Open World RPG

Fallout Fever

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The release of the Fallout Amazon Series appears to be a rousing success. It appears that critics across the board have given the show high marks, and similarly, long-time fans of the series are loving it. Tim Cain who worked on the very first Fallout game released his review of the show on YouTube and pretty much gave glowing praise for the level of detail. Sure there has been some minor controversy about the timeline of events and whether or not it reset the timeline of Fallout New Vegas… but overall folks have been happy. I shared my own praise of the show a few weeks back and I feel like I need to watch it again just to soak in all of the detail.

We are now seeing this Fallout love, translating into a rush of players to games like Fallout 76… which never really seemed to find its place and launched with a peak concurrency of 32k players on Steam. Recently it has been breaking those records with a new peak hitting just shy of 73k players. What is even more telling is… Amazon is giving this game away for free through the Microsoft Game Store and these Steam numbers are not even accounting for that. I’ve said recently that it seems to take about two years before a live service game is really worth playing, and now some five years later… Fallout 76 is in prime shape (pun intended) to welcome this influx of players.

The thing is… this isn’t just impacting the live service Fallout offering. The player numbers in Fallout 3 show an over 200% increase, New Vegas around 130% increase, and Fallout 4 similarly around 130% increase. This is translating to more than just players dusting off their existing copies because Fallout games are now seizing spots on the Steam Top Sellers Chart. As of the time of writing this Fallout 76 is 4th, Fallout 4 5th, Fallout 4 GOTY edition 9th, New Vegas 20th, and Fallout 3 GOTY edition down at 48th. I remember the Witcher Netflix series having a similar effect on sales of Witcher 3 boosting it by around 500%. While the Witcher series went off the rails and lost fans in later seasons, this is evidence that a good project surrounding a game will absolutely have deep impact on sales as it brings in a whole new group of fans.

Over the last week or so I have had a number of gamer friends reach out to me for my advice for where to start in their Fallout adventures. Namely how far back they should go… and as much as I hate to admit it my advice has been to skip the first two games unless they are already indoctrinated into the world of 90s CRPGs. The best Fallout game is New Vegas, so I feel like at a minimum everyone needs to play that one. There is merit however to start with Fallout 3, because while it is a very monochromatic wasteland… Three Dog is without a doubt the best DJ. Fallout 4 is a reasonable starting place if you are unwilling to deal with the jank of older games even though it has plenty of that good good Bethesda jank to contend with. My general advice would be to play Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, and then Fallout 4 in that order… and if you find yourself craving more then maybe go back and do Fallout 1 and 2 if you can handle the downgrade in tech. Fallout Tactics was a game that I did not enjoy in the least so it isn’t going to get any sort of recommendation from me.

Personally, I find myself sinking further and further into Fallout 76. This is probably a bad starting place for anyone who cares about the story elements of Fallout. The lore of the game feels a bit too malleable, and while I am enjoying myself if you actually care about the story of the world… the other games are a much better option. What I wanted was to explore the content that has been added to this game over the years. I’ve poked at it off and on… and then got into the habit of logging into claim the various offerings throughout the years. However, I’ve never really played it as my main game and I am trying to find my way into that stance. I talked about it quite a bit on the podcast this weekend, but the community is very intriguing.

At some point, I need to dedicate some serious time to building up a proper base. I somehow ended up getting my original destroyed when I tried to move it, but truth be told it was sort of a mess. I would like to actually spend some time building something I am proud of. Above is an older screenshot and quite honestly… I just sort of kept throwing things at it without any real design goals. I’ve found a fairly flat area of land that no one seems to ever have a base… so I am going to attempt to build something more proper there.

