Bethesda Reportedly Offering Refunds for "Fallout 76" on PC

[Aireoth]

Jesus those are horrible games. I have a quite few games in my rather large Steam library and I have made mistakes, but not those ones.

That is the point.

 

[M76]

Its possibe basing your choices on graffiti may not be ideal. Its been shown the rating of people who have played the game, is far higher than the echo chamber that writes on your wall.

The game is certainly not a 2/10, but even the most notorious corporate mouthpieces don't dare give it more than 5s and 6s. Remember, for them a 7 is an average game.

It's really hard to defend a game that is basically fallout 4, with all npcs and its soul removed. It has multiplayer, but an mmo without a proper story and npcs is still garbage.
You can enjoy the game, but you can't honestly say it is better than a 5/10.

 

[Aireoth]

Its possibe basing your choices on graffiti may not be ideal. Its been shown the rating of people who have played the game, is far higher than the echo chamber that writes on your wall.

I see it this way, almost everyone buys a new game at lunch, regardless of quilty. Then those that dislike or find it poor walk away, creating a echo chamber in the remaining community that the product is actually good.

It's fine to like bad products, I do all the time because they scratch an itch nothing else does, but I never pretend they are a good product.

 

[viscountalpha]

Don't support this garbage. People like you are the problem. You can control yourself and still reward companies for bullshit releases. Vote with your wallets if you want any chance to change the path the gaming industry is going down.

In my Head, I know you're right but it doesn't stop me from wanting it.

My heart, it wants what it wants.

 

[motomonkey]

I paid $5 for the pre-order at gamestop, played the Beta enough to see I didn't like it, went back to Gamestop and used that $5 towards a used copy of X-com 2 for my PS4.

 

[Krenum]

Best thing I've heard about 76 was someone saying that Bethesda should have just made it a FO game similar to borderlands where ytou could solo it or play through the story with friends in co-op.

This would have been perfect & probably a lot less complicated which in turn would have let them come up with a better story or a story at all...

 

[Xerack]

WoW is it that bad? This is the only fallout game I haven't picked up yet.....

 

[aaronspink]

You have played it? The people who are playing it largely love it and that's starting to show above the noise. How that makes you a fanboi escapes me.

I've seen enough people playing it, that I find that a lie. Its a fundamentally fubar'd game that needs at least another year of development to be ready for actual release and significant design changes as well.

 

[Miah]

I find it kinda-sorta OK-ish. As i mentioned elsewhere on teh intarwebz it's a somewhat mediocre game elevated to kinda fun levels by the fact i can coop in the fallout universe with my wife, not a great game that i can coincidentally coop with my wife. But just over the weekend the frustration with the bugs is beginning to set in, Each time it usually involves logging out of the game & back in just to sort it out. Just today we had:

All waypoints disappear on the overhead map during respawn, meaning someone can't choose any place to come into the game. (both of us at different times)

bound grenade key randomly quit working. i thought i was out of gren cause of panic throwing. Nope, had 5. It just decided to quit.

couldn't take bound stimpacks. During the same fight as above the stimpack key quit doing anything. going into inventory showed i had 12 normal stimpacks & right below it....12 more normal stimpacks. Don't know why it doubled up like that & why the default key wouldn't work.

Current quests in the onscreen quest list regularly disappear for one player or another like they never had them. They won't show in the pipboy quest lists either.

Server simply disconnects us & kicks up out of the game.

(edit)
got hit with couple more. when joining server it often tells us we're over encumbered & AP will drain, it's wrong

Random message will popup congratulating us for hitting level 5 & saying we can now use perk cards & can join up with other players. we were actually level 20+ & already teamed up.



This gets extra frustrating when the coop partner either has to wait for the one having the random issue to logout & back in...or else the coop partner is getting their ass handed to them & could really use some help like right now. It's slowly taking the fun-level down a notch. My wife's a total fallout nut & she's already said she's down to having a love-hate relationship with the game. It's getting so BETHESDA that i actually instinctively reached up to hit f5 to quicksave after finding a better weapon this afternoon.

 

[Exavior]

Can we get the cliff notes on what is wrong with the game for those that haven't followed it closely?

i think the issue is that like many idiots like some people here don't listen or pay attention to any information given and thought this was fallout 5 with multiplayer instead of a open world online game that is set in the fallout universe. Everything that was listed as "being wrong" is what they said the game would be. It is not a MMO RPG. It is not Fallout 5 with multiplayer. It is a shared world survival game in the same vein as Ark, The Forest and other games mentioned in another post. You are supposed to explore the land, collect items and build a base for the "main" part of the game. The problem is that people like to buy games based on some make up bullshit they have in their head and then get pissed when the games aren't want they expected or because the developers made the game that they said they were going to make and didn't make it into something else before release.

