Fallout 76

[Wrathbone]

That's amazing.

I'm a little excited to see how badly this goes wrong for the first few months. Schadenfreude, and all that.

[The Jackal]

Wait, what does that mean? If you do X action/attack under a certain FPS, the resultant physics tone up/down accordingly? That'd mean big-battle slowdown made you affect the world and objects less than with a better FPS in same battle, surely that can't be right?

[Lee]

It means things like lockpicking and such where near impossible in Fallout 4 unless you locked the framerate to 70ish or below. Anything above that and it's speed up like madness. https://steamcommunity.com/app/377160/d ... 292791705/

Stuck in terminals/doors or dying for no reason while moving around. The engine has been tied to framerate for a heck of a long time. I had forgotten about that limit with the engine myself. Just means say someone knocks over a box or fires at someone they can be doing so in lightning speed that the box could kill you by knocking you flying somewhere. They could be firing a pistol and it be like a machine gun in speed and reload animations. I hope to see the effects on the youtube channels soon enough

[Lee]

[Rusty]

Played for about 2 hours with my son. We both gave up on it.

It's not fallout. Being multiplayer totally ruins it. It's all about running to and from things and not soaking up the atmosphere.
Loads of dicks being dicks. You're trying to talk to a quest giver and someone is punching you constantly. No damage is taken but it's just dang annoying.
People are just shooting every where. I can't tell if the shots are enemies and I need to investigate or another dick just shooting in the air.
Key binds. I've just replayed Fallout 3 and Fallout NV and obviously I've been playing Fallout 4 a lot too. They've changed the key bindings for stuff. That video above points out some of them. vats has changed from V to q (it's not even the same type of VATs). Escape brings up a map not the game menu.
Depth of field is awful. The game looks lovely for a Fallout game but gah. Horrid.
Started the game and was wandering around the vault trying to soak up the atmosphere again but all the way through I could hear some nicely sounding bloke chatting to his mates about where they're going and what keys to press etc. So basically it defaults to always on in game comms! FFS.
Just wandring about the map I constantly set off area events which take over the current quest objectives so basically removed my markers where I was heading.
Movement is so slow. I can't run for more than about 10 seconds.
In the starting area I found I can't talk to the trader or use a workbench if someone else is using it. And when I'm crafting or modding guns I'll be there for a while and blocking it for everyone.
I can't mod it (pretty much the only reason Bethesda games are so awesome due to the amount of brilliant mods) as it's online.

Bring on the next elder scrolls. I'll defo buy that

[The Jackal]

Key binds. I've just replayed Fallout 3 and Fallout NV and obviously I've been playing Fallout 4 a lot too. They've changed the key bindings for stuff. That video above points out some of them. vats has changed from V to q (it's not even the same type of VATs).

I can't imagine starting a game and not going into the control options first. Even if you're happy with where thing are (supposed to be) it makes sense just to be sure and if there are new/removed features.

Escape brings up a map not the game menu.

...wait, what?

What the fuck?

[Jez]

Even the next Elder Scrolls will be a wait for review/trusted opinions for me. I'm taking nothing for granted with them anymore.

[Wrathbone]

Played for about 2 hours with my son. We both gave up on it.

It's not fallout. Being multiplayer totally ruins it. It's all about running to and from things and not soaking up the atmosphere.
Loads of dicks being dicks. You're trying to talk to a quest giver and someone is punching you constantly. No damage is taken but it's just dang annoying.

That's my biggest fear about it confirmed, then. Oh well.

Good write up too, thanks for that!

[Sly Boots]

I didn't post it but at the weekend I watched Angry Joe's video of him and a couple of mates playing it. To be brutally honest they are acting a bit like the dicks being described, going into people's huts and shooting them repeatedly and then smashing up their house, but I think part of that is through sheer boredom. He's coming from a place of loving the modern Fallout games but says he has major concerns about this.

I think this looks like a disaster in the making.

[DjchunKfunK]

If anyone pre-ordered this they should have received a few extra beta keys so they can invite some friends to take part.