Return to Fallout 76

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Morning Folks! Like I said the other day… watching the Fallout Amazon Series has summoned forth a bunch of nostalgia for the series. As a result, I have found myself back in Fallout 76, which honestly is a better game than anyone gives it credit for. It was kinda janky at launch, but I remember having a heck of a lot of fun with the AggroChat crew. If you have Amazon Prime, you can get the game for free right now. As a promotion along with the Fallout series, you can snag a copy for either the Windows Store or Xbox. While there is no cross-platform play, the PC accounts on Steam and on the Windows Store both connect to Bethesda.net and can play together. So it is the perfect time to check the game out if you have never played it before.

Coming back to the game after a long absence, I have picked up a number of things that I figure I will share with you. First off… there is now a “Pacifist Mode” in the game which entirely disables PVP functionality. This can be found in the game section of the menu just below the look sensitivity and vibration settings. While the populace of Fallout 76 seems to largely be positive and non-toxic… there are occasionally bad apples that will come along attempting to trick you into PVP combat so that they can curb stomp you and get their jollies. If you are not PVP-minded… as is usually the case with most of my readership… then I suggest you pop into the settings and just set yourself to pacifist mode and never have to deal with it again. Similarly, you will want to make sure you set yourself to push to talk because by default the game is open mic which gets super annoying. I’ve just disabled voice chat in its entirety because it takes away from my enjoyment of most games.

This next piece of advice is going to seem entirely counterintuitive especially considering I just told you to disable voice chat. There is an odd culture that has spawned around this game of ALWAYS being grouped with other players when possible. The game gives you a pretty hefty experience bonus, so there are no downsides to grouping up. There are multiple types of teams available with specific ones that are focused on individual game modes. Casual teams however are largely thought of by the populace as “experience sharing” groups and whenever I play I hit Ctl+Tab to pop open the teams interface and see if there are any casual groups currently running. If they are all full you can just create your own Casual team which will likely fill quickly. One of the side benefits of being in a team aside from experience bonuses is the ability to teleport to the camps of your team mates to get around the map. You can also check to see if they have any vendors and are selling things that you might need cheaply.

Another thing that has been added to the game since I last played is Donation Boxes. These appear at hubs like the train station and outside the first vault allowing players to leave items for each other and to give players a good start in the wasteland. There always seems to be something in them especially ammunition and needed resources like bobby pins. I need to clean out my ammunition stores and drop some goodies in these to share with others myself. I’ve yet to find anything in them that I really needed so I have left them alone, but it is cool that it is a cultural tenant of the game now. Apparently, players used to leave goods in a specific box on the map, and it became an unofficial swap hub. The Fallout 76 devs noticed this and decided to make it an official system.

Another thing that was either not like this previously… or that I simply did not remember is that breaking down multiple copies of the same weapon teaches you mods for that weapon type. I believe when the game first launched this only worked if you happened to find a weapon with said mod already in place. Now just salvaging multiple copies of the same item seems to reward you a new mod each time, allowing you to build up your stockpile of recipes and resources. As someone who grew up playing Doom… I am of course using the pump shotgun quite a bit and slowly over time I have unlocked additional mods for it. I really need to find a higher level one however because as of writing this post I just noticed that it is level 5.

Another thing that I once knew but had forgotten… is that you want to use Photo Mode any time you are in an area that you might want to remember. Photos you have taken in-game in this manner will from that point forward be used as loading screens for the game. If nothing else it is pretty cool to see your character in various locations as you pop around the game incurring loading screens. I am trying to remember to do this more often because I think I only have five pictures currently in my rotation.

One of the things that Amazon Prime is giving away right now is a trial membership to Fallout 1st. This is essentially a subscription model to the game and gives you a number of limited-time cosmetics for playing and a fairly generous “allowance” of currency for the Atom shop. The big feature that you get with 1st however is the ability to create private worlds. The nice thing about this is that the same character progresses in both Adventure mode aka with other players, and Private Adventure which is your own private snapshot of the world. Sometimes in spite of all of the bonuses for playing with other players… you just want to be off in your own world doing your own thing. You can also spin up entirely custom worlds that let you fiddle with the ruleset. These however do not carry over progress to the “Adventure” worlds, and generally speaking, there is always some special limited-time event going on.

