Fallout 76 Archives - Page 2 of 4 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Unsupported Alts

May 6, 2021 by Belghast

Good morning friends. Today is my Friday because I took tomorrow off and depending on my mood may be calling it part of the weekend. I am not sure which one of you commented that remembering random things is a sign of a midlife crisis, because lord is it hitting me with a vengeance right now. While getting ready this morning I remembered this one story from my childhood which is dumb but I am still going to share it. My entire life my father had the side hustle of a portrait photographer, this is in part why I tend to take those sort of things for granted because I effectively grew up in the darkroom and one of my first jobs was helping him photograph weddings. My dad gave his business a pretty generic name “Bill’s Photography”, and paid a local calligrapher to create a good clean masthead for him.

During the 90s when direct mail started to computerize some weirdness began happening. Always in the past he would get mail addressed to himself and mail addressed to his business, because a human being was effectively interpreting that business name correctly. However at some point this shifted and he started receiving mail for the mythical being known as “Bill S. Photography” which at the time I thought was the funniest thing that had ever happened on the face of the planet. On very rare occasions it would come through as “Bill S. Photograph” which was even better. So here I am this morning giggling like a madman as I am remembering this, and I am sure my wife thought I had completely lost it.

I think I might be done with Outriders. Recently I started leveling a Technomancer in part so that I could see how the narration and story worked with the female voice actor. I’ve now been through the entire story and I have to say if you are wanting to start the game fresh… absolutely go with the female character because the line delivery just works better. There are so many times when you are playing as the male character, that the line delivery makes it sound like he doesn’t actually understand what he is saying. I was never certain if this was a problem with the audio editing, or the line delivery itself… but after playing through with the female voice actor it seems like maybe it was the later.

Essentially I have reached this place where I don’t feel like going through the world tier grind once again with a second character. I think this is the general problem with the way levels and gearing works in Outriders is that there is zero “catch up” benefit to your alts. Sure I have a vault full of level 42 gear from my main character, but my alts can’t use a single bit of it because they have not “leveled” to the point of being able to use it. In theory this should have worked in a manner like Champion Levels in Elder Scrolls Online, where the World Tier and Challenge Tier are associated with your account and not your character, and once you finished the main story you would zoom forward to whatever your “Account Level” was at that point.

Outriders was an enjoyable but flawed game experience, which I guess is pretty par for the course with outings from companies who are not already seasoned in the looter shooter genre. Then again… I guess I could say the same about most of the other games in the genre as well, they are all sorta flawed experiences. I am hoping that Outriders sold well enough that we might see an Outriders 2 that makes good on the promise of this title, fixes some of the tonal issues of the story, and actually has a proper plan for what to do with players upon completing the final bit of story. They told us in no uncertain terms that this was not a “live service” title and I guess we should have believed them. There are a lot of things that need tweaking but I get the general impression that they are moving on to other game titles and not really that interested in anything that is not strictly a bug fix.

In other news… Fallout 76 is unabashedly a “live service” game and has seemingly found its stride. I have been enjoying myself greatly as I roam around Appalachia, which I really wish was easier to spell. At least with the Commonwealth it was two easy to spell terms jammed together, but maybe over time I will get used to it. That said it took me years to be able to spell shenanigans on the first try… and I LOVE that word. As of last night I am level 8 which means I am rapidly catching up to where I left off with the game the first time. The quests and the NPCs make the entire experience feel more enjoyable. The responder area is more or less intact with it being largely told through audio diaries, but what makes all of that feel more alive is that there are random human NPCs wandering the wastes adding flavor here and there and making it feel less dead.

I’ve built a somewhat nonsense house that cantilevers off the side of the main structure. Given that there is no actual gravity in this game… I didn’t have to do anything to make this more logical but I nonetheless added some support struts because visually it bothered me. Sometimes in a game like this I just keep building in a very “weasley house” manner until I run out of materials. Ultimately what I really need to do is pick up my camp and move it somewhere that works slightly better. For now it has been handy to be next to the Wayward while doing quests, but eventually I can see logic in uprooting it. I wish there was a way to do some terraforming, but you are pretty much stuck with way things are which is what lead me to have the second story wider than the first.