[Wrathbone]

This thread is a good laugh / horrifying:

Welcome to 5 reasons not to use an engine that you made entirely open and provided all the tools needed to mod that engine in an online game. Oh and how to entirely not secure anything for your users.

I am as much a Fallout and Bethesda fan as everyone else, I've sunk around 4000 hours into Fallout4 and have been making mods for about 2 years. So when I got into the PC Beta and it allowed me to download the client and files, I started playing with them.

Number 1: There are no server checks to verify models or file integrity. Want to make trees smaller, or player models bright colors to see them easier? Go right ahead, here are the tools to do it!

Number 2: Terrain and invisible walls/collision is client side! Want to walk through walls? Open up that beautiful .esm file and edit it. The server doesn't care or check!

Number 3: Want to save money on server hardware and make ping a little more manageable? Go ahead and open up client to client communication but don't encrypt it or obfuscate it in anyway. Open up Wireshark while playing and nab anyone's IP you want! Send packets to the server to auto use consumables, all very nicely and in plain text! Even get health info and player location, why waste time injecting the executable and getting nabbed by anti-cheat when you can get all info from the network!

Number 4: Want to grief people and be a God? Go ahead and keep looping the packet captured in Wireshark reporting you gave full HP. Why would the server care about something as little and not game breaking like this?!?! It's a great idea to let the client tell the server it's state and the server not check anything it's being told! The possibilities with this are endless and probably able to just give yourself items by telling the server you picked it up!

Number 5: Someone in your game being mean? Again have Wireshark? Well let's just forge a packet with the disconnect command in it and knock them offline!

In conclusion: Bethesda should not have just made Fallout76 by throwing mods on it from Nexus and sold it as a new game. Have fun in the wasteland gamers.

Forget about the game itself for a minute - this rings every security alarm bell in my head.

[Strudel]

As IP address is now classified as Personal Information under GDPR/DPA2018 that is a massive data breach.

[Achtung Englander]

downside - its a shit game

upside - you saved money

adding a MP game to a story driven narrative game...er..how ?

Titanfall proved it is not possible. MP games can only be geared towards open arena combat because 99.9% of the time people will not play games as you want them to play it. Add in the factor kids and stupid people will play on your game, you are asking for trouble if you want anything remotely serious or immersive.

[The Jackal]

As IP address is now classified as Personal Information under GDPR/DPA2018 that is a massive data breach.

Both of those only apply to us though, not 'Mrrka (unless it's interacting with us).

Working for a company with a US contingent, and not all our practices requiring full-on GDPR except when applicable (but a lot of it needing it), our Yank staff get pretty pissed off at having to abide by something they don't believe they really need to pay attention to.

Semi-related: we had the auditors in the office last week to run down our transactional and data-protection stuff. Everyone had to clear their desks of anything even remotely looking like personal data, including (in my case) a big envelope I'd been using as a doodle-pad.

"It's got an address on it."
"It's my address - my mum sent my meds in the post."
"They won't know that. Better safe than sorry."

[Sly Boots]

I produce magazines for corporate clients, and my job got, at a conservative estimate, 90% more hassley on May 25th. Every single image we use now needs a signed image consent form (obtained by me), which also requires explaining to lots of people why they need to fill out a form they don't give much of a shit about. This includes group shots of 12+ people on occasion, who all have to sign (again co-ordinated by me), and in a lot of cases it pisses off the people it's supposed to protect, as all they know is they sent in some nice pictures of a charity event or whatnot they organised, and suddenly they need to go out and get the signatures of a bunch of people they don't even know. Of course, in many cases this isn't possible so we end up having to blur a ton of faces and the whole thing looks like an episode of Crimewatch. It reached farcical levels when it came in and we were just putting an edition out to print, when we suddenly were told we couldn't use the photos we'd commissioned of a special event attended by a famous ex-footballer who now resides in Canada unless we could get him to sign a form within a couple of days, which was impossible. So we were forced to use a bunch of pictures supposedly of some massive event that didn't feature any human beings and were just stupid ones the photographer took of mascots in costume wandering around and an empty bouncy castle.

Naturally, despite my job now takes twice as long, I don't get paid any more or have any extra time built in to do all this.

I bloody hate GDPR.