There is a battlepass-like seasonal model in the game, and the last time I played it was essentially a game board where you unlocked one slot at a time. This seems to have changed to something more akin to a storefront where ranking up gives you golden tickets and then those can be spent on various cosmetic stuff. Each page is gated by a specific rank and doing various Daily Quests and Weekly Quests earns you currency. If you have experienced the modern Guild Wars 2 dailies system it works fairly similarly to this, but the Fallout 76 goes much deeper in the various things you can unlock. Right now the season is focused around one of the in-world radio drama characters “Rip Daring” and some sort of cryptid-based theme. This current season began on March 26th and will run through June. If I can get into the swing of things and get used to running dailies then I might actually have enough time to unlock some of the cooler stuff.

I’ve been having quite a bit of fun just roaming around the West Virginia Wasteland. In a few days I have leveled up a bunch of times and unlocked several battlepass levels. From what I understand the first real breakpoint in the game comes at level 50, and any levels after that are just sort of gravy. You can start a fresh character at level 20 now, but I think I am pretty happy just slowly leveling my way up from where I am currently. That is one thing that changed that I think is really slick. So the world originally was tiered allowing you to accidentally wander into some really high level areas. Then they made some changes which had the group leader set the level of the world, making it awkward for low levels grouping with higher levels. Now it seems that they have done something similar to the Elder Scrolls Online level scaling tech where the world around you is set based on your own level allowing a level 1 player and a level 100 player to be effectively fighting the same monster.

Anyways, I am having quite a bit of fun poking around with this lately. If you make it into the game my Bethesda account is Belghast so feel free to friend me up and say hi.

Radioactive Nostalgia

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Over the weekend I finished watching my way through the Amazon Fallout Series and I have to say… It nails the vibe of Fallout perfectly. There are so many things that are just “right” about the world and I have a feeling I am going to have to watch the entire series a few more times before all of them sync in. There are moments like Super Duper Mart that are pulled directly from the games, and then there are just set dressing and elements that are so familiar but not necessarily directly connected. For example the placement of first aid kits on walls in exactly the right location to where you find them in pretty much every fallout game. Then there are the sound effects and quite honestly just by those alone… I know exactly what weapon is being fired at any given time. Someone on this show clearly cared about these details and I greatly appreciate all of the loving work that they did on getting them right.

All of this built a strong desire to dive back in and immerse myself in the Fallout Universe. Now about once a year I end up playing some New Vegas because it is one of my all-time favorite games. Fallout 3 however is a game that I have not replayed in over a decade. So I went through the process of getting it up and running. I tried to install some mods and then got frustrated by the fact that apparently, you need to downgrade the current 2021 client… in order to get most of them to work. So instead I nuked everything and started fresh just playing through the vanilla game of the year client as downloaded from Steam.

I’ve got to be honest… the game as a whole holds up surprisingly well. I mean it still has obtuse gunplay and is full of that good good Bethesda jank, but nothing really felt terribly off from the formula we have all gotten used to. Sure mechanically there are some missing features that we have in the more modern Fallout games like 4 and 76, but mechanically it felt solid. I’ve not played a ton so far, and unfortunately Steam seems to not be able to track actual time spent playing the game and instead tracks time spent with the launcher open. I think if I were to play this further I would need to mod it a bit. I had forgotten just how desolate Fallout 3 looks. In the later titles, they realized that barren wastelands were a bit uninteresting to stare at in 3D, but this first of the modern Fallouts is a bit “spartan”.

Last night I spent some time diving back into Fallout 76. At some point, I completely restarted the game and as such still have a lot of the early quest scaffolding to work my way through. I find myself with the itch to live more in the Fallout world so between 3 and 76 I figure I am probably going to be doing a lot more of that in the coming weeks. 76 is a title that I feel like I have never really gotten into the swing of, so it would be interesting to play it enough to really feel like I am experiencing the benefits of the live service side of things. I know it has been a constantly expanding game over the last few years so it will be cool to get through the original story and see some of the newer stuff.

