happen at the end of the game where all the factions fought over access to a nuclear launch site in order to nuke the other's bases, but it malfunctions and then the scorched rise and scorchify everybody in the vicinity, and since so many people were there, nobody left in appalachia could mount an assault on the scorched beast and died to the high number of scorched) and the free state member lead them to a bunker with tons of provisions to last all of them a lifetime, and then they just settled there, they could even act as merchants and sell you stuff. the entire point is to help enforce the whole working together moral like in vault 11, as they manage to work together and play to each other's strengths , allowing them to survive. while everybody else got themselves killed over idiotic rivalries.
extra add-on for fallout good edition, what if there were small raider camps dotted around the world, they could organize smaller, weaker, attacks on smaller, weaker, settlements, and to add some fun for the raider players, they can participate in raids (big or small) and gain some serious points for it, say you raid a town and succsesfully raze it to the ground. that town has a raid factor, which increases rewards for a raid, a raid factor can give experience and weapons, (the idea being you got it from the town or it was provided for you by the raiders) giving more incentive for people to join the raiders, also I think raiders and ex-raiders should have a perk increasing their damage in PVP (it will be less effective for ex-raiders due to being out of practice) the idea would be that as a raider you can win potentially harder fights and level up faster than normal players, and then when you leave the raiders, you won't be killed as often by raiders as they will see your ex-raider status and back off because you would be more of a threat than normal players. the tradeoff being not liked by many of your peers and potentially murdered in revenge for previous death. though I think the bounty should be gone after becoming an ex-raider unless you killed anybody, but remove the base 100 cap bounty.
Fallout 76: simply better edition
There's a reason MMO's lean so heavily on the social aspect. Right now it's like they want the worst of all worlds with their balancing of single vs multiplayer experience rather than trying to get the best of both.
My point? I'd love to play your version of the game Jon :)
I think we'd all prefer Jon's version
@@traviscuperus5692 We can all dream....
76 is trying to be great at everything and is thus good at nothing. You can't have an easy, casual environment while simultaneously being a hardcore survivalist experience, they're on a spectrum like hot and cold. Being more of one means being less of the other.
Same deal with multiplayer and single player experiences. Same with trying to emphasize both lone wolf and party experiences (though you can to some degree be pretty decent at both given the citizens vs raiders scenario).
76 Needs to pick one aspect on each spectrum and stick with it, or else be mediocre at all of them.
Just my conclusion though.
Someone could potentially make it as a mod for Fallout 4 a couple years down the line
I feel like they could manage to have both. Maybe some of the more epic fights would basically require a team, and allow people who want a combat-focused experience have fun without needing to worry too much about survival (since they have a group backing them up), but make it possible to get by alone with sneaking and _sensible cowardice_ to get a more hardcore survival experience.
I just had a horrifying realization. The reason the weapon breakdown lottery was so unsatisfying was because Bethesda decided to turn each gun into its own lootbox. They were hoping the Skinner Box psychology would override common sense and get people addicted to the rush of random rewards in miniature. It failed spectacularly, and thank goodness.
I enjoyed my first bloodied power fist, but playing with that for months on end, because other similar legendaries were like .5% drop made me quit.
Plenty of people still did. They even say they're "addicted to the grind" without batting an eyelash. (How one can become addicted to *grind* is quite beyond me, but grind addiction is nonetheless a thing.) "Pull the lever; receive a 'reward'" obviously works on the psychologically vulnerable. That's what makes the practice so utterly despicable: it's the psychologically vulnerable who suffer the most.
The player community likes to absolve itself of any responsibility whatsoever for the sorry state of video gaming today. Fact is, it would change if people stopped contributing to the nosedive in quality along with the predatory and exploitative industry trends actually responsible for microtransaction nightmares like Fallout 76.
It's beyond sad because there are the makings of a great game in Fallout 76. It might even still be salvaged along with Bethesda's reputation and standing in the community, but Bethesda is pretty obviously not interested iin that because it's ignored every single suggestion for turning that around it has received.
But going back to fallout 4 after playing 76 you realize that once you pick up one of a kind of weapon there is no reason to check another. In 3 and new Vegas you could repair your weapon, in 4 sure you can scrap it but the resources you get compared to the weight of weapons was awful.
As someone who hasn't really played Fallout 76, I clicked this video because I wanted to hear what the fuss was about, expecting that I'd watch for five or so minutes, but in reality, I ended up watching for over an hour before I remembered that I had things to be doing. Well done, Jon.
Fancy finding someone with the same surname as I irl lmao
jon you absolute legend, you actually did it
They actually did it. DAMN THEM ALL TO HELL.
I wish I could play Jon's 76!
Same. The Modders must be mobilized!
@@fumarc4501 as good as the modding community is at fixing Bethesda's messes, i dont think even they can fix this level of mess.
@Raptor Cell NOT WITH THAT ATTITUDE! Take my money!
@@fumarc4501 If we give them enough resources and money it shall be done. EVERYBODY! TO THE DIAMOND MINES!
