Fallout 76

To ESO or Not to ESO

Back at the first of the year, I “retired” from the Elder Scrolls Online. I let my ESO+ subscription lapse, and simply stopped playing. There were many reasons.

First, I really felt like the game was dying. The monthly user counts were as low as they had been in 7 years. People were complaining about the changes in the game in on their forums and on Reddit. There were many performance problems, crashes, and disconnects. There was a 9-month ongoing thread on their forums about it. Even if you weren’t affected (I wasn’t), you couldn’t play through a whole trial without several people dropping, and having to wait for them to rejoin. This was causing trial prog groups to give up, because you couldn’t satisfy the time requirement part of the trifecta. Also, ZOS canceled the American half of their big 10 year anniversary tour, after having had the one in Amsterdam, and they were being jerks about how streamers were covering them. Even though it came out a few weeks after I quit, the collective atmosphere around the game was such that the most prominent ESO streamer, NefasQS, quit as well, and made a whole video about why.

Second, running vet trials was pretty stressful. Thanks to the Oakensoul ring (for heavy attack builds) and the Arcanist class, I was able to put characters together to run vet content, and farm endgame gear. I got all geared up on 2 DPS characters, a tank, and a healer. But vet trials are 2 hours of sustained clicking, with very little break. I felt that it was hurting my health. It’s far too much to get into here, but I feel that part of my health problems stem from holding stress in my gut, and I started to realize that I was clenched and barely breathing for most of those 2 hours. Vet trials require everyone to be paying attention, or you will wipe the group. It also requires all the DPS you can manage, all the time, or you will wipe the group. And, most of the time, when the group wipes, you know who caused it. So there’s a lot of pressure to perform, and there’s a surprising amount of skill involved in playing the game at that level.

Third, I was running with a casual guild a couple times a week, and it felt like I wasn’t really clicking with the leader. One evening, I volunteered for a 4-man dungeon that the leader wanted to run, and even though I was vocal about wanting to run the dungeon, she ignored me and chose someone else to run who chimed in well after I did. It hurt my feelings. It was done in a way with plausible deniability, as only people who spend a lot of time on Discord can appreciate, but I had enough history to contextualize it, and I just couldn’t not see it as personal. She just didn’t want me to run with her. I mean, everyone is allowed to do what they want, but if I’m honest, it hurt my feelings quite a bit. Also, the guild leader had allowed another guild to merge with hers, and I didn’t really care for the people who had joined. Altogether, it was just another piece of the puzzle that was deflating my interest in playing.

Fourth, I had managed to knock out most of the achievements in the game, except the PVP stuff. The only major areas I had left to do were running the Infinite Archive and playing Tales of Tribute. IA is pure ESO combat, and I think ESO’s combat is the least likable thing about the game. And ToT is a card game. I didn’t start playing an MMORPG to play a digital form of Dominion. I hate any game that you can spend a bunch of time working on, and then lose suddenly. I didn’t want to do either of those things, so what was left?

So I quit.

I also retired from Fallout 76 at the same time, for the health reason. The FOMO about needing to log in every day and do the things that get you the rewards was anxiety inducing.

But then after several weeks, I got bored, and started playing 76 again.

Then 76 released a fantastic update that I have been loving.

And now ESO has announced an update which sounds like it will also be awesome.

So now I’m considering picking up ESO again, and the question is: To ESO or not to ESO?

First, I like the depth of the game. While I love the combat in 76, it’s very shallow. You can do everything there is to do in a day in the game in about an hour. That’s more like 3 hours in ESO, and that’s just one character. In ESO, you can have 20, while 76 is limited to 5. 76’s main quests will take at most a couple weeks to do. ESO’s takes at least months, if not years. There’s just a lot more to do in ESO.

Second, I like the look of the game. 76’s runs poorly on the PS5. The textures are mushy, the draw distance is clipped, and it rarely feels smooth. And it crashes. A lot. I mean, a lot. ESO runs flawlessly at 4K@60FPS in ultra mode on my modest PC, and it’s beautiful.

Third, I miss doing group content with real humans playing mechanics. I’ve become friends with many people in 76 through doing its one raid, but that’s really just cheesing the first (and maybe last) stage, and there’s really not much to talk about. So most of the time, people are just blathering on about nothing in comms, and I have nothing to add. ESO’s trials require comms, and talking about what’s going on, in order to get through them. I guess it’s all pretty impersonal, but on console, in 76, it’s REALLY impersonal. At least in ESO, there’s more camaraderie, and longer times in doing the content lead to closer relationships than in 76.

Fourth, this new update will make it easier to do damage, which will make all content easier. So trials should be less stressful, and Infinite Archive should be less tedious and grindy.

Unfortunately, that still leaves the “problem” of Tales of Tribute, and the fact that they “hid” a mythic lead behind doing it.

