Fallout 76 Is Good If You Forget What It Was Supposed To Be
Escape from Tarkov torches its good will, Helldivers 2 gets harder, and Microsoft celebrates being the number one publisher on PS5
Fallout 76 hit a new concurrent player record of over 72,000 on Steam a week ago. The popularity of the Amazon Fallout TV show pushed the uneven multiplayer survival sim back into the spotlight almost six years after its original, buggy launch. The top two questions when you Google Fallout 76 are "is it crossplay?" and "is it good now?" The answer to the first one is no, sadly. Xbox Game Pass players can't even play with Game Pass PC players, let alone with ex-vault dwellers on PSN. Progression doesn't carry over either, despite character data for the always online game being stored remotely on Bethesda's servers.
The answer to the second question is a lot more complicated. Like many live service games, Fallout 76 was never as bad as its detractors made it out to be nor as good as its true believers claimed. The gaming consensus often dismisses broken games as also bad ones, while at the same time racing to announce a comeback after just six to 12 months of dedicated updates.
The promise of Fallout 76 made by Bethesda at the E3 2018 announcement was a post-apocalyptic playground where players created the world's stories instead of NPCs. Rather than a few memorable moments like Megaton's undetonated atomic bomb in Fallout 3, the MMO would offer a rich history drawn from players' own discoveries, struggles, and triumphs. That turned out not to be the case.
The player count per server was too small and the options for interacting with one another too limited. The old Fallout engine wasn't a good foundation for a Rust-like after all. The PVP systems resulted in boring encounters or tedious griefing. So eventually Bethesda stripped out everything ambitious in Fallout 76, added NPCs and middling story quests, and settled on just making it a loot crafting game a la Destiny 2 with base-building.
This is how I find myself perennially returning to the game hoping it is suddenly a world-driven multiplayer Fallout RPG and not a resource scavenging game with events you grind for extra gear and fun guns. This can be its own kind of fun which is how I found myself up until 2 a.m. earlier this week harvesting fusion cores for my power armor at the Poseidon Power Plant workshop. Almost every "how do I do X" question from new players on the subreddit has the inevitable answer of "spend a bunch of time dumpster diving in random parts of the map."
Once you break through the inertia of the early game and learn to ignore the defanged survival mechanics it can be a lot of fun to explore the wasteland harvesting resources for your camp. The answer then to whether Fallout 76 is good now depends a lot on whether your gamer-sense starts tingling upon hearing the words "janky post-apocalyptic Stardew Valley." I also think Fallout 76 could have been a lot more successful a lot more quickly if it didn't seem like the game was constantly trying to fight against this fate. The game's map will dramatically expand for the first time ever with the Skyline Valley expansion in June.
Live Service Interrupted
One of the messier wrinkles in Fallout 76 is its monetization model. Bethesda made all updates and expansions free and instead charges for camp items, cosmetics, and a monthly subscription that gives paying players various bonuses like an additional campsite that make the game a lot less tedious to play. This membership, called Fallout 1st, is normally $13 a month, on top of needed Xbox Live (now Game Pass Core) or PS Plus to play Fallout 76 on console. It's clearly intended to milk the whales who are over level 600 and have been playing for years. Other helpful items like a Fusion Core recharger are sold a la carte for real money. It's an overwhelming mess to navigate if you're just getting started with the game today.
What's really been bothering some players recently, however, is an overhaul of Fallout 76's season pass. Originally introduced in June 2020, the earned rewards were laid out like a board game that players progressed through by completing various objectives. It had plenty of problems but was a novel approach to the standard punch card approach many other games have taken.
With the launch of season 16, Duel with the Devil, on March 26, Bethesda switched back to a Fortnite-style booklet. Players unlock new pages by completing challenges, earning tickets that can be used to collect rewards. It's much more streamlined and much less creative. Plus reaching level 100 isn't even enough to unlock everything. "It gives you the illusion of choice but what's the point," wrote one player on Reddit. "Now instead of getting an item per level you'll have to get multiple levels for enough tickets for a single item. It's an objectively worse version of what we had."
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League feels like its at a point where Rocksteady Studios needs to address the elephant in the room which is that nobody wants to keep playing this game. The game made headlines this week for falling to just 200 concurrent players on Steam. Windows Central reported that Suicide Squad has dropped off much faster than Marvel's Avengers, recently even had fewer concurrent players than the already killed-off superhero live service game. "At What Point Do You Abandon A Live Roadmap?" asked Forbes writer Paul Tassi.