Finding this video in 2021 is interesting. You had made very interesting suggestions for changes and it's fun to see what kind of changes Bethesda actually made. Most of your concerns here have actual valid work-arounds now
Nice review. Speaking of improvements in Fallout 76, what about a new game based on Fallout 76 that is much different? In the new game arch is to address the obvious situation of odd mysterious reoccurring enemies, more less static conditions, lack of real progress in rebuilding USA, and constant grind of characters. -- Tentative title: Fallout Appalachian Revelation -- It Seems Similar To Fallout 76 But Has New Focus and Dynamics (less grind): Appearances like Fallout 76, but it takes place in near future (~ one generation after Vault 76 opens), and is very different in mood with new realization by many characters getting sick of grind, with new wandering prophets, rise of philosophy and spiritual ideas, resistance movements, civil strife, discontent, and desire for higher quality of life by most everyone, except by those who are power players behind the scenes. --- CAUSE and EFFECT: Most inhabitants notice things are way more complex (from their history books) than before the war such as now more currencies, less safe travel, still no long communications to other states nor nations, no decent factories, constant survival, no large farms, no modern hospitals, and so on. They question the grind and lack of real progress in rebuilding "freedom" in USA. Examples include hostile enemies keep coming and their lives are largely a grind (loot, shoot scavenge, beg, quasi-slave to factions) TURNING POINTS & ODDITIES: Inhabitants start talking in unique ways, trying new creative things and new odd things occur even more. Like inhabitants either start moving outside the map or they disappear, or are taken, or major waves of mutants or ghouls appear from unexpected regions; and certain factions attempt to completely clear large areas, and they try to make large factories or large farms, or science research centers, but this effort may be met with resistance by mysterious aliens or by certain factions. SETTING & TIME: About 67 to 126 yrs later after opening Vault 76, and inhabitants questioning lack of progress. THREE TO FIVE POSSIBLE ENDS (some blended together): 1. Focus on progress by certain inhabitants creates civil war to region, and largely wide scale destruction that seems similar to 2077. 2. New mysterious influences from edges of map and by interior agents show even more harsh dangers causing panic and either fleeing map area, or going into stealth mode, or going into new bunkers. 3. Major progress efforts made by players and NPCs in clearing large areas and by establishing hospitals, working labs, large farms, govts, factories, but these may get wiped out by mysterious aliens, or new nuclear bombs. 4. One or more factions or special groups becoming either very powerful, or very hated by many in the region, and that faction(s) gets wiped out completely. So, maybe this could be a reason the Appalachian Brotherhood was not heard of again later in future Fallout lore. 5. Any combination of the previous scenarios could occur in the possible ends. LESSON OF NEW GAME: Freedoms are very hard to win and even a grind is not a guarantee for freedom, and may even hold you back, and mysterious enemies may always be out there, and could even be in your midst. --- RECAP: Players and NPCs start to learn from Fallout 76 and start facing the harsh facts of grind and how repeating the past is not necessarily a solution for the future. They dreadfully realize there are still mysterious things going on that are holding them back even after all they have gone through. So, they must take on new dynamic changes and learn new revelations to truly be free, and to truly rebuild freedoms. -- Copyright (C) April 7, 2023 by KEK Freedom Heritage - All Rights Reserved -- Permission to Share If Credit Given
Such as? 'Pay a hundred dollars a year for an infinite, virtual stash limit despite that we swore the limit couldn't be raised because it would cause stability issues for the game?' Or maybe it was the ultralong and boring introduction to a new currency to grind? Or was it the "content" harkienng to nostaligia for a former DLC best played over again? Please, enlighten us as to what the "workarounds" of which you speak actually were.
Yes I agree if fallout 76 was a completely different game it would be better.
Yeah exactly. The “game“ would require such an extensive rework that it'd be like making a new game. Even IF bethesda cared about anything other than your sweet money, I'd like it much more if they'd just focus that effort for their next game.
@@littlejohnny41 If bethesda actually cared about money, they'd put in the work to redo the game. Because that would literally bring in more money.
They just wanted to cash in on the shitty live subscription and MTX trend.
Lmao
I came just to like this comment
I once played a great sprite swap of Fallout 76 on my CD-i called "Doom". It proved that with some minor tweaks, Fallout 76 is an awesome game.
Bethesda needs to hire this man immediately. I would buy a whole Bethesda friggin console and subscription service to play a fully functional version of 76 he describes towards the end.
I'd prefer it if the game he described was made by someone other than Bethesda at this point.
SpeedingOffence I'm playing the Metro Franchise right now. If you need an alternative post apocalyptic game play Metro. its basically the fallout of Russia. just more shooty lol
They did. It is called rust where the players that are in a group can monopolize resources in a way to exclude those other people in a place that is barren and lacks conveniant resources
@@OgBadlaws until they get their compound spear raided and door camped by eokas after a bunch of nakeds get pissed lmao
Take a shot every time Jon brings up the cogs.
I'm already half dead from all these shots at 30 minutes in 😂🤢☠️☠️
Not trynna get alci poisoning
Every time he mentions cogs I think of the big sexy cogs from civ 6
Gotta work tonight, sadly :(
If you wanted to kill people, might as well have it be for saying “survival” or just “76”.
Jon’s point about vats and the tiny robots, I’ve rewatched this video a few times and it finally struck me that when I use vats in Bethesda’s other games, it’s because I am panicked at the quick moving close thing. The robots don’t work with vats because they are quick moving little things... uh...
I've never seen a critique video by someone who I felt legitimately loved the franchise as such as you do. All of them just talk about all the ways the game or the studio sucks and why they hate them and why no one else should play the game or support them anymore. You actually go through each issue in depth, why it's an issue, how it was handled in previous games, why that wouldn't work in the game you're addressing, but how it could be fixed with multiple different possible solutions. And not just multiple solutions, but how those changes affect other aspects of the game as well, and ways to mitigate those effects. It's seriously incredible to listen to. Bravo sir.
yeah This is why i like MATN.
To satisfy single player people, multiplayer people, survival people and non-survival people, just make different servers for each person. People who want to play solo can, while multiplayer people can play with people that also want to do multiplayer. Same goes for survival.
Sure, maybe it needs more servers to be up at a time, but it would certainly be better then compromising to two different kinds of people.
Whatever anyone's opinion on the game, well done for putting the effort in to make such an in depth video Jon. Your commitment to the fallout universe is admirable.
You could even say that repairing some weapons can give you a small chance to unlock a mod (because your taking apart the weapon and going through it so you will learn what happens inside and possibly how to improve it)
That would have made sense! How dare you.
TODD!!! PUT THIS GUY IN CHARGE OF FALLOUT V! WOULD YOU KINDLY!?
No with this level of creativity. It would never work for those kids at bethesda
Wrong franchise, but nice try, Atlas.
He likes fallout 3 it would still have bad npcs
You didn't say good afternoon ladies and gentlemen right at the start. This whole video is ruined and you should start over.
The Fallout 3 Mega Video didn't either - I prefer to jump straight in when it's a video essay.
@@ManyATrueNerd let's just jump into it
Nope, not gonna fly, start over!
@@ManyATrueNerd Like a teacher that starts class by throwing buckets of water over his students. Absolute madman...
That's how you knoe were in for something serious
Your single player prequel idea is fantastic. I really hope Bethesda work on that either as an expansion to 76 or a standalone game.
If standalone game I hope it's a single player and off line game
"Ok so the solution to carry weight problem is either to either remove all carry weight perks by giving free carry weight, or remove the perks and reduce the carry weight"
Bethesda: "How about we start selling unlimited carryweight for 100$ a year instead"
More precisely
You have a stash limit for server related issues, we can't do anything about that
Oh wait, give us a hundred a year and have as much stash as you want, money powers our servers
Well in Fallout 1 and 2 you can use mods to add XXXX amount of carry weight. I have about 900 for Fallout 1 right now and it's glorious.
In Fallout 3 and New Vegas I add 9000 weight with the in-game command console which is even easier.
They can pay me to play any live service games which have become trash for rich people.
Ain’t that the rub?
What do you think of Fallout 76?
Some bloke: It just sucks, what more there is to say.
Hey you hot pink-coloured egg carton, how about you
Jon: Well let me give you short answer to that
If this is short.. I wonder what the long answer is... Oh lord
Oi, don't be pulling words out of my mouth.