 

[Formula.350]

All I can say is I genuinely hope that they come up with a good way to do quests, and involves living beings that we can make a mental connection with where we want to help.

I'm waiting on my friend to send me the game (on SD Card since I lack the monthly bandwidth or DL speed to get this on my own), so I can't say how good or bad it is, nor whether the questing aspect is going to be a big problem for me.

Coincidentally, with Bethesda games I seem to end up just exploring the shit out of it and somehow don't managed to ever finish the main quest, yet do manage to rack up 300+ hours lmao So I'm sure this is going to end up being a game oddly fitted for me. But! I do still want good questing, as I love side-quests!

 

[gamerk2]

The problem here is the type of bugs Bethdesia games normally ship with simply can NOT exist in a MMO. Nevermind that simply filling your world with filler quests really isn't acceptable these days.

 

[theBrownLlama]

just wait a year for Offline mode.
Their investor would not say no to a double-dip , would they,being greedy bastards and all

 

[Old_Gamer]

I had a feeling Fallout 76 was going to be a turd when the question of "What happens when other players turn into trolls" came up... Took a hard pass and didn't buy the game. Doing refunds is the smart move and will prevent people from taking a stance of "I'm never pre-ordering from Bethesda again". In the end, the loss of future customers simply isn't worth the risk.

The painful part is that I *REALLY* wanted this game to be good. I love Fallout and the Elder Scrolls games. My only hope is that Bethesda will pull their heads from their rear ends, look at what the developers of No Man's Sky did and get shit fixed. You can resurrect a failing game long after it's launched with time, effort and the will to give a crap. Till then it's a big old pile of nope.

 

[Crash.]

As a fan of the Fallout series since the first, and someone with almost 600 hours in Fallout 4 alone, I don't understand the mixed or hateful reaction to 76. While I could do without pvp aspect, I rarely run across other players anyway, and I love this game. Sure it has some of the same glitches as Fallout 4 and Skyrim, and hopefully these will be addressed, but few would call either of those games 5/10 unplayable blah blah. It is engrossing fun for me.

 

[l88bastard]

You are telling me, an 72 year old man, I can't honestly say its good. Go fuck yourself.

Back in the golden dawn of PC online gaming, I played Delta Force 2 online with the handle
"67 Year Old BADASS"

It was the best handle ever! Noobz used to try and insult my "age" after I owned them and my comebacks were so priceless. On the ingame chat I used to talk about banging 20 year old hooters waitressess, bench pressing 450lbs, wallpapering my study with c-notes, confirmed kills in vietnam, etc, etc.

As a fan of the Fallout series since the first, and someone with almost 600 hours in Fallout 4 alone, I don't understand the mixed or hateful reaction to 76. While I could do without pvp aspect, I rarely run across other players anyway, and I love this game. Sure it has some of the same glitches as Fallout 4 and Skyrim, and hopefully these will be addressed, but few would call either of those games 5/10 unplayable blah blah. It is engrossing fun for me.

 

[aaronspink]

As a fan of the Fallout series since the first, and someone with almost 600 hours in Fallout 4 alone, I don't understand the mixed or hateful reaction to 76. While I could do without pvp aspect, I rarely run across other players anyway, and I love this game. Sure it has some of the same glitches as Fallout 4 and Skyrim, and hopefully these will be addressed, but few would call either of those games 5/10 unplayable blah blah. It is engrossing fun for me.

Um, fully game breaking bugs, bad design choices (the stash one alone is enough to shitcan it), shitty server stability, dead world, etc.

And sure all bethesda games have issues, but those are generally fixed via mods and console commands, basically. Which means what normally made bethesda games viable are available to make 76 viable.

 

[M76]

You are telling me, an 72 year old man, I can't honestly say its good. Go fuck yourself.

Well, as the above example shows, age alone doesn't make you wise, just, well old.

You can look past the game's issues and still enjoy it, all the more power to you. That doesn't make it a good game by any standards. I've enjoyed games that were 3/10 or 4/10, and didn't feel the need to cuss at people who judged the games objectively.

 

[M76]

View attachment 122654

You're using the wrong meme. Some people can be spoon fed any garbage these days.

 

[Domingo]

This feels a lot like Mass Effect Andromeda. Most of the people complaining and making fun of the game haven't played it and are just parroting what they're supposed to think.