Have you watched your way through the new Amazon series? What were your thoughts? Has it also prompted you to want to spend more time in Fallout games? Drop me a line below.

Horizon Forbidden West on PC

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I have to admit I feel a little bit bad for the Guerilla Games. This game released in early 2022 and was somewhat screwed over by Elden Ring releasing within a few days of it. Now the PC version is finally out and it is colliding up against the release date for Dragon’s Dogma II. For me… not being a souls-like fan I played this game originally on the PS5 but bounced around the midpoint of the game, or at least what I feel like is the midpoint. After some time I made the decision just to wait and revisit it when it released on PC since I enjoyed the first game infinitely more with a mouse and keyboard. Sony really needs to tighten up the release cadence of these games because two years waiting on a PC release seems a bit brutal. Complaining aside… Horizon Forbidden West is a beautiful game.

On so many levels, this is just mechanically a better version of the first game. It does everything that Zero Dawn did right and then adds multiple layers of nuance and enjoyment on top of that. The addition of gliding really improves the entire experience and makes this quite possibly the best version of “Breath of the Wild” that exists. The mechanics of hunting dinobots is just so much fun. Focusing in on specific weak points and weak elements to quickly decimate these gigantic machines is just pure enjoyment for me. However few moments beat this massively long glide down from the side of a mountain after finishing an epic climb.

The other thing that I really feel like calling out about this game is that the side content is so much more developed. In the first game the main story was the highlight but you still met a lot of really interesting side characters. In Forbidden West every interlude seems to be filled with characters that I legitimately care about. I was happy to see a bunch of folks returning like my Petra, my favorite side character from the first game. However there are a bunch of new characters like Silga… who once heard a radio broadcast for a brief moment and it sort of dominated her destiny from that point forward. So many heart felt stories woven through the forbidden west that I have spent way more time focusing on side content than actually moving the main story forward.

There are also so many freaking vistas that are just breathtaking. Like who else could have made a swamp look this interesting? The color palette of the game is part of what makes it all work so well. Everything is so vibrant and really pops on the screen, even without leaning on the gimmick of HDR since I generally play with that turned off. For the most part I have been playing the game at 1440p at at 144hz and it looks amazing. There have been a few times I shift it up and do 1080p 60hz when I am downstairs and playing on my laptop remote into my gaming machine upstairs via Parsec and that still looks gorgeous.

That is not to say there are not some performance issues with the game. There are some areas surrounding the region known as “The Grove” or “Lowland Territory” that have volumetric fog that seems to slow everything down. The game has received a few minor patches and I have not experienced since the first days, so maybe that is now taken care of… but I did experience some sluggish experience in a few specific areas. This was also something that impacted cutscenes where the dialog and the animations were wildly out of sync with the animations playing much too slowly. Like I said I have not experienced this in a few days and there were some patches… so hopefully it was a bug that was taken care of but I can’t talk about the game without at least mentioning that there were some issues from time to time.

I’ve passed the point where I was in my previous attempt at the game, and I have no clue how far I am from the end… but it is my goal to wrap this up prior to the launch of the Path of Exile League on Friday. That is going to happen fairly late in the day and I am off Friday so if nothing else I should be able to wrap up loose ends then. The Horizon series is just a phenomenal experience and it gives me some hope about the talk of an MMORPG version of this game. If I could have a game that is a mishmash of Horizon, Destiny, and Monster Hunter that I could play with friends… I would be in heaven. The only thing that gives me some pause… is that this project is being led by NC Soft… a company that is not known for creating games that I love. Sure they published Guild Wars 2… but that is more Arena.Net than anything that NC Soft did. They also had the short-sightedness to cancel City of Heroes so… suffice to say I am cautious about that project.