Instead of a frank discussion with prospective players or the remaining community, Rocksteady released another developer update that feels a bit like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. It outlined future changes coming to the game when episode 2 drops, which is expected to add another playable character and boss fight but still doesn't have a release date. The improvements teased all have to do with recalibrating the loot chase and end-game progression, as well as a few quality-of-life fixes like mission mutators moving from negative modifiers to gameplay bonuses.
None of this addresses the fundamental problem with Suicide Squad which is that there's no content. The main game ends on a cliffhanger after a reskinned boss fight, and most of the game's activities are remixes of the same three missions. I think there's a meaty arcade combat experience at the heart of Suicide Squad that's complimented by an interesting buildcrafting system. Unfortunately, there's just no reason to engage with any of it, and nothing but new missions and story content can change that. If there's not effectively a Suicide Squad 2 hiding in the post-launch roadmap, it's hard to see anything changing. There's no way there are enough players to sustain the investment a 2.0-style reboot requires. And Rockstead hasn't even hinted that it thinks that's what might be necessary.
Battlestate Games, maker of extraction loot shooter Escape from Tarkov, set its community on fire this week when it announced a new PVE mode and new items would be locked behind a $250 Unheard edition of the game. This even though players who previously bought a $150 Edge of Darkness version of the game had been promised "all future DLC" for free. A community manager on the Tarkov Discord wrote, "It ain't DLC, it's unique feature of the new edition." The studio doubled-down on Twitter in a post that was quickly ratio'd and appended with a community note. A YouTube trailer was downvoted to hell and the Discord and subreddit have been a mess ever since.
On Friday, Battlestate Games tried to quell the community with an olive branch. Chief operating officer Nikita Gupta posted on the subreddit that Edge of Darkness owners would get temporary access to the new PVE mode before needing to upgrade. A day later, he had a new offer: the mode would eventually become permanently free to all current Edge of Darkness owners, while those who pay to upgrade get the first shot at testing it. Less than 24 hours after THAT post, Gupta was back with a new post. "I would like to say that I am very sorry that fans and the game community in general are experiencing these feelings," he wrote. The community still isn't buying it.
"We didn't win anything so far, all of that was just an apology that they got caught and some damage control," wrote a player in one of the many upvoted posts flooding the Tarkov subreddit's front page. "You still have P2W items that affect fights outside of skill. you still have PvE that is behind paywall that won't reach people that need it the most. The ones that just start and want to get into the game." One of the issues at play here is that fans have been complaining about cheaters in Tarkov for a while. A PVE mode would be somewhere they could play free from hacks and other exploits.
The latest twist is that the owner of FPS event and show organizer Evasion.gg appeared to be booted from Tarkov channels after speaking out against the recent announcements. “What happened to the Tarkov community over the past week is what’s been happening to us for the last two years dealing with BSG,” the organization posted on Twitter. “Promises not kept, gas lighting, event cancelations, control issues, blatant nepotism, all while wasting our time money and efforts.”
Foamstars has been plagued with matchmaking errors recently. "I'd like to apologize for the matchmaking errors many of you may have experienced during your gameplay," producer Kosuke Okatani wrote on the Square Enix website. "We are working to address this and other high-priority issues.
A May 2 patch will introduce a bunch of changes, including penalties for international disconnects and going AFK, spawn camping, and bug fixes for the hero shooter's Chloe Noir character. The update should also address a memory leak issue that was apparently crashing the game on PS4. But some players aren't even sure if they're matching against other humans.
"Going into the game play, I was the only one who used any skills the entire match," one player wrote on the subreddit. "Their movements were very unnatural. They'd often get stuck on corners, running into them, then giving up and just standing there. Their aim was not human like at all, they never missed no matter what you were doing."
Patch Notes
Hellivers 2 1.000.003 just made the game a lot harder for lone players by increasing enemy patrols. It's also now more hardcore in other ways. "Shots that ricochet from heavy armored enemies will now properly hit the Helldiver who fired them. Trigger discipline is highly recommended."
Dragon's Dogma 2's latest Title Update is "Reducing the infection frequency of dragonsplague and adjusting the signs of Pawns infected with dragonsplague to be more noticeable. For example, when infected, glowing eyes will be more noticeable."