 

[M76]

This feels a lot like Mass Effect Andromeda. Most of the people complaining and making fun of the game haven't played it and are just parroting what they're supposed to think.

ME:A was OK as a concept, it had bugs at launch, and many of the faical animations were bad. However F76 seems to be flawed on a conceptual level. It would still just be F4 without a story if it had zero bugs and performance issues. I played F4 to explore interesting areas, and to meet interesting npcs, and to enjoy the story. F76, has nothing but pointless exploration to find loot, that you can't pick up because of the limited inventory. It is flawed on many levels, not just because of the bugs. I'd easily look past the bugs, if they weren't frequent and game breaking. F76 seems to be an attempt to use the fallout name and F4 assets to push out a multiplayer game with the least amount of effort. Despite their claims to the contrary, this can't be their biggest undertaking yet. It reeks of zero fucks given. It should've been pushed back a year at least, to iron out the issues, make the gunplay multiplayer friendly, and to populate the world with actual npcs.

The combat was the worst element of F4, that we tolerated to get the rest of it, now they release a game that is built around that single aspect of F4. Of course it will fail. I didn't expect it to fail this bad, but it's a good thing that it did. Because it tells devs, to don't release half assed garbage.

 

[SecretStash]

Forget the NPCs. I'm happy for their lack of effort. This is not the game I wanted. I'm waiting for ES6 & FO5. Keep the NPC development on those games. Let's not extend the time for release for those.

 

[Miah]

As it's going i can't imagine that Bethesda's release date & patch schedule is doing them any favors... To release mid November & drop 1 patch after launch then let things sit over a fairly major US holiday weekend where quite a few people would have both the time & desire to escape their family. Would think there might be a little "all hands on deck" to sort more issues immediately after launch. This is Bethesda damnit, even they admitted their less than stellar track record when it comes to bugs

 

[Aireoth]

You are telling me, an 72 year old man, I can't honestly say its good. Go fuck yourself.

Just because your old, doesn't make you right.

 

[BladeDancer314]

I was really thinking about pulling the trigger on this game but the criticism it's getting will not let me do it.

I honestly can't believe they released the game with this many bugs.

 

[madcap magician]

I've experienced no bugs in FO76 myself. I have only about 5 hours though.

 

[BladeDancer314]

I've experienced no bugs in FO76 myself. I have only about 5 hours though.

Interesting, enjoying the game so far?

 

[Gorankar]

I have played about 20 hours since launch on the xbone. It does have a handful of bugs that are annoying at times, nothing game breaking though, and I do wish there were at least some npcs/factions in the game instead of just terminals and corpses and factions that really don't mean anything without npcs.
If you can get it at a discount, I would still recommend it. It is not a bad game, and I have been having fun playing with my friends and family. Without them playing with me, it is a game that just needs a bit more fleshing out. I get the feeling that they expected the player base to fill the voids left by npcs. That is not happening since I, and it seems more than a few others, essentially ignore other people on the server unless they are wanted or know them. There is little possibility of creating our own factions with 20 player server limits.

While I like the game well enough despite it's flaws, I don't expect the game to last more than a year or two b4 they start talking about shutting down servers unless Bethesda does something pretty unlikely. Fix the bugs, and add some npcs/factions/more interesting enemies.


Edit: Having lived in the upper Apalachian mountain region, I am appalled at the overseers pronunciation of "Apalachia"....

 

[BladeDancer314]

BTW, the game is $35 right now on Amazon

 

[Silverlok]

This feels a lot like Mass Effect Andromeda.

Appropriate analog; MEA a game a year and a half after launch is "selling" for $8.99 or less

Most of the people complaining and making fun of the game haven't played it and are just parroting what they're supposed to think.

Oh how quickly one forgets.... https://hardforum.com/threads/mass-effect-andromeda.1865497/ , read through those posts. You can watch with eerie familiarity Fan enthusiasm drain into the black hole of despair as the painful realization overcomes denial and almost everyone realizes they are watching the slow gutt removing death of a franchise at the hands of inept developers

 

[DejaWiz]

Its possibe basing your choices on graffiti may not be ideal. Its been shown the rating of people who have played the game, is far higher than the echo chamber that writes on your wall.

Perhaps you should read more.

The price is already dropping like a rock, which signals that it will be a quickly forgotten title.

Fallout 76...76% off sale by the end of December, likely?

 

[Silverlok]

Can we get the cliff notes on what is wrong with the game for those that haven't followed it closely?