There’s also the issue of PVP. I’ve tried serious PVP with one of the big PVP guilds, and it was interesting. We were always getting beat, but I would do more if the game engine was more fair. Mechanically, PVP is in terrible shape in this game. It leads to nothing but gimmicks. I know — and ZOS knows — what the problem is, and they’re going to have to make a lot of people very mad to fix it, so the future is not great. Additionally, socially, the pressure brings out even more cringey behavior in guild comms, and there’s probably nothing to be done about that. So PVP is a negative regardless.

I don’t know what the answer is. At least, not yet.

Thank You, Vault Dwellers!

And what would a Summer be without grabbing a fishing pole and heading down to your favorite radioactive watering hole? No need to worry about finding out because fishing is coming to the wasteland this Summer and is angling to reel-in our esteemed adventurers, collectors and traveling trawlers alike.

It all starts at a mysterious location where players encounter a fisherman who has decided to set up camp and share their love for fishing to one and all… or so it seems. This strange merchant will sell our players everything they need to catch any of the slimy, scaled swimmers found in all bodies of water across Appalachia. Sharpen those hooks! We’ll be eating well!

Source: Thank You, Vault Dwellers!

Adding fishing to Fallout 76…

Of all the awful things in ESO, fishing is the awfullest. Of course they would add it to Fallout 76.

Programming vs. Achievement Hunting

Last night, in my continuing saga of playing Fallout 76, I finished all the main quest lines, and turned my attention to one of the first side quests that you’ll run into when starting the game. You meet a robot who is a Fallout version of a Boy Scout leader which starts a mission to become a “tadpole” scout. Turns out that this “mission” is really composed of about 9 parts, each of which has about 7-10 other parts, and you probably won’t even notice that the game adds a tracker for all of these steps in an obscure place without telling you, leaving you to wonder how to accomplish these things.

Many of the steps require things you’ll need to acquire that I still don’t have at level 190. At least one requires an item that is a rare drop in an infrequent event which I can’t solo. So there’s that. For reference, you unlock the 5th legendary perk slot of only 6 at level 200. So, even by the game’s standards, it would seem I’m fairly well along the path, yet I have a long way to go to finish something that started when I was in single-digit levels.

The point of this exercise is to acquire a better backpack. Like other MMO’s, you’ll be spending about half your time in inventory management, in some form or another. After leveling up, getting a few key perks, and grinding for some critical upgrades to your gear, an extra 45 pounds of carrying capacity goes much, much further than it normally would, so this is a really nice thing to try to obtain. The good news is that you only have to complete 3 of the initial badges to obtain it, and they can be any you feel like fooling with, but there are only about 5 that you can do without being, well, apparently a much higher level than me.

The “bad” news — or, the expected news, given that we’re talking about an MMO — is that completing three “tadpole” badges unlocks a whole new series of achievements in order to obtain “possum” badges. About 19 of them. All with 8-12 steps each. Many of which require… you guessed it… things you’ll need to acquire that I still don’t have, and have no idea how long they will take to obtain.

One thing that has become clear is that it’s time to launch a nuke. There are about 3 achievements that relate to it. I saw someone else comment on a forum that they didn’t do it till level 200. I get it now. I tried it once, and realized what a slog it is, and quickly set it aside. The mission continuously generates enemies until you traipse back and forth around the level and find the thing and unlock the other thing and finally enter a code. Normally, you would have to get the code by killing special enemies in the overworld and collecting the parts, but, thankfully, these codes are game-wide for a particular time period, and people figure them out and put them on a web site. Soloing this mission will require extreme sneaking to just avoid as many bad guys as possible, and I’ve got the perks and the Stealth Boys to try it now. I just wish I could stumble on a team that had some level-1,000 guy who was doing it to start the Scorchbeast Queen encounter, and just get the achievement by osmosis. But so far, no good.

So the net-net of all of this is that I’m trying to tick off about 300 different to-do’s off my list, in as efficient a manner as possible, to speed things up. You know… Do this while on the way to do that while using this and eating that and picking up these things to craft these other things… You get the idea.

A surprising amount of this activity is taken up with taking pictures of various creatures with the in-game camera. (As opposed to using the game’s photo mode for other achievements.) What I’ve noticed is that taking a picture of some animals now counts for multiple achievements, between the various “badges,” and the game’s “overworld” baseline achievements, which means I’m probably going to just walk around parts of the map where I can run into a bunch of particular kinds of creatures to photograph in one area. Oh, and be on the lookout for rare plants and mining deposits exclusive to that region.

Anyway, the point of writing this down is to note how similar this exercise feels when I’ve finished a major sub-project in my professional life, and start looking over my backlog in Pivotal Tracker, and trying to prioritize my next tasks. I realize that I’m looking over the list for ways to combine activities and push the lowest-hanging fruit to the top of the queue. And, suddenly, it dawns on me why, despite so many frustrations, I’m still drawn to MMO’s, and, at the same time, why they often feel like work to me.

