There's A New Fallout

There's a new Fallout game out.  As I described last Monday, I finally downloaded the new Fallout 76 from Bethesda.net after a great many adventures and misadventures, most of which were probably user errors by this technology-challenged old man.  But I finally succeeded and wisely decided not to open it or start playing right then and there, as I knew it would likely have me up to whatever hour on Monday night.  I instead vowed not to open it until Wednesday, so that I can stay up as late as I wanted and play to my heart's content over the long Thanksgiving-holiday weekend. 

It turned out to be a wise decision.  I started the game around 5:30 p.m. Wednesday and was up until 4:30 a.m. that night playing.  I don't have Steam statistics to account for my actual playing hours (the game is not yet  available on Steam and can only be downloaded from the infernal Bethesda.net site), but my rough estimate is that I probably played for 14 to 15 hours each on Thursday and Friday.  All this on top of the fact that 76 is clearly the worst Fallout game yet (well, Fallout Shelter might actually earn that dubious distinction, but I hardly even consider that a video game).  . 

Bethesda has gone out of their way to emphasize that 76 is not Fallout 5, that is, not the next chapter in the Fallout series after the enjoyable 4.  It's a side-story, although there really isn't much of a story here - your character awakens in the titular Vault 76, leaves, and then has to survive in a post-apocalyptic, post-nuclear West Virginia.  That's pretty much it.  Sure, there are some quests and missions that come up, but there is no overarching storyline tying them all together, other than your character trying not to die.

What is different and unique to Fallout 76 is that it's the first multi-player Fallout game.  Unlike the previous Fallout games which were populated by computer-generated Non-Playing Characters (NPCs) and you played alone, every person you encounter in this game is actually another player sharing the game with you.  That guy running through the streets of downtown Charleston?  That's an actual person, someone somewhere in the world playing at the same time as you.  At your discretion, you can wave to that person, talk to that person, decide to hunt together with that person, or take on a monster together.  Or you can kill that person.

But this is not a battle royale, zero-sum game like Fortnight.  The goal is not to be the single last survivor.  The goal is to actually restore West Virginia from a battle ravaged wasteland to an actual vibrant community.  Game theory states that you're better off cooperating with the other players you meet than by opposing them, but my concern was trying to explain that to a 15-year-old playing the game somewhere out there in the world.  My fear was that adolescents would try to just be punks and run around shooting everybody and breaking everything they could find, including and most especially the encampments you spent hours setting up and stocking.  My worry was that while I was playing a mutually-cooperative game of Fallout 76, others would be playing a nihilistic game of Grand Theft Auto.  There's even an option, or so I'm told (I haven't gotten there yet), to acquire nuclear bombs and launch them at other encampments should you so choose. What teenager could resist that option?

What surprises me in a most pleasant way, and gives me renewed hope for humanity, is how cooperative and pleasant most people are that I've met so far in the game.  No one's shot at me yet and no one's tried to kill me.  A couple times, we shared encampments and I've let several players come into my carefully constructed encampment (more on that in a minute) and use my campfire to cook or my shop benches to repair their equipment.  Several people have offered me their unneeded gear (there's a weight limit on how much you can carry, and no one needs to lug around five pipe rifles) and when I offered to trade something in return, they were just "Nah, we good." 

Is this really the milk of human kindness manifested in gameplay, or is it just a self-serving kindness that rewards the player for good behavior and discourages the bad?  I forgot to mention, if you do actually kill a player in game, a bounty appears over your head and wherever you are on the game map, and lets others know they can earn extra caps for killing you.  So that's one incentive to behave, but is that really enough to discourage a rebellious adolescent from trying to kill and blow up everything they find before they get killed themselves?  You know, just for the lulz?  Apparently it is, and those who argue that video games foster violent behavior in real life need to look carefully at this example, where people are actually far more cooperative in gameplay than they are according to the newspaper accounts from the real world. 

So that's the good side.  The bad side is the game is really a chore to play - you're constantly having to forage for food and water, not to mention arms and ammo - even if you're not shooting other people, there is plenty of wildlife out there ready to attack you (and that makes good meat if you kill them first), as well as renegade robots, mutants, and feral ghouls.  

In the previous Fallout games, you had to monitor your Health Point, or Hit Point (HP), meter, and if it fell to zero, you'd die.  To restore points and not die at zero, you needed to eat, drink, sleep, or take a med, and try to avoid getting shot or hit by enemies.  Fallout 76 still has the HP meter, but it also has a thirst meter and a hunger meter.  When those fall to zero, you don't die, but you have so little energy and mobility that's it's easy for pretty much anything to come along and kill you - you're left essentially defenseless.  So to keep up your thirst meter, you need to constantly find water, and as most water and wells are contaminated by radioactivity and will make you even sicker if you drink without boiling first, you're also constantly foraging for wood to fuel the fires to boil the water. What's more, unlike the previous games, food perishes if stored for too long.  As a result, you can't stockpile food which means that instead of following the quests, which are of so-so interest to begin with, you spend a lot of your time looking for old, leftover rations or fresh meat (i.e., wildlife).  Just like real life, and just as in real life, pretty tedious and boring.  

Also, you can catch diseases in the game from bad food, from sleeping on the ground, or by getting too close to some monsters, and I've already caught dysentery (which makes you have to drink clean water almost constantly), "swamp itch," and something called "snot ear" (don't ask).  These are all annoying but can be cured with the right, hard-to-find medicines or harder-to-find natural herbs. 

We're playing games to escape from real life, not to recreate real life!  We want to pretend we're superheroes who can carry 100-pound machine guns on our backs while climbing up the sides of a building, or who can kill dragons with a shout and two strikes of a sword, not a camp dweller with dysentery huddling in the rain and praying that the scorchbeast on the other side of the hill doesn't smell your food cooking.

Anyway, I solved that later problem by building an encampment high up on a ledge on a cliff where it's difficult to approach me without giving me ample time to first determine if you're a friendly gameplayer or a monster or robot that needs to be killed.  It's pretty secure up there and easy to get to once you've figured out the path.  Also, the views are spectacular (I can see Morgantown from here!) and I've luxed it out with a brass bed, a state-of-the-art (such as it is in Fallout) cooking stove and several specialized workbenches for ammo, arms, and armor.  I've got a water well (still need to boil the water first) and even planted some fruit trees and veggies for food.  I'm not quite sustainable yet - I still need to forage for meat and wood - but I'm getting close.

The problem is I like my encampment so much I'm hanging around there all the time and not completing the game quests.  Instead, I've become something of an in-game hermit, helping out other game players in the area.   The camp is within earshot of a mutant-infested railroad depot, and when I hear gunfire I head over there and help out the outnumbered player (at this point, I know all the vantage points at the depot to shoot the mutants from without getting hurt myself), and invite the player to my encampment so they can repair their gear and restock their supplies if they want. There's even a pair of comfy chairs up there from which we can enjoy the scenery while trading tips about the game.    

So that's nice, and writing about all that makes we want to go back right now and play some more, so even though it's a boring and tedious game, even though the characters aren't developed and there's no overarching story arc, it's still the new Fallout game and I suspect it will dominate my time for at least the rest of the holiday weekend.