Fallout

Y'all know me. I don't really care what other people think about video-games. Whatever I like could be rated at 10 on Metacritic, and I'd still dump hours into it, because not only should other people's opinions dictate your own, people are generally pretty unreliable critics. What was once considered a bad film can be considered good because circumstances that have nothing to do with the film itself.

So whenever I see a video-game being endlessly praised or endlessly shat on, I'm always curious. I'm curious where I'll fall on the line, or if I'll be in some kind of weird stage between the two lines.

That's what led me to installing Fallout 76 this week.

It's free on Steam for a couple days, and it's been years since all of the controversy. I watched that Internet Historian video like everyone else and man… that was rough. As bad as Cyberpunk's launch was, at least it only impacted individual players, not what was trying to be a mini-MMO or multiplayer sandbox for friends to dick around in.

However, it's received a lot of support from Bethesda since then, most famously, it re-added human NPCs instead of just robots, and you do indeed witness this immediately upon exiting the vault in this game, though I didn't experience that in minute three of this game, but minute thirty… Because when booting up the game, on my Ryzen 3700x paired with a GTX 3080, I was getting 48fps.

I knew that's bullshit, even Fallout 4 ran better than that on my PC, so sure enough, the game has an FPS lock turned on by default that you disable by going to the game's config file.

Alarm bells are ringing.

Searching shouldn’t have taken me half an hour though right? I've been through this circus before, config files don't scare me, so what was the issue?

The issue is I took the time to customize my character, only to learn even though I've taken a photograph of my character, and said photograph appears after relaunching the game and loading the level, it deleted my custom character, and I have to start all over again…

This is uh… not good.

I've got everything running though! It's at a solid 130fps with everything cranked to maximum, so it should all be good! Run through the empty base, collect my starting gear, go through the vault door, and instantly, that FPS has gone down to 70…

Well, no big deal right?

I can easily survive that with a gamepad, and it's not like a Fallout game is something you play for the combat, so I don't mind not using a mouse and keyboard, just, casually kicking back while I explore a world. Leaving that door's when I encountered the first human NPCs, now normally I don't do this, but Bethesda games are often filled with lots of redundant dialogue where I know what a characters' going to say before they've even said it, and I sometimes skip the last couple of words just for the sake of my patience.

I do that…

It doesn't work.

I press it again…

It works.

Sometimes.

Because the game's running on a server, skipping dialogue has to sync with said server, and it often fails, leaving me to listen to more dialogue I don't want to hear, and if I spam the button, there's a 50/50 chance it will actually skip that line.

This is quite infuriating, especially when I've played at least a couple hours of Fallout 4, and now that this would never happen in that game, and that despite the shared assets, engine, gunplay, menus, etc, I'm now dealing with all new problems in a Bethesda title, games that are quite infamous for their issues.

But… it's fine, I played Cyberpunk at launch and got enjoyment from that, how can I possibly complain about Fallout 76 after it's been patched over the course of yea-

I can't get 60fps… not in combat at least, and not against hordes of human enemies with their heaps of intelligence, but Zombies. Four zombies, and already the game's running worse than Cyberpunk did on my computer… at launch… on a GTX 1080…

Combat's not important though right? Especially in a Fallout game, this is all about exploration, picking a direction, and exploring all of the world. Never mind I already did this The Outer Worlds last year, and massively enjoyed that in comparison with none of the technical or performance issues.

No, it's for the stories! Stories that you discover in the world! And I was about to finally witness my first story sequence, with someone holding up a bartender at gunpoint…

https://twitter.com/Raycevick/status/1451448599129178113?s=20 

After her line of dialogue, there's three seconds of an awkward pause, when the hideously haired character snap turns like a Quake 3 player to yell at my unconvincingly, he puts his gun down just as abruptly as my line of dialogue, and it disappears from his hand for good measure, doesn't stop the bartender keeping her hands up of course (her arms remind me of the Little Dark One from Metro Last Light), that's when someone from the corner pops up with a pistol to fire a lone shot at the guy, a shot that I guess the server didn't register, because he doesn't fall over for another half a second, the gun-man's firearm disappearing is the final punchline.

And that's when I uninstalled the game.

Y'all know me. I don't really care what other people think about video-games, including Fallout 76. I'm selfish, and in my own experience with Fallout 76… was god fucking awful.