Tag: Fallout76

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.

Fallout 76

So close, and yet…

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.