What I really need to do is sort out a more stable method of healing myself and a better source of water and food that don’t irradiate the hell out of me. I mean I have radaway, but I also know that is a fairly limited resource right now. I do pretty well in a stand up fight, but end up needing to heal pretty regularly afterwards. I did find an interesting option for grinding… up at the lighthouse on top of the mountain which seems to have a nigh unlimited number of rad toads. If I hang out in the house I can pretty safely kill those at range. There is also a quest up there for filling up the lighthouse with bioluminescent fluid that I should probably do as well. I wish there was a way to upgrade a piece of gear to the next level range rather than needing to craft a brand new item, but the game is what it is.

All in all however I am having a blast in Fallout 76, so I apparently was away from it the optimal amount of time for it to feel fresh and for the game to have evolved while I was away. Maybe at some point I can return to Outriders and have that same feeling.

Unexplained Hankering

May 5, 2021 by Belghast

I am finding myself in a familiar place where I am sort of flailing about between multiple games right now. I am logging into Elder Scrolls Online each night to play a least a tiny bit, even if it simply means getting my daily reward, sorting out mail and auctions, and then logging right back out. I am also playing a bit of Outriders each day, but I have finished the story on my second character and don’t really relish the process of grinding up world rank yet again. Finally there is Mass Effect Andromeda and I am not really sure I have it in me to replay that game right now either. I ultimately started again because Tam has been playing through it and I more or less wanted a refresher for the story. I feel like I have played enough to jog my memory for conversations, but also not really feeling the drive to push further especially knowing that I am going to want to replay Mass Effect when the Legendary edition comes out.

Last night I was struck with the unexplained desire to play some Fallout 76. I did not make it terribly far in the game and my highest character was only level 11 from the launch. In the time I have been away they have made some fairly sweeping changes to the way the game plays and the content contained within. The biggest of these is the inclusion of NPCs scattered throughout the area, which is sort of huge given that not having them made the game feel weird at launch. All of these combined with my relatively low level has given me the desire for some time to start from scratch. Last night that desire finally turned into action as I rolled out of the vault as Belgrave my second character in the wasteland.

I’ve not made it terribly far yet, mostly just down the hill from the vault to the first settlement area. Having NPCs makes a MASSIVE difference for me personally in how this game feels. At launch it felt like we were wandering around this dead husk of a world and now it feels like everything is alive. I set up my first C.A.M.P. just down the road from the Wayward. Down the road a bit further is a little camp of Brotherhood of Steel folks, and immediately this feels way more like Fallout than the 76 I remembered. I think the biggest part of this change in feel… is there is now an Appalachia radio station playing some very familiar Fallout tunes along with some new ones added to the mix.

I’ve created only the most basic of shacks on the road. I spent some of the Atoms I had on a scraptron but I am uncertain of how well it is actually working. In theory it is supposed to collect scrap for you and deposit it in the box. At least for now I am playing on a private world while I get my bearings in the game, which means I did have to pony up for Fallout First which has apparently had a number of the bugs ironed out. It is my understanding that a private instance exists for five minutes after you log out of the game, allowing you to pretty easily swap items in the world between your characters. Also it allows you to pop over to a public game for a few minutes, wait the timer out… and then spawn into a fresh copy of the world with fresh resources. That intrigued me so I went ahead and picked up a subscription, that along with the unlimited scrap box because I am addicted to the unlimited crafting bag in ESO.

I had an awful lot of fun last night just sorta doing my own thing. I don’t have a large social group in Fallout 76, mostly just the handful of AggroChat folks that I played with when the game initially launched. I am enjoying not having to see other players, because the few minutes I played on a public server already annoyed me enough to abandon ship. I was trying to solve a hacking puzzle and this dude kept jumping up and down on top of me making an awful racket. So I guess I am paying for the First subscription in part for the peace and solitude of never having to see another human being while playing. That does not mean I won’t pop over to public servers occasionally, but I am likely going to hide in my own little private box.

A Partial Defense

October 25, 2019 by Belghast

Earlier this week Bethesda announced the Fallout 1st Membership, and I feel like I had a vastly different take on it than the rest of the community. There are a good number of people up in arms about this, and I can’t say that they are entirely wrong. I myself have deeply mixed feelings about it, but at face value I didn’t balk at the $100 a year price tag. As such I am going to break down my line of thinking. For that $100 or $13 monthly you get the following items.