...all things already mentioned and ; client side collision detection , and ,already, two patches weighing in at close to 100GB

ME:A was OK as a concept,... However F76 seems to be flawed on a conceptual level.

I think that hits it right on the head.
Did they achieve what they conceived of?
Somewhere along the line someone's hubris and obvious echo chamber certainly seemed to think so , and to make matters worse; pat itself on the back for doing so . Seen from the same conceptual point of view that FORCED the 'creation club' onto the start screen of FO4 I'd say the actual intent of the entire '76 push was to get a FO platform for the purpose of slow rolling micro-transactions ( and eventually loot boxes ) into the FO fanbase mindset.

Creation Club failed ( to live up to Corporate expectations) so some "genius" thought let's set up a brand new platform using the FO4 assets, but players as the actual content. What could go wrong?

... F76, has nothing but pointless exploration to find loot, that you can't pick up because of the limited inventory. It is flawed on many levels, not just because of the bugs. I'd easily look past the bugs, if they weren't frequent and game breaking. F76 seems to be an attempt to use the fallout name and F4 assets to push out a multiplayer game with the least amount of effort. Despite their claims to the contrary, this can't be their biggest undertaking yet. It reeks of zero fucks given. It should've been pushed back a year at least, to iron out the issues, make the gunplay multiplayer friendly, and to populate the world with actual npcs.

The combat was the worst element of F4, that we tolerated to get the rest of it, now they release a game that is built around that single aspect of F4. Of course it will fail. I didn't expect it to fail this bad, but it's a good thing that it did. Because it tells devs, to don't release half assed garbage.

YEP.
So , what's next from bethesda? Will they tell us if you don't like it don't buy it? Or , even better: Since you players ARE THE CONTENT, YOU ARE , OBVIOUSLY, THE PROBLEM. So, go Fix yourselves , oh and pay us for the courtesy we have extended to you for the opportunity to go Fix yourself .

 

[Troz]

Honestly, I've never liked Bethesda's style. I haven't really enjoyed one of their games since Oblivion. However, unlike most people I only put the basic 40 hours into it to finish the main story and I was done with it. I used some mods but that didn't carry me too much beyond the original 40 hours. I think the Bethesda games are lacking in polish and technical execution. I always hated how you "interacted" with the environment with an invisible body. The menus have always been shit. Story telling isn't done in a particularly compelling way, etc.

This is the Bethesda SOP. Make a game that is 60-70% complete and release it. Then release the mod tools for the fans to fix everything. Saves a lot of money and time in development.

 

[aaronspink]

I have played about 20 hours since launch on the xbone. It does have a handful of bugs that are annoying at times, nothing game breaking though, and I do wish there were at least some npcs/factions in the game instead of just terminals and corpses and factions that really don't mean anything without npcs.
If you can get it at a discount, I would still recommend it. It is not a bad game, and I have been having fun playing with my friends and family. Without them playing with me, it is a game that just needs a bit more fleshing out. I get the feeling that they expected the player base to fill the voids left by npcs. That is not happening since I, and it seems more than a few others, essentially ignore other people on the server unless they are wanted or know them. There is little possibility of creating our own factions with 20 player server limits.

While I like the game well enough despite it's flaws, I don't expect the game to last more than a year or two b4 they start talking about shutting down servers unless Bethesda does something pretty unlikely. Fix the bugs, and add some npcs/factions/more interesting enemies.


Edit: Having lived in the upper Apalachian mountain region, I am appalled at the overseers pronunciation of "Apalachia"....

That's what happens when you make a multiplayer game with built in voice chat and leave out the basic fundamental Push-to-Talk. Everyone I know who's played it, ended up turning off in game voice because of all the annoying shit they kept hearing.

 

[nysmo]

Can we get the cliff notes on what is wrong with the game for those that haven't followed it closely?

Game breaking bugs, like dead NPC's that require interaction thus making it impossible to progress .

 

[notarat]

...all things already mentioned and ; client side collision detection , and ,already, two patches weighing in at close to 100GB


I think that hits it right on the head.
Did they achieve what they conceived of?
Somewhere along the line someone's hubris and obvious echo chamber certainly seemed to think so , and to make matters worse; pat itself on the back for doing so . Seen from the same conceptual point of view that FORCED the 'creation club' onto the start screen of FO4 I'd say the actual intent of the entire '76 push was to get a FO platform for the purpose of slow rolling micro-transactions ( and eventually loot boxes ) into the FO fanbase mindset.