I screwed up. I’ve been wanting to play Fallout 4 again, but I’m waiting for the next-gen refresh, which is supposedly due “this year.” Fallout 76 is an MMO by Bethesda, which are the same people that do Elder Scrolls Online, which I’ve played a lot of. Even though I’ve loved the Fallout series, I had avoided it when it came out because of terrible reviews, but it was free on the PlayStation Plus collection, so I finally gave it a try.

I was up till 3 am.

Fallout 76 has a difficult time feeling like an MMO. If you run across the map in ESO, you’ll always run into a lot of people. In 76, you can go hours without running into anyone. If you look at the “social” menu on the map, there are usually less than a dozen people listed in the entire instance. That’s just not enough people playing to make it interesting as a multi-player game.

There are in-map “events” which are kind of like ESO dungeons. There are out-of-map “expeditions,” which are kind of like trials. In ESO, you have to queue and wait your turn to run a dungeon, because it’s a very popular thing to do. Half of the events on 76 expire because no one is doing them. The screenshot above shows the most people I’ve ever seen at one time on the server, still, 35 levels later.

If you look on the Steam charts, ESO has like 16K people playing all the time. FO76 has about half that. And that’s for PC. Player counts on consoles are usually about half of those numbers, for both platforms. Combined with this is how they do world/instance provisioning. However, it works out, there are usually only a dozen or so people in any particular instance of 76, compared to hundreds in ESO. (Apparently, the Xbox version has cross play with PC, so that would work better, but that — especially after Bethesda’s acquisition by Microsoft — will never come to Playstation.)

As with ESO (and probably all MMO’s) inventory management is a pain. Like ESO, the monthly subscription includes a bottomless container to hold all your resources, and that alone makes it worth the price.

It’s much simpler than ESO, as there are no classes. Fallout has seven stats, to allocate 56 skill points, and you pick perk card “skills” to go along with the stats you choose to boost. You can easily swap out different allotments of skill points and stacks of perk cards. This part seems really, really nice compared to leveling a main and managing alts for each class in ESO. (Of course, that is a critical part of ESO’s in-game economy, but I digress.)

Unfortunately, I’ve reached level 50, and I seem to have chosen an unwieldy approach. Thinking and feeling like this game was very similar to Fallout 4, I thought I was safe working up an explosive shotgun build. I even managed to “roll” an explosive legendary perk for my combat shotgun on the first try! However, it’s often painful having to close distance to make the shotgun useful. I find that I need more range. Maybe I could make another shotgun for “long” range use, but the whole thing feels really underpowered, even at point-blank range. What I’m noticing, in my admittedly-limited interactions with other people, is that almost no one at higher levels is using shotguns, and it seems that I should be taking the hint.

So now that I’ve leveled up through 50, and chosen all the shotgun-related perks, I find myself needing to spend the next 20 levels or so unlocking perk cards to switch to a different build setup, like commando, for automatic rifle perks. Or maybe rifleman, for single-shot? Or maybe heavy guns? I don’t know.

I see a lot of people in the servers running around at levels ~200-500. I watched a few minutes of a guy on Twitch at level 5025. Yes, I typed that correctly, and you read it correctly. Like, I literally can’t even. Every MMO has “bucket people,” I guess. These people have builds that kill anything in one or two shots, and it’s maddening to me.

To make any build viable for the hardest group content, you have to get really specific about stacking your perks, your legendary effects on armor and weapons, your mutations, your food, and then your chem buffs. Of course, getting the plans and legendaries and recipes and serums is where all the grind is.

I would guess that all MMO’s wind up breaking down like this. Ergo, to do the “best” content takes 1000 hours of grinding to get your build setup to be able to pull your weight doing group activities. I jumped into one event where there were 3 other people who had god-tier builds, and we lost out on the rewards within a minute because we were so overwhelmed. So it’s a bit different than ESO in how you group and do things, but it’s really… the same.

I couldn’t get into ESO’s “single player” experience because the base-game exploration quests were so boring. At least Fallout 76 is kind of Fallout 5, if you don’t get into the “end-game” content. But I think I’ve seen enough. My build is so whack, it’s taking 2-3 clips of ammo to kill random bugs in the world. The ammo situation is a joke, and this is certainly part of the reason why. But, hey, at least there’s no “light weaving” type of real-world-agility-check in the game.

Update

So it turns out that, really, there is a “light weaving” physical dexterity skill involved in the game, if you use a VATS-based build. I’m level 80 now, and I’ve maxed out all the perk cards for VATS-related skills. There’s trick to watching the critical meter fill up, and listening for the sound when it procs, and then hitting a different button to make your next attack a critical. Because the perks can make the meter randomly fill up at any time, there’s no set pattern to the timing. The best way to manage this is to… wait for it… slow down, just like in… ESO.

Sigh.