@@someblokeontheinternet9368 well? We are listening..
x SO x FATAL x I’m waiting for his response, he’s probably still writing
Two and half hours later.
I'd buy this game Jon describes. Investor conference when?
I have $300 a Month I can invest into such a Project. That's not going to be enough.
One of the biggest issues for needing to scrap to learn weapon mods... is the Ultracite Laser Pistol, its supposed to be a big reveal and special weapon that the brotherhood had managed to develop for the Scorched problem, but not only is it a separate gun so any learnt laser plan isn't compatible, its also the only non legendary spawn variant of the gun in the game, so you HAVE to buy the plan for the gun from the Brotherhood vender in Watoga, and its VERY expensive to craft each one requiring a lot of the rarest materials in the game to craft!
I'm not disagreeing, but I want to add these mechanics are the shell most mmo's use to start their "end game content". Not defending it, not saying i would enjoy it (if i was at that stage), just saying it's not an uncommon mechanic and seems to keep streamers in games in the early days by adding a ridiculous long grind for some end game item until the developers can make more content.
Having extremes of player levels on the same servers makes the game miserable for low level characters after 10 hours or so. Considering if you’re level 15 and are in the same location with a level 80 character the enemies that spawn will be to high for the level 10 player. Also even compared to previous fallout games the enemies are extreme bullet sponges.
Jesus, I knew this game was a shitshow, but I never realised it was this badly designed.
And I'm only 30 minutes in!
'"A sliding scale with "Ian repeatedly murdering me with my own guns" on one end, and "Craig 'Bloody hell leave one for me' Boone" on the other. "'
Dude yes. Jons version of the game means I can be my wasteland chef
So this.
I can finally be the sniper doctor.
@@TheReal_birbwizard you can hunt meat for my dishes!
I could be a travelling medic. It would be awesome.
I can be a cowboy bandit who (after a period of time) will try to find some redemption for his actions...yas.
"In FO76, the demands on your junk are much higher." (37:20). I hear ya, bro. I hear ya.
Jon: Makes interesting and proper video about how to fix Fallout 76
Bethesda: Ignores that and adds battle royale
Breathe in. Breathe out.
_Okay then_
_Here we go!_
“Crafting weapons just to smash them.” That’s just Skyrim with extra steps!
replace weapons with children. **banjo music starts**
Technically, but it works better.
You trade 1 iron and leather strap you found for a 5 gold shitty iron dagger that raises your general smithing ability the equivalent of looking for 2 minutes at a git on the front of a book smithing.
Then you can either sell the dagger, or spend a shitty soul gem to increase price (also increasing enchanting) again, low, but still there.
Then you can improve it for one more iron (up to legendary) for more smithing.
Then you can sell your,amazing shitty dagger to someone for 2 things. Gold and speech.
Every action you took in that took something away, but gave you something more permanent in return.
I always have felt if they just took the fucking leveling system from Skyrim, imported it into fallout,
Shoot an enemy 100 times? 1 point to whatever type of weapon you're using
Sell a valuable piece of prewar,tech for 5000 caps?
A couple points to barter and your caps.
You want to level up your speech?
Level it up by doing the diplomatic options instead of fighting, even if the option is just minor like disputing the price of an item, or lying to someone so they give you 50 caps if you wanna be a bastard.
I just feel Skyrim was 2nd best in is world and characters and people.
And 1st best in its mechanics.
Combining the two into a centralized single player experience like a traditional fallout game, having the option that works canonically for playing online as an option with Skyrim like improvement as you do them mechanics would just make an online fallout game so much more fun knowing you actually have to shoot your gun to be good with a gun.
It's society. They work for each other
@@chrissimon5810 I wouldn't consider invalidating literally all loot (including daedric artifacts which were meant to be pretty much unrivaled in Power) as well as the entire idea of a build with a stupidly overpowered enchanting system "1st best in it's mechanics"
Eek barba durkle
I think it's a lovely set of ideas. I like the town building especially.
For me personally, I stopped playing because the game has "no point" to it.
To summarize.
1: I don't enjoy the quests. They don't catch me, they bore me, I even stopped reading through the logs and stuff after a while cause I just simply wasn't interested and I felt absolutely nothing. No decent story and no NPCs removes immersion too. So quests = 0 for me.
2: I felt like there is no challenge. Even with spending over 90% of my points in inventory enhancing perks so I can maximize what I can carry, I still found the difficulty to be... lame... couple that with the lack of any serious consequence for death, and the game takes away any sort of feeling of threat and danger and with that, takes away immersion as well. Then, out of nowhere, you stumble across some high level spawns because some level XXX player with no life and thousands of hours played is in the area and triggered some ultra-high spawns (again, immersion fkt in the ass), and you start dumping about half inventory of ammo into one of said spawns to kill them, and they drop a pipe pistol... So challenge = 0 for me.
3: Looting is a core mechanic of the game... that the game punishes you for... It's like they had two different teams working on the same game and they went beyond their way to make sure those teams can't communicate with each other until the game was released. On one hand, one of the only things you can "do" when you visit a location/POI, besides killing the spawns there, is to loot the place... and so you do, and then you haul all the shit you looted all the way back to your base, and you discover that once you dump the shit you looted from your perk-ehanced inventory into your "stash", it will immediately fill up all your stash and you no longer have any room to store your loot. Sooooo.... that's it. There's no point in looting any more because you got nowhere to store your loot. And you can't sell your loot either cause vendors are limited to 200 caps, they offer atrocious prices, and the most accessible ones are always sold out (have no credits left) cause other people already sold to them... Soooo... without looting, the only thing you can do in a location now, is just kill the spawns. That's it. You go somewhere, you kill the spawns, you don't even bother looking around for loot anymore cause you're just getting pissed at all the rare materials you're finding and that you know you got nowhere to store... and you move on, dying a little bit on the inside... Looting = 0 for me.
4: Survival mechanic is non existent.... where's the "survival" aspect in this game? I mean the mechanics, seam to be there, as lame as they are, but they just fail to do anything. It's dumbed down to such a sub-casual level that it becomes irrelevant. Survival = 0 for me.
5: Exploration? Where's the exploration feeling from the Fallout games? That sense of amazement and discovery? Well... once you realize that everywhere you go there's NOTHING but a bunch of enemies to kill, a bunch of loot that you can't pick up cause you got nowhere to store and POTENTIALLY, MAYBE, a bunch of boring computer logs that you don't really need to bother reading cause they don't really lead to anything that directly affects you (unlike other Fallout games where many locations had their own puzzles weaved into the logs and locational stories that often unlocked hidden areas of a location and revealed interesting unique gear or valuable loot stashes/treasures or even secret larger story/quest arcs, or npcs and all sorts of wonders)... So besides seeing nicely designed places.... exploration = 0 for me.
