The Fall of 76

[Mr Bean]

So Fallout 76 was a thing, it was a big thing it was a messy thing and now there is an amazing video encapsulating the entire sad story and the numerous side issues in one nice package.

The Fall of 76
I post this because A, The video is watchable even for those that have never played the game and B, there are so many scandals from Fallout 76 I learned of two from this very video (Nuka Dark rum and review bumping their own items).

[Broomstick]

That was a surprising entertaining and informative documentary with actual research and information that could be independently confirmed.

And I am so glad I did not buy this game piece of shit.

[ray245]

I saw the trailer but I never trusted Bethesda to be able to build a decent MMORPG. If the company had treated its customer base a lot better, it would have been rolling in cash.

[TheFeniX]

Good man, I had cashed out right after the Rum Bottle shit. I never bothered to think how it would be impossible to pour and/or how it would run into the plastic case. Bonus points it tasting like garbage. Them flooding their own unreleased products with bullshit 5-star ratings. Anyone who had any knowledge of Beth's part in the industry over even the past 10 years should have seen this coming. I will say, however, that Bethesda managed to surprise even me with the shear extent of their incompetence and sleaziness.

F76 literally came out of them giving their id team (who really know netcode) busywork to try and make their Gamebryo Fork handle MP (which is hilarious since gdamn RIFT runs off Gamebryo). GOOD THINGS come from this kind of "fuck around" design style. Left 4 Dead being just a single example.

But man, you get Todd Howard involved and they can drive a good idea all the into Oblivion. I still bet cash money the whole "Settlement System" for F4 came out of Skyrim Heartfire and they just drove that shit into the ground. Because it's what they do best these days.

I saw the trailer but I never trusted Bethesda to be able to build a decent MMORPG. If the company had treated its customer base a lot better, it would have been rolling in cash.

You could have seen how they handle an MMO by watching the ESO launch. And how they handle multiplayer in general by the launch of Brink.

[bilateralrope]

I'm just waiting to see how Bethesda manages to fuck up the canvas bags again. Does anyone know the exact date Bethesda promised to get those bags out by ?

I make it sometime late May/early June to fit within their 4-6 months timeline. I have yet to hear of anyone receiving the bags. Though Anthem has pushed Fallout 76 out of the terrible live service spotlight.

[Lord Pounder]

A company that relies on fan made mods to make the games playable was never going to make a good or even passable MMO.

[Vendetta]

I'm just waiting to see how Bethesda manages to fuck up the canvas bags again.

In the meantime here's some naked plagiarism to tide you over...

[Highlord Laan]

I'm just waiting to see how Bethesda manages to fuck up the canvas bags again.

In the meantime here's some naked plagiarism to tide you over...

This makes me cackle. Bethesda picking a fight with WOTC, a company that has a legal reputation almost as dreaded as GW's? If this explodes it'll be epic.

[bilateralrope]

I'm just waiting to see how Bethesda manages to fuck up the canvas bags again.

In the meantime here's some naked plagiarism to tide you over...

How did the plagurist think that nobody would notice once it went public ?

[Lord Revan]

I think it's combination of Bethesda (or at least part that OKed this) beliving their own lies and not quite getting that D&D isn't some obscure thing only the geekiest nerds do so it's actually not that unlikely that someone who would be listened to would find out.

EDIT:I'm full aware of the irony of game company known for making fantasy and scifi RPGs would think something is so geeky they get away with plagiarazing (sic) it, but I don't think Bethesda is aware of it.

[bilateralrope]

We don't need Bethesda to have OKed the plagiarism here. All we need is to have the people involved, other than the plagurist, to have never read this specific adventure module before.

So how popular is The Black Road as an adventure module ?

[Mr Bean]

We don't need Bethesda to have OKed the plagiarism here. All we need is to have the people involved, other than the plagurist, to have never read this specific adventure module before.

So how popular is The Black Road as an adventure module ?

It's published by Wizards of the Coast... there are known reviews of it and quoted text in review copies is featured in the Bethesda ripoff, further The Black Road was a featured module in the D&D Adventurers League which is a kind of monthly meta-campaign by Wizards, this was one of their public game modules which means...

A. It was approved for usage in the Adventures League
B. It was vetted for use as a public game module in stores or Con's
C. Said module was likely played at a few hundred Wizard's partnered game shops

This is not some 4.99 module advertised in the back of a D&D magazine this was one of their marquee pop and drop adventures meant for DM's who want something they can run with all the prep work already done. Further since it's an Adventures League game it got even more playtesting then a normal module before being released.

One of the most basic checks companies do before releasing something is supposed to be to verify they are not violating anyone elses patent/trademark/copyright. As evidenced by how quickly the plagurism was found. Which was within hours of release because remember this was a Wizard adventure league module meaning it's been played by a few hundred thousand people. So they failed to do those checks before release

[TheFeniX]

Yea, this was a bit beyond "I read some fanfic a while back, forgot I did, then 'came up' with something I thought was original." The text rip is pretty much something pasted into Word, then words/specifics replaced. I actually do this with reports for work, since many of them have TONS of standard bullshit. However, I can't exactly plagiarize myself. I would never consider doing this for a historical report we got from another company or an Agency because that would be incredibly unprofessional and illegal.

This isn't "we made a mistake." This was deliberate IP theft, there's no other way to shake it.

[streetad]

Speaking as a fan of the original Fallout games, I was never going to buy this as I have no interest at all in online multiplayer; I have young kids and just can't manage a game that you can't pause.

