honestly, it just doesn't look good, and i have so many questions
why did they have a bunch of press and youtubers playing at once at 4k if stuttering was even a possibility? like, why would you even want that concern associated with your game? every video i've seen has significant framerate issues that get worse when the player is near other players. not a great start! all of the streamers say the same thing-- that bethesda assured them it'll be fixed for launch-- but, uh... bethesda isn't exactly known for technical polish on their games in the first place, so... other than that, graphically the game looks fine (like a slightly nicer fallout 4?), even though the nuke animation/cloud was lolololol bad
maybe the no NPCs thing is being overblown, but i still have yet to hear anyone who's played it actually explain, from an immersion standpoint, why I would be doing questlines for dead characters who are given depth only through terminal logs and/or holotapes. it doesn't seem to make any sense, and even less so when you start to hear about how they're parts of a bigger faction system. what is motivating a player to join a specific faction in the game, from a narrative perspective? i know we've only seen ~3 hours of gameplay total, but nothing in there seems to answer that. it's just "hey, these people died and left some notes. go do the thing they wrote/talked about, and you'll... get rewards from them? somehow?" I don't get it. also: seriously, how could it be that big of a problem to include NPCs? every other always-online game i've ever played has been able to figure this out, so i have a hard time buying any argument about technical limitations...
speaking of immersion, PVP seems fucking stupid. I get what they're trying to do, and I understand that they're going to great lengths to prevent griefing or whatever, but the idea of having to "accept" a fight breaks immersion in all of the worst possible ways. they can't have it both ways... being set to pacifist mode by default pre-level 5? that's a pretty good idea! but coordinated teams could just have someone roll a new character to scout, which seems broken, right? maybe a party is unable to enter PVP if there are significant level gaps therein? and even still, what's to stop higher level players from engaging with people just as soon as they hit level 5? IIRC, you can see all player levels on the map as well
why not just take a (gulp) destiny route for PVP? keep the main map PVE only, maybe shrink the players on the server at any one time (which, hey, could help with stutter!), make some side maps based on the terrain zones, make it a standalone playlist thing with your characters, figure out a way to disable level advantage, and everyone's happy! wasn't the whole point of trying multiplayer fallout that you had guys from Doom or Quake in-house who knew how multiplayer worked? (and look, you guys just made me defend goddamn destiny, which is unforgivable)
being able to see the names of everyone in your game world is the sort of thing where, sure, I get why they'd think it'd be a good idea initially, but did anyone on the dev team give that idea more than five seconds of thought? stream sniping/grouping is going to be incredibly rampant, and it's going to be a beautiful shit show. hoooo boy, i can't wait to see how that plays out!
VATS looks like a trainwreck. I can't understand why anybody would ever use it over manual aiming? like, I know it "has" to be in the game, but holy fuck it seems useless.
the difficulty is also something i've seen folks concerned about-- a team of lvl 4s/5s teaming up to kill a lvl 25 legendary glowing one with relative ease seems overly easy? maybe they had the difficulty settings turned down because they wanted the press to be encouraged to explore? i dunno.
the trading system looks nice, so there's that, I guess. it's cool that gear is level-gated, too.
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At the end of the day, I know Bethesda has always referred to this as an experiment, and co-op Fallout does sound like something I want to try. But this isn't co-op Fallout, not really. It's not quite Rust either, fine, but everything I've seen or heard explained seems to miss what makes the franchise great in the first place. Fallout was never about shooting and looting and crafting. It contained those things, especially in the more recent entries, sure, but the series itself has always been about a feeling of desolation, and having to come to terms with a post-war society that was often pulling you in a bunch of different directions, and having to make difficult decisions that affected your place in that society. These are things that a co-op Fallout game can accomplish-- I'm not of the mindset that the idea for co-op Fallout was fucked out of the gate-- but this Fallout game seems to miss the boat so completely with those things that I don't really get why they even bothered attaching it to this IP in the first place. It looks like it could be a fun enough game, even with the concerns I've noted above, but it seems like a terrible Fallout game.
Oh, and it's not going to be on Steam, which seems to be less Bethesda shooting itself in the foot and more just amputating the foot straight away. Srsly Bethesda, Activision was able to pull this off with Destiny because millions and millions of people already use Battle.net for a whole library of games that are good enough to warrant it. Even Ubisoft cross-sells games with Steam, because they realized how many people fucking hated the hassle of going through Uplay. Nobody wants yet another game dev's launcher to have to go through. Shit just seems like common sense.
And if the argument is "people will come, because they want to play Fallout 76, which will be a popular, well-reviewed AAA game," you should probably go look at Titanfall 2 and Origin, a platform that already had a pretty sizable user base and still managed to hamstring a game that most outlets called the best shooter to come out that year.