6: PVP? LOL. NOPE! Wth, are we even going to talk about this? Level 300 with power armor and plasma gatling vs level 10 guy with pipe pistol and vault tec suit... Level auto-scaling!? Wtf? NOPE... just nope... this is such a hairball I'm not even going to touch on what's wrong with it. PVP is just not a thing in this game ok!? PVP = 0 for me.
7: Base building? Erhm... sure, I like to build a nice base. Spend hours upon hours making a masterpiece, and I'm gonna build this here, and then this here, and then I'm gonna... Oops, sorry, you've reached your limit... But, but but, BUT, I just started.... No butts! You've reached your limit! Now be a good boy and do like everyone else running around the map doing events to level up. That's it with building for you ok!? You're done! Base building = 0 for me.
7b: I'm not done with the base building... What kind of a fing game makes the buildings disappear when the player is offline!? Why the flying fk would you go with a "server-less" architecture if you KNEW you were going to have player owned buildings. How the fk do you want people to build a sense of community when every time you log you're thrown on a different server. Yesterday you walked by a cool player house, and he had a garden and you picked corn, and sat down on a bench, and watched a beautiful sunset, and you went to take a shit, and when you came back you were standing on a rock surrounded by a bunch of trees cause the guy logged out... so much for having neighbors and forming a community and discovering player-built landmarks...
8: Sooooo in the end!? In the end.... you level up... and you level up... and you visit all locations, and you do all your quests and all events and everything... aaand.... that's it. You can just keep doing the same events over and over and continuing to level up... without any reason at all besides showing everyone how much of a no-lifer you are compared to the other no-lifers around you that sunk thousands of hours into pointless xp grinding... It's like an MMO WITHOUT the end-game dungeons and raiding... At least in an MMO you'd do challenging and fun end-game dungeons, to get high-end gear, so that you can then go on even more challenging end-game raids with even more people and in this epic multiplayer events. But there's none of that here... Sure, you could call dropping a nuke and killing the damn bat thing a raid event but that's just a very, very, very, very shallow experience compared even with the most basic MMOs out there. The point being... there's no point... the game has no point. NONE.
I could write for many many more hours and get into the details of every single thing that's wrong but... why even bother. This game can't be saved. It was an experiment, and sadly it failed. And there are so many different things that are wrong that it's just unrealistic to speak of solving it. It's just a complete mess and no amount of time investment or development will make this game into a decent game.
NightLurk let’s not mention “mods” or a normal campaign mode for those offline players. Sometimes internet is expensive...and it’s sad.
I’d love to hear your take on wastelanders.
Now that’s some essay-like review that actually trying to fix this game. I haven’t played 76 and only understand it through gameplay footage, but this is really noble cause, for that you have my respect.
- Jinkeloid if you didn’t care to actually play it and base your views on a single video them you have an issue already
T GAY regardless you cant state on something you have no complete knowledge of
T GAY actually it doesn’t work that way but suit yourself
T GAY facts are more than just a misguided view but if thats the way you gather “facts” thats your problem
T GAY you don’t need to be a fan to gather actual facts by the way
Well shit, if Fallout 76 actually were like this it would probably have been one of the best online experiences to date, let alone a fantastic fallout game
(Sorry for going pretty much on a rant here) I fully agree, a game as described would be a cult hit and from a design perspective quite sound if balanced well. Though it wouldn't have as much widespread appeal, it wouldn't be as casual an experience. Most fans of the franchise and and many fans of gaming in general want less casual, more interesting games. Yet let's not forget that more-so than the content, the money drives development and publishers (let's not forget that Zenimax, being the publisher and thus having majority say in decisions, is responsible for the bad decisions as much if not more-so than Bethesda, although this doesn't mean Bethesda isn't at major fault themselves) want as many people to play their game as possible, especially if the game is going to have microtransactions. However a casual game will attract a lot of people, that will play less often, and stop far sooner, while a hardcore fanbase may be smaller, but play more often and stick with the game for far longer. More hardcore fans would also be the ones more willing to buy your microtransactions more-so than casual players. More players on paper sounds good for profits, in the short run, but a smaller but hardcore fanbase can be far more profitable in the long run.
I've also been programming for almost 16 years, and I by far am no where near what I would consider a great programmer, yet even at my current skill level, none of the ideas he suggested in the video are that difficult. In practice there would be major balancing that would need to go on and many revisions, but fundamentally from a mechanics perspective none of it is particularly that hard of an engineering challenge, and the framework and fundamentals for most of it already exist or are close to existing. The features themselves are quite simple for the most part, but the main problem in getting any of this done is that every decision needs to be approved in most environments, some studios will allow their designers and programmers to prototype ideas to present, or even work on a separate branch to implement into the game without approval without them being merged into the primary branch until approved, even so for even seemingly tiny changes the amount of bureaucracy that is involved is immense and getting approval of small ideas, let along large ones can take large meetings with investors, publishers, executives, etc and can take weeks. Bethesda from what I understand is a fairly casual environment compared to many large studios, but they still answer to Zenimax, who would function like described. Bethesda has a few advantages here, with the main studio being more relaxed for the most part and more casual environment, local decisions can be made faster, but not major ones that affect the core of the game. However the second advantage is that it's an online live service. As least in theory this would grant more freedoms in design as the game has already sold or reached most of it's playerbase/has already launched and deadlines aren't as much of a factor, in fact live-service games practically live on content updates. The reason I say in theory however is because this game launched in such a state that the reception of it was so negative, chances are that Zenimax won't let Bethesda take any major monetary risks, and changing the game this dramatically would be a massive risk, it would be a major investment, into something that both hasn't been explored much before, and also may not recoup the investment cost due to its reputation. A live-service that launches to positive reception will likely be given far more creative freedom by it's publisher(s) and their investors, the less, the less. That being said if they could roll out parts of this at a time that reduces the risk over having it as a focus, new content and new safe content is highly likely to drive some monetary gains allowing Bethesda to take a couple risks at a time. But if a turnaround takes too long the game may never be able to recover and the game has been out for a significant amount of time and hasn't progressed in many important areas yet.
