Online games often launch with problems that must be fixed, and fixed quickly. Fallout 76, Bethesda Game Studios' first large-scale living game, was no exception. Fallout 76 was troubled during its beta period and suffered multiple issues throughout its extended launch.
I'm not surprised by this: I've played too many online games in their first weeks to expect perfection out of the gate. Fallout 76 is unique in one troubling way, however: Post-launch developer support has managed to make many of these problems even worse.
The future of Fallout 76 depends on ongoing improvements to its current, broken state, but with every patch, Bethesda continues to move in the wrong direction.
I'm not sure how Bethesda is going to fix the game, to put it bluntly. And it's becoming less clear whether Bethesda itself has an effective plan for how such a thing might be possible.
But that positive feeling didn't last long. Frequent disconnections and other server issues made it hard to set up groups. While we could joke about it at the time — the common refrain was that anyone who couldn't log in hadn't properly sacrificed a goat while Mercury was in retrograde — the truth was that it wore us down. Constant visual glitches further hurt our experience.
Fallout 76 just doesn't work, and I mean that on the most basic level. I don't want to spend my few hours of daily gaming time fighting with connection issues; I want to play a video game. Fallout 76 has offered the basic functionality of a working game only intermittently since launch.
Fallout 76 is affected by multiple serious issues, but the game's most recent patchhas actually made things worse.
Released at the end of January, the fifth patch made sweeping balance changes that lowered the value of duped items. This had several unintended consequences. The patch hit endgame builds that relied on the current meta of the most powerful items hard, causing them to deal significantly less damage. It nerfed the powerful explosive and two-shot modifiers to an extreme extent: Now they're at 20 percent, not 100 percent. Which, again, wipes out the progress of the players who had worked hard to create a character with those abilities. The nerf was a blunt instrument, impacting cheaters and legitimate players in the same way.
The patch also reintroduced old server infrastructure that brought with it old bugs, including the primary duping bug Bethesda had fixed at the end of 2018. It took yet another patch to fix many of the old problems that patch 5 reintroduced, and the game will need more balance changes in future updates. Every patch that should help the game take a step forward has ultimately forced Bethesda to take multiple steps back. And item duping has persisted, in some form, through every iteration of the game.
But for now, the problems are getting worse faster than they're getting better, and players won't stick around forever waiting for things to improve.
All along, the Atom Store continues to chug away, offering more cash items than you could possibly buy with in-game activities alone. It's hard to stomach a request for more money when I'm already having such difficulty trusting Bethesda with my time.
I want to love Fallout 76, because I think it's built on strong ideas. But Bethesda has followed a rough launch with three full months of controversy, server issues, lost progress, and anger. So much has gone wrong that it's incredibly difficult to fix one thing without inadvertently hurting something else. It's going to take a monstrous amount of work for Bethesda to fix the issues while also reaching out to players, begging that they stay involved in the game.
The question remains: Is that even possible?
Much more on the link
https://www.polygon.com/2019/2/7/18214008/fallout-76-updates-patch-fix-future
