Games

I remember playing the beta, thinking how cool it was that the economy would be player driven. It was not cool at all. Lol

There are so many aspects of Bethesda games that would be changed for the better if they took inspiration from their stablemates, like Arkane or iD. I'm still waiting, though. Nor am I holding my breath.

How long ago was that?

I mean, there aren't a lot of players on a given server aside from at specific locations, so it's not common to run into people. But I don't think that the map is especially empty of placed content -- named locations and the like -- compared to past games in the series.

There are a few areas in the map (well, unless they've added stuff) where you can mostly dodge any created content, but you'd have to go out of your way to find them. There's a strip along the southern extremity of the map where you can travel almost the extent of the map without running into something. The far southeast doesn't have that much stuff (aside from a few important things, like the Scorchbeast Queen fight).

And I don't know what you mean by crafting being broken. Maybe things have changed between when we played it, but it felt more-or-less like Fallout 4 crafting to me.

Gathering certain plants en masse probably requires digging up a map of where they spawn, unless you want to go mushroom hunting in the woods (which I think was probably part of the intended experience), and those are a crafting item.

There are some scrap generators in the game, but I'd call them more-or-less a non-factor, since they only have a low rate of item generation.

thinks

Learning the recipe to craft certain items, like serums, has a high bar. I don't know if one would call that broken or not, but it's a difference from Fallout 4.

Some crafting components decay -- though there are perks to mitigate that -- but to leverage those perks, you need to keep the items on your person until you make use of them. I can see someone taking issue with the inventory system, which is a major place where the game places resource constraints on one, but I assume that that's not what you meant, if you were talking specifically about crafting.

I probably played it for much longer than I should have. The main reason I stopped is the same you said, the latency is just too bad. It's not always so bad and if the latency is low enough to be barely noticeable then there's actually a somewhat fun game underneath it. But the issue is that 90% of the time the latency is noticeable and it makes the game feel extremely sluggish, if not completely broken.

It's okay, but it's not Fallout 5. The fundamental problem is that it is, well, an online game. So even though not all of the game is oriented around online play, you can't do things like have the world change much around the player's actions, which was a major element of, say, Fallout: New Vegas.

I played through it, played it mostly as a single-player game, didn't regret the purchase, but do regret that Bethesda decided to do it instead of Fallout 5.

It's Fallout 4 with some engine and mechanics improvements (e.g. Fallout 4's bonkers dialog system went away, and it works like earlier games in the series) but a lot less nice single-player content.

I think that the person who is gonna enjoy it the most is something like people who just want to kinda casually mess around with friends or a spouse in a Fallout-themed world, want to build camps in 3D for aesthetic value. It's definitely the easiest Fallout game I've played.

And it can't be extensively modded, because it's online, so the modding crowd is kind of out of luck.

I hope Starfield modding takes off, because Fallout 5 isn't coming anytime soon. Maybe we'll get something like Tales of Two Worlds in Starfield (TTW meets Fallout 4?), because the Starfield engine does a much better job of streaming content smoothly as one moves from cell to cell than with the earlier games from Bethesda.

random DCs, etc.

I think that some of that is people using that perk that lets you control creatures and then lugging them to unusual places.

googles

Animal Friend

But, yeah, there are deathclaw spawns at some weird places, like that one that spawns on the grounds of the Whitespring Resort, which ordinarily doesn't have much by way of hostiles running around.

There are fewer deathclaws than in previous (recent) games, though. There's nothing like New Vegas's deathclaw promontory. I can only think of a few places where I've seen them.

My bigger issue is that deathclaws -- as well as other melee enemies -- become trivialized once one has a jetpack, because one can simply hop to somewhere that they can't path to. I think there were jetpack mods for Fallout 4, and I get them wanting to stick a popular mod into the game, but I really think that it's unbalancing. Starfield has the same issue, and one can get a boostpack far earlier in Starfield than a jetpack in Fallout 76; in Fallout 76, you've played through most of the game's content by the time that you start running around with a jetpack, so it's kind of a late-game treat to look at the world differently.

In Fallout 4, a deathclaw can move more-quickly than you and can generally reach anywhere you can -- unless you can dodge into a small building or something, and that's rarely close-enough to be a factor, aside from the first deathclaw encounter in Concord. You can jump, and deathclaws can't, but that rarely gives you sufficient privileged access to get out of reach If you get caught in the open, it's hard to get away, and a deathclaw is a tough opponent. In Fallout 76 or Starfield, it's almost always possible to easily get somewhere that a melee enemy cannot get to you.

I think that if jet/boostpacks were going to become a major game element, they also needed to do major improvements to pathing and the ability of creatures to move, like adding jumping or climbing (or jetpacking, though I have a hard time seeing a deathclaw jetpacking working thematically). Or take melee enemies out of the game, which I think would be unfortunate. Or give melee enemies counters to your limited flight ability; molerats have the ability to travel underground and burrow out of most surfaces, and you can't lose them once they're following you.