Also honestly Bethesda seriously needs to clean up it's engine, not necessarily make a new one of use a new one, but overhaul many aspects of their current one at least, as they've just piled more and more stuff on top of a very inefficient and old infrastructure that pretty much no one really uses anymore, this has led to their engine being extremely bloated and messy and being in general a pain to deal with. Tasks which are trivial in most other engines, or even making one from scratch are far harder to do in the Creation Engine, and modders, who have had to use the tools can contest to the tedium and problems with the tools and engine. The game looks okay for the most part, but lackluster textures, models, animations and lighting/materials are everywhere, and while that's not a deal breaker, to have low-fidelity graphics you'd expect the game to run quite well as it's not as graphically intensive (or shouldn't be if done right), yet it doesn't. The game runs poorly on even the most powerful systems and has since launch, and has only gotten marginally better. Worse graphics in addition to worse performance isn't very acceptable and is almost exclusively because of how fundamentally problematic their game engine is at this point, using decades old rendering logic with some modern effects and changes thrown in on top of it. It would make their games faster to make, easier to make, less buggy, allow more complicated features to be possible to add without insane amounts of workarounds or hacky solutions and insane effort.
@@DreadKyller Yup
I have a story from jon's FO76 single player, (though there would be no enclave) just outside the ash-heap, you see a free-state, a Responder, a raider, and a BOS paladin all sitting by a fire, the player will most likely be curious about why these factions that usually show such open hostility are just sitting by a fire, so they ask one of them why they're all together, and one of them tells the player character about how all their (same faction) buddies died venturing into the ash-heap, they all got lost but ran into each other,. when they first met each other they were going to kill one another, but realized that it would be stupid. so they started to work together to try to escape the ash-heap, the raider had given some pointers on weaknesses of the ash-creatures (that's what I'm calling them) from some of their raider friends' stories about killing ash-creatures. the Responder uses their medical know-how to help them become more resistant to the ash-heap's air, and treats any wounds. the free state uses their survival/scavenging skills to keep the group fed off nothing but what they brought, and what they can find on unlucky corpses and finds a way to turn some of the ash into something useful (I don't know yet) and the BOS paladin's general combat skills keep the ash-creatures off their backs. and in the multiplayer, this group would still be alive, because they weren't at the big major battle (which would happen at the end of the game where all the factions fought over access to a nuclear launch site in order to nuke the other's bases, but it malfunctions and then the scorched rise and scorchify everybody in the vicinity, and since so many people were there, nobody left in appalachia could mount an assault on the scorched beast and died to the high number of scorched) and the free state member lead them to a bunker with tons of provisions to last all of them a lifetime, and then they just settled there, they could even act as merchants and sell you stuff. the entire point is to help enforce the whole working together moral like in vault 11, as they manage to work together and play to each other's strengths , allowing them to survive. while everybody else got themselves killed over idiotic rivalries.
@@DreadKyller I always use wrestling logic when it comes to these kinda games. The hardcore fans will buy it regardless, you have to draw the casuals in. It doesn't necessarily make the product better but mass appeal is the goal.
A year later and I couldn't help but notice they still haven't fixed it.
Yeah, the only thing that was implemented was mediocre stories, and very repetetive endgame content. Now they're just full on doing these 'seasons', which have more in common with Path of Exile than a Fallout game.
And talk and argue about "bad decisions", or illogical things... When it's always been about daylight robbery (and not much else), meh. ;$
When Private Servers arrive, modders will use this video as a manual/bible.
In about 6 years it'll be done
Private Servers won't have the resources to run even half the player number you see currently in the game due to the horrid engine. Not to mention how the delusional permanent(objects) and temporary(npcs) entity additions will crush them even faster.
@@sedlinasera3891 I find your lack of faith disturbing...
@@sedlinasera3891 Its probably based on linux, I'll bet people will find solutions and optimizations to run smoothly, and private servers can be run just for you and your friends...
@@thomasesr
Faith has little to do with the simple fact that games with interactable world elements utilize simpler graphics for this very reason.
Fallout NV: We're going to add nukes to a DLC that give players the option use a nuke on their opposition. This will force players to weigh their choices and decide if they want to use the nuke and destroy them with possibly terrible consequences or do nothing with the nukes and risk possibly loosing the battle of hoover damn or suffering further casualties. This demonstrates the ferocity of nuclear weapons and gives the game a darker, more realistic feel and also give some commentary about how weapons of mass destruction can do terrible things in the wrong hands.
Fallout 76: whats a sin of matt tic lol nuke whatever you want
Reminds me of the backlash against Ready Player One's movie adaptation use of the Iron Giant
Ian Henderson Let’s be honest, the nukes in Lonesome Road were pretty pointless and only opened up high level combat arenas. Almost exactly like 76, except without rare crafting components.
@@CrimsonKnight77 I find myself in the minority it seems, but I freaking hated Lonesome Road. I thought that was a very weak DLC. Only reason I wasn't pissed about it was because I got GOTY edition super cheap.
@@lorenhusky2717 I like Lonesome Road, but I'm usually burned out before I ever make it far enough that I want to go through it.
I nuked both for the weapons xD
Finally someone saying what I’ve been saying all along! What about the rebuilding? My own notion was that the Vault could serve as a hub, containing blueprints, tools...a space to work together and actually rebuild. Water filtration, solar power, etc. But this guy is way more ambitious, logical, imaginative-envisioning a game people could immerse themselves in for years! Bravo, sir!
Daniel Cohn-Bendit for real since the game launched it’s just been complaining and I stopped keeping up w it because of that but this video brought my attention to how amazing of a game this could’ve been.
"This isn't rebuilding American, it's 20-odd hermits." That made me laugh pretty hard.
As for difficulty you could even have difficulty based servers you pick a difficulty and it puts you in a like server
This would be a great idea for a Fallout 5: a traditional single player mode, then a multiplayer segment that serves as a sequel to the main story with all the features you described.
This is a great idea, just what Red Dead did
like Portal Co-op
THIS IS IT!! ITS FINALLY HERE IN ITS TWO AND A HALF HOUR GLORY!!
I have an hour and a half before I go to school
Step 1: Get bought out by Microsoft.
Bethesda has been a mess for some time, we can only hope Microsoft can shape them up to be at their best. My only experiences with Beth is TES while on the other hand 76 became my first fallout experience (sadly). so it's kind of funny to me to discover that 76 is their worst game ever now that I'm lvl 111, it didn't seem too bad at first. But then you notice things. Things that were thoroughly discussed in this video lol
@@Mestephra RIP for 76 being your first experience. I would have quit and never looked back if I were you.
@@larryhoover2541 I'm sorta already in that process to be honest lol Uninteresting enemies, scenery, quests and combat... No incentive to keep playing. Beth really screwed up with this one, and I doubt I'm gonna try the other fallouts now because of that. Whoever is in charge of Bethesda content should just quit and let someone with real passion run the show. Their games suck, probably because they've been using that shitty engine they don't want to let go of. It kind of make me wonder how this company is still around 😒
@@Mestephra Fallout 3, NV and even fallout 4 have a lot of redeemable qualities, and if you have them on PC, its even better as the modding community really makes some good stuff. I would recommend checking that stuff out if it is at all possible for you!
