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Fallout 1st - Utterly Terrible or Simply Flawed

    • 1467 posts
    October 31, 2019 6:53 PM EDT

    Good...eh it's morning for me but probably not for you (based just on...statistics and all that) but today I wanted to have a discussion that legitimately interested me. If you somehow hadn't heard, Bethesda recently revealed their 'Fallout 1st' paid service that has gotten an immense amount of backlash. It's purely a service for Fallout 76, that provides the following benefits.

    So, it's interesting to me. The backlash around the service has essentially been two-fold in my opinion. First are the people that are shitty about it in general, that think it's riduclulous to pay $100 a year on top of buying the game and that what you get is absolutely not worth that much. Then there are the people that are annoyed that, to be honest Bethesda really fucked up implementing it. The Scrapbox provided problems, the Private Worlds aren't really set up in a good way. There are flaws like the fact that it isn't actually a unique instance of a world, but essentially just a random, currently empty server that Bethesda is already running. That means you can come across already looted areas/killed enemies and essentially means that, while the worlds are Private they aren't as applicible (all the time) to you and a group of friends jumping in and playing in your world. 

    I wanted to have a discussion on this, basically just looking at the service and judging whether you think the idea is just utterly terrible and that Bethesda is being greedy or that there are legitimate benefits to the system, it just wasn't implemented well. I'll be delving into some of the research I'd done regarding Private Servers in my comment, but very interested to hear what other people think.

  • Mr.
    • 763 posts
    October 31, 2019 8:41 PM EDT

    I have little faith in Bethesda right now, which is worrying. But at least they have one game before Elder Scrolls VI (Starfield) so that will allow us both to evaluate how this new Bethesda deals with a single player game and how much (if anything) it learned with Fallout 4 and its many shortcomings (voiced protagonists, poor RPG mechanics and mainly its poor writing and story) before they start working on The Elder Scrolls VI. And it will also let us put even more pressure on Bethesda and have them make a course correction in case Starfield sucks too.

    On the topic at hand, looking at it merely from the standpoint of a paid game with subscription and micro-transactions, my thoughts align a lot with Gopher's, in that a subscription model is vastly superior to a system based upon micro-transactions, period. That said, it should have been like this from the start... charging $60, plus $14 dollars a month, plus micro-transactions... It's insane.

    They should kill all micro-transactions and reduce the price of the main game to something like $40, then I hypothetically wouldn't mind paying for the subscription (though it is a salty price, but it could be justified if they start allowing unrestricted modding on private worlds).


    This post was edited by Mr. at October 31, 2019 8:42 PM EDT
    • 1467 posts
    October 31, 2019 10:34 PM EDT

    I'll have to give that a bit of a watch, Goper at least is less clickbaity than a lot of other people (I mean, the amount of people that don't actually care about Fallout who are making videos being outraged about this is hilarious) and I tend to trust his opinions anyway. So yeah, might be interesting. 

    I think, it's sort of fair to point out that this isn't really a strange concept for an MMO. ESO has basically the same structure with ESO+, the base game and Microtransactions but then it throws in paid expansions as well. Destiny is the same (Base Game, Expansions and Microtransactions. Dunno if it has a Premium subscription), I believe World of Warcraft is subscription based but expansions cost more to buy? Haven't played it but I am about 80% sure I've seen WoW expansions in stores. It's not really a Bethesda thing, it's an MMO problem. Nobody got shitty when ESO unveiled ESO+ and really the fact that eople played it at all orignally proved that people were more or less happy paying full price for a new game and then subscription as well. So part of me is really curious about why Fallout 76 is getting so much hate for literally just doing the same thing as it's competition. 

    It is however completely fair to look at the content your getting. Which is where, for me the Private Servers come into play. Not going to argue that, at the end of the day it's shit that Bethesda couldn't make things work for whatever reason, and it's why I'm not going to even consider paying for it. But the theory behind everything is entirely worth $14 a month, and honestly I think it's actually really good in theory. I'd done a bit of research into how other games handle Private Servers, and completely ignoring the fact that it's illegal for most games, the only other examples I could really find are of the company outsourcing the server management and you having to pay the third party. So, the cost your paying is actually I think better than other MMO's simply by it being done by the company that makes the game and the cost (and it being an option at all). 

    I dunno, I'm very torn on everything, and it boils down to Theory/Reality. In Theory, fuck yeah I think this is a legitimately good idea, not aimed at individuals but at groups. Hell since the concept is group-play is it that hard to imagine a group splitting the costs? So yeah, it's not great in theory if you just want it to play Solo, but if you've got a group of friends then it's kind of amazing. In Reality, yeah it's not great, not great at all. They've managed to royally fuck up implementing it in what feels like every possible way. 

     

    • 275 posts
    November 3, 2019 2:52 AM EST

    Part of he reason F76 gets shit for this, I think, is because it runs contrary to what they said a while back: that the only microtransactions would be cosmetic only. Back on launch when the game was buggy as shit (even more than it is now) to the point of being damn near unplayable and they shipped fucking trashbags instead of what they actually promised, that was the one bright spot it had. The cosmetics were expensive, but they were that way so that Bethesda could put in gameplay affecting stuff for free (their words, not mine). Now they're adding in private worlds and more crafting storage (shit people have been begging for since launch) behind an impermanent paywall less than a year later.


    This post was edited by Ebonslayer at November 3, 2019 2:56 AM EST
  • Mr.
    • 763 posts
    November 3, 2019 12:30 PM EST

    Yeah, they're actually making the game worse unless you pay (again) for them to fix it. Pay to play and then pay to keep playing what you already paid for.

    • 1467 posts
    November 4, 2019 7:28 PM EST

    I guess there's this vague argument that could be had on whether this counts as a microtransaction...Like, I think technically it isn't but that's getting into semantics rather than the core nature of the problem which is that they definitely suggested that we wouldn't have to pay for any content or gameplay affecting transactions, yet here we are with that changes how you play. I am curious, if it was simply Private Servers does (and the extended crafting space was just implemneted as a normal feature) would that change the opinion on Fallout 1st in anyway?