Fallout 76 Review Thread - Opencritic: 55, Metacritic 50

[dharh]

andisart said:

dharh said:

We are not getting scammed.  Most of us that like Bethesda games expect what we get.  You don't enjoy their games, we get it.  You don't have to look down on those of us who find their games some of the most worthwhile out there.  EU4 is just about the only game (besides everquest) that I've sunk more than Bethesda Fallout and Elder Scrolls games.  Even Final Fantasies get less hours by far than those games.

 

Ok hold on a second, you may be speaking for yourself, but not for everyone that enjoys Bethesda games even despite their plentiful shortcomings. I for one love the worlds Bethesda creates (and this is where the studio excels) and can get lost in them for many hours. However, the unpolished nature and technically lower standards in parts of their games have still always annoyed me. And especially since Skyrim I think it's fair to say that the technical quality of Bethesda's games has been further declining.

For example Skyrim, it has been ported over to so many platforms, yet Bethesda never fixed many of the multitude of bugs that the game has, despite having awareness over them and plenty of years and opportunity at hand. It is quite baffling that the Switch version, coming out in 2017 (six years after initial release) still has many of the initial bugs. PC users (and to some extent Xbox and PS users) have the chance to get the unofficial Skyrim patch by the modding community, which fixed hundreds of bugs Bethesda never cared to fix. Switch users in this example are missing out. Fallout 4 is the same story, an unofficial patch exist that similarly fixes hundreds of issues of the vanilla game. Bethesda just doesnt care to make these fixes, and they know they have the largest modding communities behind their games to fix the issues and their games have sold well enough anyway. That doesnt mean though that everyone that enjoys the game wouldnt wish for a smoother and technically better version of their games. Fallout 4 for instance I can only play with a lot of mods, then I can enjoy it. Vanilla for me is not much fun.

And now we have Fallout 76, which trumps all of this even by Bethesda's low quality standards. What I have experienced myself in the 10 hours I played, what I saw from streamers, what I read in the initial reviews, this all paint a clear picture of a new low, technically speaking. A product that seemingly needed at least another half a year or more to polish. This is now all not even considering the gameplay changes and that many people find the game boring after a while and not giving real motivation and incentives to go back for more, me included.

Bethesda's stubbornness in sticking with outdated technologies and tools to create their games, their unwillingness to release their games in a more polished state, their reliance on modders to fix many issues present in their games: this all has been lazy and arrogant and is now coming to bite them in their behind as we live in an ago of Breath of the Wild, Red Dead Redemption 2, AC: Odyseey etc. - all open world games that prove to everyone how these kind of games can look, play and function in 2018. Bethesda has a lot of work ahead.

Did you expect more from Bethesda?  At this point I can't believe anyone expects much in terms of polish from them.  Also, can't believe you compare those games to Skyrim or Fallout 4.