@@larryhoover2541 I've heard some good about them, maybe I'll give them a shot. I'll gladly take some of the spite back if they're that good as people say. It sucks that my first impression of fallout had to be 76, after lvl 50 I find I just idle a lot. Launching a nuke the first time was cool, but afterwards I realized that was pretty much the only cool thing to work for. Just having different guns or cosmetics don't impress me much, innovative content and creativity does. The Scorch Beast queen is a boring "wait and shoot" for something that's supposed to be a major battle in the game (she's big, so why can't she grab n yeet people? Or send us flying if directly caught in her misty blue dash of disease?) The wendigo colossus is a stand and shoot, and yet with legs like his he could totally kick people around into the air. He does have his scream/fear mechanics but it's kind of a weird thing to have in a fight like his but at least it's something. I just wished these (and most) enemies had more special actions, AI and tactics. Adding AI personality would be a cool thing to see, enemies could diversify their behaviour making most encounters seem somewhat refreshing. But thats just my take. Anyone can go on about what could be, I just wished Beth would act on those ideas
There it is. Published 5 minutes ago at 417.880 subscribers. Let's see how that changes :)
It increased by 43
Now 418,007
I just subbed
Thanks for noting the numbers - I'm curious to see what happens too
-1 from me, I'm sick of youtubers hopping on the Bethesda hate train for quick views.
They looked at this and said; "How can I monetize this, while also putting in absolutely no effort?"
Amber “It just works!”
@Forsaken Pumpkin wtf cyberpunk was a shitshow built on unethical labor from start to finish
76 still sucks and has implemented a plethora of gacha mechanics and other base systems requiring monetization to bypass?
they did put in efforts, with the folklore being variants of a monster, not to mention the world design, just because the internet say it's bad doesn't mean every part of it is, like come on, have you learn to grow up? that's the equivalent of hoping your child to born with every skills that exist on our universe.
fallout 76 is a flawed game, in many ways, it's not perfect, not to mention zenimax is the one taking control of monetization, not bethesda.
while all that happens BGS was also forced to rush 76, yes it is rushed, it wasn't planned to be bad from start, which is oddly enough leads to bethesda softworks delaying DOOM ETERNAL, hence saving both id's reputation and DOOM ETERNAL itself.
Bethesda: "Instructions unclear. Added £100 premium membership policy. Unsure why everyone hates us. Please help."
We WISH they'd let us help them.
Also make said service delete fucking everything.
According to our charts this should make them buy more if they have to start over.
Also ban MATN from future Bethesda online services for showing us up like those pricks Obsidian did......twice.
Mirrors Andstuff yo dirty
Seit ich mich t
Bullshit, it is 12.99$ a month, it’s 99.99$ for a year.
Just you wait guys they're adding a battle pass to it! Im not kidding look at the road map they put out. When will this pain end....
This video really made me reflect on this
My biggest problem with this game is its gorgeous, it looks so good, I've always loved the aesthetic of 4 and this just took it further.
I didn't even know all of the problems you've mentioned I couldn't persist with it, what a mess, such a shame but for me the biggest kick to the nards comes in the form of the fact that it actually looks fantastic.
I would sell my soul for them to just put this map in fallout 4
The game world is gorgeous (or, at least, it was until they made lighting and assorted other changes) and a pleasure to explore. It also contains some of the best environmental storytelling ever to appear in a Bethesda game. The artists and developers themselves did a wonderful job with it Too bad that's all there is to it.
I'm in awe of your critical analysis - Perception: 100 | Speech: 100 | Intelligence:100
His perception is usually -1, must have taken mentats before this lol
@@rikithelegendaryheropon8135 So... 99 perception?
@@w0rstart1st5 no, -1 perception
100 Enduance for this one take.
better than god howard himself: 101
OH MAN! The releasing a single player campaign set 10 years before 76 then releasing the multiplayer set after everyone dies..... that would have been BRILLIANT!
Now I'm incredibly sad this didn't happen. :(
All I could think of for your stalker idea was the giant lag spike when all the enemies spawned for the attack. I have no confidence that a basic enemy ai could stalk properly, especially in a group. Stalking a player is difficult to program without it being a scripted event so you would be limited to just audio cues with no spawned monsters until the attack. I like many ideas in this video but they require a level of stability that I think is currently out of Bethesda's scope.
The Ash Stalkers are cool, but I found the mechanics more interesting then the creature. Reminds me of Silent Hill and the Mole Miners would be perfect for that! They attack, or don’t, and we wouldn’t know why... until it’s too late. Maybe part of the area quest would be to discover how they can navigate the Ash heap. Requiring us to follow them underground and learn about them. Maybe find out they worship a Giant Molerat Queen and you gotta acquire a tame molerat and with it you can better navigate. Otherwise the lack of area specific diversity was a problem for me. Each area had the same enemies, at one time or another. Ya know?
It's so rare that I see a criticism of something that is at the same time actually constructive. I get to hear negativity everywhere I go in the world today, but I can always come back to this channel to feel something positive again. I don't know if you'll see this comment, but thank you for that, it really does help.
"Fixing Fallout 76: the Motion Picture"
I love these fallout essays, wether its defending 3 or analyzing 76's problems you analyze them very well. Great video
and now we are here, 8 months later, with no improvements and privat servers behind 100$ a year.
Hahaha. I remember people telling me “just you wait“ “this game's going to be good“ ye sure. Screw bethesda
@@littlejohnny41 i can say rn its improved slightly since launch, less bugs, human NPCs new story lines and some other things worth giving a double check
@@EtherealAfro thanks for the tip truly but it's not a game for me even if it's fully fixed.
And now here we are, lots of improvements and a great story behind a wall which doesn’t exist.
@@Blue-uy3xs And now here we are, with a subscription service on top of the base game price and pay to win mechanics.
Hell of a video essay you've done, mate. Fantastic analysis.
As Yahtzee once said, how do you begin to fix a ravenous monster that has been bred and raised to feed exclusively on piles of money.
as sane people once said, nobody should listen to a guy that wears a fedora
@@Spiffo0 it's a trilby
@@Spiffo0 not even an armoured battle fedora?
Juliett A you ween it onto hobnobs
yahtzee offers a lot of negatives to the things he dislikes and doesnt offer any insight on how to fix it
I appreciate you taking the time to make a video like this. Most people played the game, didn't like it, or the monitization model, and just wrote it off (which is completely reasonable.) I feel like it could have been a great game, they just went and fucked up horribly.