Minecraft Bedrock version 1.20.80 adds an armadillo mob. "Spiders and Cave Spiders will run away from Armadillos, and only if they are not in a rolled up state."
Contra: Operation Galuga patch fixes bugs that were freezing the game and turning music off.
Granblue Fantasy: Relink Ver. 1.2.1 added new quests and characters. It also, "Improved the visibility of damage numbers that have hit their damage cap."
For Honor patch 2.51.0 brought a bunch of balance tweaks and a new ecological mode to decrease power consumption on console. Wardens got a nice buff too: " All Shoulder Bash followups now gain Uninterruptible Stance at 100ms
Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition 1.3.55.0 addressed a performance regression when enabling NVIDA Reflex On+Boost that was making GPUs not give the game their full power.
Industry News
Embracer plans to break up after years of acquisitions and a brutal regime of cuts, cancellations, and closures last year. How did we get here? CEO Lars Wingefors blames investors for losing their nerve after the cheap money-fueled covid boom. Another possible vector: Embracer took on a ton of debt to buy European board game distributor Asmodee for $3 billion and then a deal for $2 billion in funding from the Saudi public investment fund fell through. As part of the new breakup plan, J.P Morgan and other banks will finance a write-down of the rest of Emrbacer's debt, putting almost all of it with Asmodee.
If you're asking what the hell any of this has to do with games, you're not alone. Gamesindustry.biz had an exclusive interview with Wingefores in which he failed to explain what the original value of Embracer was or how that will change under this reorganization. "I would like the management teams of those businesses to form their own specific strategy in terms of how they operate their business, how they consolidate what games they make, how they monetize, and so on," he said. Lol okay. Wingefors won't be CEO of any of these new entities but plans to stay on as a part owner for many years to come. Has he learned anything from these mistakes? Doesn't sound like it. He won't even admit what any of them were.
Microsoft is really proud of how many games it sells on the PlayStation Store as Xboxes continue to gather dust. The tech giant reported another 30% year-over-year drop-off in console sales, while patting itself on the back for having the most games in the best-sellers list on PSN of any publisher. "We are committed to meeting players where they are by bringing great games to more people on more devices," CEO Satya Nadella told investors during the recent earnings call. He added that Microsoft set a third quarter record for game streaming hours, console usage, and monthly active devices.
Touting sales on the PlayStation Store is a far cry from when Phil Spencer accused Sony of using its 30 percent commissions to take more games away from Xbox back during the FTC trial last year. "They use that money among other revenue that they have to do things to try to reduce Xbox’s survival on the market," he said at the time. Of course, that was the same trial during which Nadella said he hates console exclusives and would get rid of them entirely if he could.
People Can Fly decided to cancel its co-op RPG codenamed Project Dagger for a write-down of roughly $20 million. Take-Two walked away from the game in 2022, and either development wasn't progressing or it couldn't find a new partner. The studio behind 2021's underrated grim sci-fi loot shooter Outriders laid off 30 people earlier this year, but it's still working on a lot of other games, including one for Square Enix and another for Microsoft.
Blizzcon is canceled again. The announcement-laden fanfest came back last year after covid put the in-person event on ice and a 2021 sexual harassment lawsuit through the company into turmoil. Now owned by Microsoft, Blizzard suggested future announcements for Diablo IV's expansion and other content would be sprinkled across other gaming events like Gamescom. At least some of them will no doubt appear at Microsoft's not-E3 showcase in June.
A bad year for game developers continues with layoffs at Alone in the Dark maker Precision Studios and the shutdown of Bethesda France. The latter was opened back in 2010 ahead of the launch of Fallout: New Vegas. The decision to close it was seemingly part of wider cuts at Microsoft announced back in January.
Indie Games To Watch
Centum (Hack the Publisher/Serenity Forge): "Presented as a long-lost game never released, navigate through a series of perplexing scenarios, each shrouded in uncertainty and enigma."
Promise Mascot Agency (Kaizen Game Works): "Explore the cursed town of Kaso-Machi! Recruit and train mascot friends! Help out when jobs go wrong! Solve the mystery of your exile! Help Pinky work through her many anger issues! Turn Promise Mascot Agency into the best agency in Japan!"
Pine: A Story Of Loss (Made Up Games): "Alone in the forest glade he shared with his wife, a woodworker struggles to accept her passing. Help him hold on to cherished memories of their life together as he struggles to care for himself and his now empty home. Pine is a single-serving game focused on telling a beautiful, emotional tale."