The part of this that I immediately honed in on was the Private Worlds functionality. See if you have followed my blog for awhile this was what I desperately wanted at launch. In fact there were a bunch of server hosting providers that were advertising having private worlds just ahead of launch. This was likely wild speculation, but the serving up of a private server is not at all a new thing. In fact games like Rust, Minecraft or ARK function heavily on the backs of private hosted worlds that allow you to tweak and mod until your heart is content. This is ultimately what I was expecting from Fallout 76, was the ability to run my own destination to hang out and explore the world with my friends.

Now if you look at the price tag entirely based upon Private Worlds… it becomes honestly a bargain. If we just take a Rust or an Ark server, which I figure are pretty fair equivalents of what sort of horsepower that Fallout 76 would require. Getting a server up and running is going to cost you somewhere between $20 and $30 a month through one of the many hosting providers (though admittedly you can run your own for free if you want to go through that nonsense). The scalar variable there often is based on just how many slots are available for players to log in and join. Immediately it seems like the Private Worlds are capped at 8 players, but then again the normal worlds also appear to be capped at 8 players so I guess that makes sense.

What everyone else appears to have latched onto in the statement is that this is seemingly a package of cosmetics and some core functionality that isn’t available in any other fashion. The Scrapbox honestly reminds me a lot of the crafting inventory from ESO Plus… which did not phase me at all and is worth every penny of that subscription cost. The monthly allowance of Atoms also seemed nice because it would allow you to play with stuff on the item shop all part of your server subscription fee. Again I am looking at this as entirely a way of getting private worlds and getting a bunch of stuff as part of that package. Most people however are just seeing this as a cash grab for a bunch of stuff that should have been available in the base game.

For most of the week I thought I had the right of it, and we were renting server space to play in our private worlds. However it is coming out that this concept is a little bankrupt as well. First the world only exist if the player who is a First Member is actually online. That is way more problematic than renting a server, because in theory so long as you have granted someone access to your server it is up and running 24/7. I was maybe willing to cough up the money for a server if it let me have a place to roam freely with a group of my friends. Strike two is the fact that apparently the controls for this server are set up based on your Bethesda friends list… and anyone on that friends list can pop in freely. So instead of being like I thought and granting permissions to individual players, seemingly anyone can join your game that you have friended.

The other fault that is coming out is that often times the worlds you are going into are not unique to you. What I expected was something akin to Minecraft, where you get a default spawn and the game tracks every change made by you or your friends to that world. There are instead reports of players joining worlds where there are corpses everywhere, items looted and containers empty. So when they say “Private Worlds” they are seemingly talking about just a normal world that has a limited party list to your friends. So yeah… it turns out my line of thinking was the one that was completely wrong. $100 a year for a private server is completely reasonable, but this is seemingly no private server.

Instead of caring about Fallout 76 First subscriptions… I feel like their timing is perfect for pushing players into playing The Outer Worlds that came out apparently some time last night. It is currently available on Epic Games Store, Windows Store, and free as part of the PC Xbox Games Pass. Instead of playing a poorly implemented feature, you can instead explore a brand new IP from the makers of the best Fallout game… Fallout New Vegas. It seems pretty clear to me what the actual choice to make is, and it is what I will probably be spending my time doing this weekend apart from some ventures into Destiny 2.

I got in long enough to make a character and do some of the very early interactions and so far… I am more or less impressed. It has the same sort of feel as Fallout New Vegas did and does a better job of on-boarding you into the new destination than a game that either forces you to care about a father you don’t know or a child you never actually wanted. I am hoping it continues to be as good as it seems to be. This is what you should be spending your time doing instead of playing Fallout 76. So when I said a partial defense… really I mean not much of one at all.