I was one of the people who for YEARS now has been saying "I wish they would make a coop Fallout/TES game, I'd have so much more fun with friends!" and I wanted to love Fallout 76, I really wanted to. But what we got was.... not what I wanted from a coop Fallout/TES game.
I kept playing it for probably nearly 60+ hours, but... I just couldn't continue. Most of my friends had stopped playing, I had a few times where I crashed before the base 10min auto save time, and lost a lot of progress, I couldn't get any of the damn mods I wanted for my weapons of choice, the silly limit to how much you could store in your stash, etc etc.
I really did want to love the game, I ignored all of the "Fallout 76 BAD" talk in the community, and kept going, but Fallout 76 just wore me down to the point where I uninstalled it and haven't looked back. I really hope they learn from the mistakes and make an actually good Fallout/TES coop game sometime soon, or the modding community manages to figure it out well enough to be playable.
int3r4ct I don’t get why they don’t just add a co-op mode to one of their games after making an already good game. They would need to change the way some things work but it would be way better than 76 or ESO
If you played it for 60+ hours you probably got your moneys worth.
@@Makrillo considering many have hundreds even thousands of hours into Bethesda games 60+ is barely anything.
@@JohnDoe-nf7up just saying, if you spent more than 60 hours on a game you obviously enjoyed it enough for the money you spent. And if you didnt enjoy it, then you're dumb for having kept playing it.
Makrill0 considering I picked it up when it was like 50% off, I 1000% got my money’s worth out of it. I just wish it was so good that I wanted to put 100s more hours into it.
Posting to improve your engagement score with the almighty algorithm. Was looking forward to this one.
Just try not to drive yourself into the ground in future. We want you to keep making great videos, and not die from an overwork induced heart attack.
I've watched this so many times and I just can't get over the idea that a single-player first Fallout 76 with drop-in co-op allowing players to join their friends' single-player worlds would have been so much better. Saints Row 3 did this basically perfectly.
Yes, people wanted Fallout 4 (or NV) with couch co-op and not the broken MMO that 76 was...
someone start a petition to get Jon in charge of the new 'super survival' mode, settlers VS raiders.
seriously though, great work. It's nice to see someone be constructive for once instead of just bashing the game.
I think your town idea is great, but you should be able to make raider settlements too (mabee limited to single settlements instead of towns).
you could also expand the idea, where each town could be attached to a faction, like responder, BOS etc, or custom factions you make in game. This could lead to interesting scenarios like raider factions going to war, or BOS factions with different ideoligies like in new vegas.
Wow, i got abit sidetracked there... Anyway, great vid :D
The segment where you talk about converting a single player game into a multiplayer one really got me thinking. It's a common criticism of a lot of the ongoing multiplayer games (games that don't have an "end" like a single player game would) that the devs don't really seem to care what their players think, and that they make intentionally grindy systems intended to be major time sinks. I think this highlights a critical flaw with the concept of "no ending" games. I think it's more obvious in MMOs, but FO76 tends to suffer from the same design mechanics.
In a single player game, the devs are incentivized to make sure that players are having the most amount of fun they possible can. Those players will recommend this great game to others when they finish, and the revenue is generated as a function of the *number of people* who they can sell the game to.This is true to an extent with multiplayer games that have no end, but a larger impetus is put on the devs to *keep people playing* than to make the game a truly great experience. Multiplayer games live and die by their playerbase, so if players breeze through and enjoy themselves but then place the game aside... that's demonstrably worse for sales than if they enjoy themselves moderately but continue grinding along.
Because of that I think the "endless multiplayer game" concept, be it an MMO or a game designed like FO76, will always end up as a war between players and developers, wherein developers are trying to keep things JUST fun enough that people won't quit, but grindy enough that they'll continue to beat their head against it. The entirety of the rest- be it good story, flashy mechanics, individual fun gameplay loops, etc... that's all there to act as cushioning around the extremely fine line of "Just fun enough to keep you grinding".
And the truth is, players didn't enjoy Fallout 76 not because it was the only game that had this problem... it's just because they didn't balance the cushioning well enough. It became too obvious that the grinding was there. World of Warcraft is currently experiencing the same thing in BFA. The grinding is obvious, and the rewards and paltry and very randomized.
So while I desperately want FO76 to do well, and I want the devs to earnestly look at each of your suggestions and implement many of them... I'm left thinking that perhaps actual old school RPGs and Endless Multiplayer Experiences are like oil and water. Even the most successful among them have continually dumbed down the RPG elements and embraced the grind loops.
Anyways, an excellent assessment of FO76, where it went wrong, and how to fix it.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go cancel my WoW subscription.
I honestly believe fo76 is the result of incompetence. Either by management or developers and their hand got probably forced by the publisher. There were so many fundamental design flaws and technical errors on launch that you cannot talk it away any other way. They definately had no QA of the pvp system or ignored it completely, nor were they prepared to fix bugs in a timely manner. 3 months after launch it now is in a state where it is playable as a game, left with most design flaws but at least the technical side is kinda okay.
I think the idea pitched by todd was a good call for "endless multiplayer game". In the end a multiplayer game can only be endless if content is created by the players, because there is no viable way devs can ever provide enough "satisfiing" content in the same time as it is consumed. Every hour gameplay is probably worth 100s of hours of devtime when you include assets, worldbuilding, lore, etc... Many successful games have found some way to enable players to make their own stories. i.e. Minecraft gives you an easy to use sandbox, mobas create new situations you not encountered before and constantly rebalance stuff so it doesnt get as stale, Arc could have been a well of learning opportunity for this game. BUT FO76 just doesn't give players enough tools to do that.
The cooking and "player taders" are the best examples. There is no chat (probably because moderating 1000s of servers is not easy or cheap), the servers have not enough players on them to have enough customers, and there is no help to create 3rd party helping tools to deal with setting up trades like an API for websites. Cooking or crafting services in general could have been an awesome job to pick up, but as in the video described: It is just not worth it and everyone can do everything anyways. Indie games in EA like eco did player economy systems better. Where are social systems like clans? Where are party/clan camps that get raided (as another junksink)? Why do the workshops exist in the same world where there is an endless supply of respawning mats by server hopping - talking again about interlocking cogs and fundamental design flaws.
There is one other thing that adds to this feeling of "not enough": There are now games with 5+ years of constant development in this "endless multiplayer" environment that provide you with hundreds of hours of worthy gameplay if you just pick them up now. This is a new thing! The first of those games that are still around came out around the early 2010s. So this generation grows up with that as a standard.
So i think sandboxes are a good way for endless multiplayer (but of course - you need to work for rewards - so there need to be a reasonable grind in any case), its just that fo76 had the right idea with the wrong implementation by incompetent people.