But it has just been fascinating watching the whole thing unfold like a slow motion car crash. Just watching a company completely lose sight of why people buy their products and go bandwagon jumping after a supposedly more lucrative market without understanding what THOSE people want out of a product.

[TheFeniX]

You get one of these huge blow-outs every other year. Sometimes they stack up and they are usually out of big budget publishers. F76 is just another added to the list.

Those that were just huge clusterfucks:
SWTOR
Brink
Elder Scrolls Online
No Man's Sky
Battlefront 2
There are others, but these lasted weeks/months and killed a lot of launches before they happened. SWTOR (among others*) still made a ton of money due to the upfront and original subs, but they hemorrhaged out quickly and really hit all the key points in "how to be the worst at customer service." I mean, at one point they released a huge patch (that fixed nothing and actually broke.... a WHOLE bunch of shit) and the tag line was "biggest patch notes EVER, over 10,000 (IIRC) words!" That's not a joke, that was in BIG BOLD on the patch notes page AND they did a press release.

Once the game "failed," and EA just put them into "do whatever" mode, the game improved dramatically. It's still ugly as sin and the microtransactions are stupid high (but at least it's only cosmetics), but had the game released in it's current form, they would have likely been (at least) FFXIV levels of subs.

It was.... pretty fucking hilarious. EA is a mainstay publisher on this list and they are good at covering up otherwise insanely good games (Battlefront need apply) with their F2P-mobile-tier micro-transaction bullshit.

I play a lot of co-op. All anyone really wanted/wants is:
A. A single-player Fallout game
B. with networking

This is why the Skyrim Together team is getting the hype and money it is, even after.... Jesus.... well over 4 years.

You see, this used to be a big deal in the early/mid 2000s. But now, any talk of "co-op" means either "MMO" or "persistent server, that we control" when you failed out of business school so had to get a job at Bethesda/etc. They hacked together some bullshit in their free-time, which probably would have worked fine. But being Bethesda: they fucked it up. Look at Left 4 Dead. Same thing, except no Bethesda, so it worked and people loved it.

*Last I heard, EA's mobile trash Dungeon Keeper, which was so bad the EU said "you can't call this F2P" and I hope the people behind it get herpes, had made them over $250 million in profits because people with smart phones are fucking morons.

[bilateralrope]

Those that were just huge clusterfucks:
SWTOR

Don't forget Anthem. It's almost like taking a developer known for their single player narrative and expecting them to make a multiplayer game is doomed to failure.

[TheFeniX]

Don't forget Anthem. It's almost like taking a developer known for their single player narrative and expecting them to make a multiplayer game is doomed to failure.

I'm on the fence of how related those are. Both teams were way late to the party chasing over-saturated genres. Bioware is pretty dead at this point. They brought in multiple new teams, touting their diversity in the hiring process (which coming from EA is probably bad news, because they love using shit like that as a way to deflect valid criticism). These teams were across the globe and had piss-poor communication. They were basically saved by using the Frostbite Engine IIRC.

Fallout 4 is more about taking the best people at what they do (id concerning netcode) and giving them busywork to add it to probably the most patchwork piece of shit engine used by a AAA dev. Seriously, Creation is so unbelievably bad and has only become worse over the years as they patch-work more and more shit to just make their games function. All the way back to Morrowind, hilarious glitches and crashes were par for the course. In SP, that's kind of funny. In MP? You get F76.

Beth's internal code monkies actually get a lot of respect from me. They've been working with the Windows Me of gaming engines, yet somehow make (semi) functioning games. Given a real engine, I wonder what they could accomplish.

[bilateralrope]

Looks like Bethesda is trying to do some damage control. Welcome to the age of "we know the live service sucks. But we have a roadmap towards a much better game".

BETHESDA KNEW FALLOUT 76 'WOULD HAVE BUMPS' – IGN UNFILTERED

BY JOSEPH KNOOP The launch of Fallout 76 was, to put it mildly, a bumpy one. IGN gave it a 5 out of 10, calling its rich world “wasted on a mess of bugs, conflicting ideas, and monotony.” It also earned a spot on our top 10 worst games of 2018 list. Much of the criticism stemmed not only from a rocky launch and massively broken game content, but also poorly handled PR snafus, like when Bethesda shipped bags that looked significantly cheaper than the ones promised in the $200 special edition. Yikes.

On this week’s episode of IGN Unfiltered, Bethesda’s own director Todd Howard sat down with host Ryan McCaffrey, saying that Bethesda saw a lot of these woes coming as the game neared its release date.

“That was a very difficult development on that game to get it where it was,” Howard told IGN. “We were ready for...a lot of those difficulties that ended up on the screen. We knew, hey look, this is not the type of game that people are used to from us and we're going to get some criticism on it. A lot of that is very well-deserved criticism.”

Howard also shared his thoughts on Fallout 76’s near future, hopes for improving the game and increasing Bethesda’s ability to listen to community input, and what lessons Bethesda learned from the troubled launch.

You can hear all that in the clip at the top of the page, and the full episode debuts on Tuesday, June 4 here on IGN and your favorite podcast platforms. Howard sat down to not only talk Fallout 76, but also his early history as a budding game developer, games industry crunch, and the infamous horse armor DLC, among many other topics.

Every month, IGN Unfiltered hosts some of gaming’s biggest names to discuss what made them the developers and artists they are today. Previous guests include former president of Silicon Knights Denis Dyack, Ubisoft co-founder Yves Guillemot, Uncharted writer Amy Hennig, and plenty more.

If you believe Todd Howard here, which I don't, this only explains a few of 76's problems. It doesn't explain things like the canvas bag debacle, illegal microtransaction pricing or updates bringing back fixed bugs.