Leaving Flatwoods

November 14, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday it turns out that I was not crazy, and that Fallout 76 was in fact active and fully launched for most of the day. When I popped in to get a screenshot for the blog post, I noticed that it was allowing me to hit play… and sure enough I got in with a half dozen people roaming around the map. The funny thing about this is I remember doing something similar during the launch of Elder Scrolls Online and getting into that game several hours early. I guess it pays to be patched up and ready to go when Bethesda launches a new game. The funny thing is though, since I knew the game was available it caused me to approach launch day with a lot more chill than I normally have. This is also helped out by the fact that I had a character with progress that carried over from the beta, and I didn’t exactly feel a rush to get to a point of sustainability quickly. Now that said I am always seeming to need a source of food and a source of water and weirdly enough a source of wood… to keep boiling said water.

For most of the beta I spent my time around the Flatwoods area, which is one of the first towns you encounter… if you actually follow the quest directions. However it is an area rich in resources and quests so in theory it is a pretty good idea to go there first. We did a jaunt to the far south at one point and captured the Poseidon power plant as a Trio, but I never managed to make it to Morgantown which was where the next major quest objective was directing me towards. So I set forth on a journey that would take me up Interstate 59 to Route 64 and on into the basic vicinity of Morgantown. I largely followed the highway system in part because I figured if I were doing this for real… I would wind up doing that as a way of keeping track of where I was going. Sure I could have set a waypoint off in the distance and made my way across the open terrain, but I was curious what attractions I might be able to find from the highway.

Roughly halfway down Interstate 59 I encountered a Slocum’s Joe which for the uninitiated is the Fallout Universe version of a coffee/donut shop. On the road beside it however was something magical… I am guessing this player spent every last minute of the beta hoarding resources to build this really awesome base, giving him one hell of a start for when the game launched proper. What was creepy however is that the mutated hounds were flopping stuck in the side of his fortifications. They were one of the random encounters I ran into along the road so I am guessing they attacked the base… and then got gunned down but the two turrets up above. My previous camp location had the problem of constantly being attacked by feral ghouls, and in one case they managed to damage the turrets and make their way into the base… and I logged in just as they were taking out my generator. So as such I started thinking more defensible fortifications… and this guy here seems to have a great design… minus the fact that the steps are wide open. Maybe the NPCs can’t walk up steps so good?

When I got to Morgantown I found this bridge with an eyebot moving back and forth across it playing its patriotic theme… and behind it was leading a trail of rat pups pied piper style. I watched the bridge for quite a bit and nothing else seemed to be pathing across it due to the fact that this neutral/peaceful event was programmed to take place there. This gave me a bit of an idea…

As such I opted to move my camp and reconstruct it underneath the bridge… thinking that this map feature might make for a slightly more defensible outpost. This was well and good until I realized that the ground was just uneven enough to make erecting a barrier of fences nigh impossible. I’ve built as much as I realistically can at this moment because I have run out of resources. However the area surrounding my camp is full of logs, so my hope is they will have re-spawned each time I visit the camp and can keep harvesting a decent amount of lumber that way. Additionally I am on the outskirts of Morgantown, which should serve as fertile scavenging grounds for parts to make more stuff. The camp being nearby will let me shuffle loads of things over to it and dump them in the machinery there to free up my inventory. I need to learn to pair down my weapons and carry only the things that I know I will be immediately using. The truth is I have largely settled on my serrated machette and my trusty 10 mm pistol… but in both cases I need to build the level 10 version of each I think. Unfortunately my building spree has run me out of other resources as well.

The biggest takeaway from last night is that this is in fact a Fallout game. My wife got home super late and as a result I largely played things other than fallout until around 7:30. By 8 pm however I was deeply engaged in the game and did not really look up or pay attention to the time until a little before 11 pm when I hurriedly scrambled off to bed. Another friend managed to play until 4 am without realizing it. When you are focused on this objecting or that while exploring this deceptively large and densely populated map… all other things in the world sort of fade away. I still have not really encountered any players in a negative fashion, and while they are out there… once I left the Fallout 76 proper area and Flatwoods especially… I stopped encountering them. That is not to say that there are not players out there… the above screenshot I took to show off where my camp is located and you can see a number of dots sprinkled around the map representing other players. That seems like a large number for the roughly 6 am when I took it. More than that however I learned a few key pieces of information about why the world is the way it is… and what happened to most of the people that were remaining. That however is a tale that I am going to save for another time, given that it factors on some serious spoilers.