PS: Because its 2019 i feel i need to disclaim this: Calling people incompetent is more a factual statement than some hate against a specific group or individuals. It is used as a description of skilllevel based on numerous instances of nonfunctional perks, obvious bugs with open sourced fixes at launch, complete ignorance of the concept of save client-server-communication (aka why items could be duped soo easily), reintroduction of previously fixed bugs (you get laughed at when you do this kind of stuff in 2nd semester computer science) and while many of those things are fixed now it shows the technical inaptitude of the team.
Jeff B 100% agree. The game isn't really any more grind than any other multiplayer game. The drapes just aren't as pretty. I remember playing the Halo games and the Battlefield games and not being that good at them in particular, so to unlock new stuff meant grinding my face in game after game where I'd get murdered dozens of times...wow, my childhood was actually a lot darker than I remembered...
Bethesda needs to hire Jon to come up with ideas for the next Fallout game and/or fix F76.
His ideas of how he’d do Fallout 76 is like my dream Fallout game.
ideas aren't the same as development. His ideas are mostly pretty impossible. Anyone can come up with a bunch of massive ideas for what a great game would be like.
Honestly I disagree they’re impossible. Incredibly difficult, yes. But everything he discusses is something that starts at the game concept level, before any programming has even started. Had these kinds of ideas been tossed around during the meetings before the game even began being programmed, most of these could have been able to be done. I’m not saying easy, but had try been proposed at the right time they could’ve been possible.
About the mod part, I think adding "Expertise" for each type of gun would help players focus on specific weapons and help them feel worth investing time in that specific type.
Expertise can be earned by using the weapon to kill the enemy and as your expertise level increases, you gain access to more options to modify your weapons. This can be combined with the old system that along the way you still have a chance to earn higher rank mods when scrapping the weapon. This will at least ease the tension that eventually you will gain access to every mod of that weapon if your expertise is at the max level. This also makes the game feel more immersive for the player as the heavy weapon character that never used shotguns or rifles before still has to earn expertise from the beginning if they want to use a new type of weapon. Like the real world, we all earn skills through experience of doing each specific tasks.
With your crafting system.
Charcter with 10 luck 1 intelligence trys to make nail board and accidentally creates fat man
I....id kinda dig that
That would be hilarious.
Instructions unclear, introduced gay frogs.
But because he/she was still low-leveled and not specced into heavy weapons, when said character tries to fire it the Fatman miss fires and blows themselves up. xD
But his Luck is 10 so the missile ricochets into the nearest scorch beast
“ just falling over with the weight of the weapon”
I can just imagine someone attack a super mutant and running away and falling over themselves
12:00 I had an experience similar to that too. I got a Two Shot .44 from the first legendary enemy I killed, and it did three times the damage of every other weapon I had, for the rest of my playthrough. I couldn’t continue with the game after a while, but even as I quit at level 12, my .44 did more damage per hit than Jons Black Powder pistol, even counting all the perks he had giving him the supposed edge.
By the time he’d completed his character, he’d still only had about 10dmg on me per shot, of a gun I got at level 4. I’m sure the game had larger problems, but that’s the one that showed the most to me.
27 minutes in, and I agree about making it more survival orientated. Me and my friends currently are playing through the game from scratch with no HUD (having to do the old FO3/NV/4 way of pressing x to open a container to see whats inside), no fast travel and no teams, as well as only talking through area chat. Makes it so much more fun so far, and honestly walking back to my CAMP after a hard day of scavenging feels so good, it literally makes me think about what I actually want to bring back like "Do I leave the hunting rifle, and bring the level locked plasma rifle?" "what scrap am I going to bring back". It's real fun however when your controller disconnects while in-game, area chat breaks, so you have to leave and join back which is such a hassle. I played yesterday with my friend doing the Rose Quests (worst quest tbh) and we went into the wendigo cave together with mining helmets on and my friend went to scout ahead and his voice got more distant until I heard him sprinting back going "RUN THERES 2 FUCKING WENDIGOS". We didn't know which way they were coming from and had to sit back to back waiting. Intense as fuck and makes things way more memorable and enjoyable than playing the game normally.
The Fallout Community cares more about the IP than any of the people actually in charge of making it.
So sad but so true
damn, first time i see someone saying something sensible
about the big problem about fallout and bethesda
@Dibidam85
Agreed. Sadly Bethesda only wants fanboy zombies, not the dedicated nameless fans that have been with them over the decades. Corporate and their hierarchy spawn want to monopolize all the creative power. They would never allow developers to listen to even basic feedback from true fans like Jon and his video here.
In fact, Bethesda is currently doubling down on insanity: they are now hiring monetization experts for future games because they thought the weakpoint of 76's low sales was unoptimized microtransactions.
(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻
(Personally a fan since Morrowind. I think I'm going to have an aneurysm. . .)
@@dragonhold4 fyi it has been stated on multiple occasions that sales and recurring revenue from microtransactions are not grouped into the same earnings pile. I guess what I'm saying is, please stop talking out of your ass.
Either Todd Howard is the problem with Bethesda, or Bethesda is using him as the fall man that takes the heat. I really can't tell which.
Fallout 76: the movie
The M.A.T.N chronicles
The section at 1:11:11 resonated with me the most. I always felt that the different regions of the map, whilst visually different, just felt very samey in terms of challenge.
I'd love there to be some environmental hazards in places like the Ash Heap or Toxic Valley, it would give players something to strive towards and there would be a sense of achievement and wonder and pride at getting there.
Also, this video is a tremendous achievement. Well done Jon, you can be proud of this masterpiece!
[The section at 1:11:11 resonated with me the most. ] well duh, it's a series of 1's.
Here's a sort alteration to your suggestions on zones and difficulty. Perhaps have each area have obstructions that cater to, not specific perks/tactics, but to specific SPECIAL attributes. So with your Ash Crawler suggestion perhaps rather than just sneaking it's all about agility. SO sneaking allows you to evade ash crawlers but perhaps they're slower so you can outrun them and find safety if you have enough agility. Perhaps your acid storm will quickly deplete the health of players with low Endurance but higher endurances might be able to just power through the storm. So now the difficulty is determined by your choices and what makes you special overall rather than specifically. AND this also means group play would be encouraged by essentially recruiting people as guides and protection. Low visibility, get a high perception guy to better evade enemies. Lots of terminals blocking easier paths, get a high Intelligence to hack them. This mean players can also gain access to new types of treasure and junk, maybe if you have high strength you can gain more access to the Strength focused area and thus junk that is more prevalent there. So maybe the strength guy has more access to adhesive, but the intelligence guy has better access to screws.