Bethesda really needs a new marketing manager. I mean, I do think people have been blowing 76 out of proportion from the beginning, but there isn't an argument to be made in defense of the marketing team. As a whole, they've been doing a pretty deplorable job (Outright lying? Rescinding on refunds? Really guys?) and I think they deserve the backlash they get for that.
At this point, it almost seems like somebody on the inside wants it to fail. Because the game itself, it's not bad. People blew up about the online thing, but that's ignoring the fact that a lot of people have been asking for a multiplayer Fallout for years. There's also a rising trend amongst self-identified "gamers" conflating "I personally dislike this" with "this is objectively bad", which must be considered. This mentality does a lot of damage to games, regardless of their actual contents, in many cases before they're even released.
But now there are increasingly more tangible, reasonable reasons to hate it, which only gives ammo to those who are truly dedicated to ensuring it doesn't succeed and convincing others it's bad, even if that isn't necessarily the case. The physical merch and the marketing tactics really don't have anything to do with the contents of the game itself, and the developers who created the game aren't in charge of it, so it's a little disingenuous to blame them.
What bugs me right now, is that this puts me and others who do like the idea of the game in an awkward position- because if you so much as express even the slightest doubt about anything regarding it, a lot of people automatically assume you carry the same amount of vitriol they do and use valid complaints as a springboard into a bunch of other opinion-based reasons why it's just "bad", even though that's not at all what you're saying.
There's very little actual discussion going on, it's just a lot of harassment and bullying over points of personal gaming preferences, and the marketing team making these spectacular blunders is really, really not helping. It's all really annoying, and I'm almost certain this is exactly what toxic fans want to happen- make what should be a standard game release into such a cesspit that even the people who like the thing can't detach the unpleasant experience of the hate from the experience of the game. Their reactions to the game itself are almost entirely unjustified- I can honestly think of other games that genuinely deserve way more hate than 76 has gotten. People wanted Fallout 5, and seem to be labouring under the impression that 76 is meant to be Fallout 5, or that this is the game plan going forward. Which, if anyone had actually took it upon themselves to keep up with Bethesda during this time, it's not. Not every game in a franchise has to cater to your specific preferences or even be the game genre. In fact I'd think it would be considered a good sign that Fallout, as a franchise, is so well established that they're not afraid to actually take some risks or make spinoff games in the interim.
People had a similar reaction to Fallout 4 too, which was not a bad game at all, by any stretch of the word. It wasn't even "a bad Fallout game" (which, as an argument, doesn't even make sense in the first place seeing as that's about as nebulous a complaint as possible). Most people, when asked about Fallout 4 now, will concede that it was at least "okay", and you see a lot of people who are really attached to the companions, even now that years have passed.. Companions who had way more interactivity than the ones in pretty much any other Fallout game. And personally, in my opinion, the characters in Fallout 3 seem rather one dimensional and in a lot of cases almost downright cartoonish when compared to the ones in Fallout 4. So, as far as Bethesda's case is concerned, significant progress is being made.
Anyway before I waffle on for another ten pages worth of text, I just want to say that I hope Bethesda has the good sense to turn this around and that people get proper compensation for the misleading and skeevy behaviour of the marketing team. They can still make up for this, but they're going to have to be willing to work for it and earn that goodwill back.
Let me preface this by saying there's nothing wrong with liking a bad game. I would also like to say that the following is more the fault of the publisher than any designer, programmer, artist, or QA worker that worked on the game.
Fallout 76 is objectively a bad game.
A. The story is nearly nonexistent at worst, and RP driven at best.
B. Quest design is resultingly abysmal. I use New Vegas as a high point standard for quest design because it had quests that were dynamic to your character, and their actions snd choices. Quests with multiple solutions, resolutions, etc. The world was interconnected as well, so actions one place could have an effect elsewhere.
C. The perks system is still worse than previous titles, but better than 4.
D. VATS should have been canned in this game. In a real time multiplayer game, VATS is a wonky aimbot.
E. The PVP is abysmal, and prone to exploitation. A player can use automated defenses while not responding to combat in order to cheese enemy players. Sniping is pointless, as it requires you to reveal your position, or otherwise expend mountains of ammo to kill one player. Your ability to kill an enemy player effeciently can be negatively impacted by your opponent's ability to aim. That's a complete failure of game design in a multiplayer survival game.
F. 24 is way too few players for an empty sandbox world of this size.
G. The game is atrociously optimised, and contains unresolved bugs from a previous game. Bugs that where fixed by modders in unofficial patches.
H. The graphical assets are recycled at best, and horrific at worst. They were advertised otherwise, so its not a case of getting what you were promised and being dissapointed anyway.
I. The server reliability is a fucking joke. 3 nukes brought the game down for a lot of players. That should never be possible in a multiplayer game.
J. The game takes the piss on cannon lore in order to justify many of its elements. It doesn't have to do this, but it does it anyway.
K. No push to talk. In 2018.
L. The interface is bad on PC, especially for a live multiplayer game.
Every element of this game has massive room for improvement. But Bethesda had the game put out as a rush job to jump on the PubG/Fortnight bandwagon. Because of that, the game is an unpolished mess, and due to the masdive overhauls promised to fix said mistakes, should be considered an early access title. A full priced early access title made by a AAA punlisher. This is only one game in a running and expanding trend of releasing games in an unfinished state for full price, while monetizing that game as if it were free-to-play. The game is not only shit, but its shit that represents larger fucked up trends in the video games industry.
This game COULD have been a decent survival game, and me and my friends planned to buy it as a group game. But in the state it released in and is still in; we can't even gurantee it will run on all of our computers, and our computers are fairly good.
So by all means, enjoy it. But understand that it is by objective and relative standards a bad product, and one exemplary of dangerous market trends at that.
I got hyped expecting a fairly storyless survival game that could be fun to kill time with friends, or even RP with enough players to have a falloutis experience. Instead I watched my favorite series debased.
(Fallout 4 was worse than its predecessors except in graphics and gunplay, but was a decent game.)