Creation Club failed ( to live up to Corporate expectations) so some "genius" thought let's set up a brand new platform using the FO4 assets, but players as the actual content. What could go wrong?


YEP.
So , what's next from bethesda? Will they tell us if you don't like it don't buy it? Or , even better: Since you players ARE THE CONTENT, YOU ARE , OBVIOUSLY, THE PROBLEM. So, go Fix yourselves , oh and pay us for the courtesy we have extended to you for the opportunity to go Fix yourself .

Fallout 77 Immortal, of course!

 

[Nafensoriel]

Can we get the cliff notes on what is wrong with the game for those that haven't followed it closely?

Mostly netcode related and poor QA/QC. You might go 20 hours without a bug or you might go 5 minutes. Server stability seems mostly related to what players are actually doing. Since gamers are great at breaking servers and this is Bethesdas first attempt at MP... well it gets broke often.
Is the game really worth 2/10? Not really.. but its definitely not worth 70 bucks either and it definitely should not have been released as it stands.

I still stand by my first comment about FO76. It is a way for Bethesda to iron out co-op gameplay before beginning production of ES6. It doesn't matter if the game does well and it doesn't matter if the game was finished. This is the release spot needed to find out if it was in the realm of sanity or not. Everyone who plays this game can enjoy it or not but at the end of the day, you are just beta testers for CO-OP mode later on. No matter how this plays out they win. They use a throwaway title to fix code so their flagship remains "good" and they use the experience to integrate IDs team into their own. Any money they make is just gravy. They can deny any links to their main titles at will.

 

[Gorankar]

lol, just found a useful bug on accident. I accidentally unequipped a chest piece with pockets. I reequipped it and my total carry capacity went down. I experimented a bit and if you just equip/unequip that armor piece with pockets until you weight capacity reaches negative numbers, you can carry seemingly unlimited inventory.

 

[Silverlok]

Mostly netcode related and poor QA/QC.((sic) in a nutshell , very concise, but that reads like a chinese tech manual to baseline users) You might go 20 hours without a bug or you might go 5 minutes. Server stability seems mostly related to what players are actually doing. Since gamers are great at breaking servers and this is Bethesdas first attempt at MP... well it gets broke often.
Is the game really worth 2/10? Not really.. but its definitely not worth 70 bucks either and it definitely should not have been released as it stands.

I still stand by my first comment about FO76. It is a way for Bethesda to iron out co-op gameplay before beginning production of ES6. It doesn't matter if the game does well and it doesn't matter if the game was finished. This is the release spot needed to find out if it was in the realm of sanity or not. Everyone who plays this game can enjoy it or not but at the end of the day, you are just beta testers for CO-OP mode later on. No matter how this plays out they win. They use a throwaway title to fix code so their flagship remains "good" and they use the experience to integrate IDs team into their own. Any money they make is just gravy. They can deny any links to their main titles at will.

yep, and bean counters digits to figure how and when the microtransactions are phased in , but I disagree with you on one ( perhaps two ) point(s):

..."their flagship remains "good""...

NO. This and FO$(4) have now collectively, irreparably damaged the brand.

A fallout whore is not someone franchise devotees want to lie down with .

Bethesda is trying to "embiggen" the customer base at the expense of existing customer trust/loyalty, they had soft push back for FO4 ( when they said "we're taking the game in new directions ", but the actuality was they had stripped it of any real identity ) , and failed to understand the dissidence of destructive harmonic resonance , and then slammed the pedal down on it with this obvious the market funds it's own research piece.

FO4 was not a fallout game

FO76 is a bastard frankenbitch ( in terms of customer relations ) of a 'not a fallout game'

the only way they could insult the consumer further is to say , f-U on returns on all platforms...

 

[Nafensoriel]

/snipsnip

I was more referencing its investment brand than the player opinion. To shareholders and Zenimax, the titles are sold as separate and thus as long as FO76 breaks even it will insulate the brand from any issues with it. Investors will simply demand FO5 does not do what FO76 did.. which is very easy considering what was removed to create FO76. Remember, they point blank told everyone this wasn't FO5. It gives them a huge layer of insulation to just point at outraged gamers and says "they didn't listen and demanded a different game" (/edit Reference how Diablo Immortal played out)

Even FO4 itself is effectively immune to criticism. Steam user count has held steady at 15-20k a day average for over a year. That aggregates out to 500k-3m users you can claim still play this game every year on steam alone. So any criticism related to its current quality is always going to get back to those numbers and end up losing the argument due to "the numbers" showing a different opinion.