Mr Fish
Slippy sloppy, The
So, I recently watched Bellular News where they talked about Bethesda Launcher shutting down and they looked briefly at the Fallout 76 Roadmap and said positive things about it as it seems like Fallout 76 is getting the attention it needs as if the content it is getting is actually substantial and I ranted for myself (as I talk to myself like a crazy person) and decided that hey, this would be good to bring up on NMA.
So let's take a look at the roadmap for 2021 and 2022 then shall we.
(click to enlarge) ->
First up is Locked And Loaded.
It includes a variety of things, none of which have anything to do with "locked and loaded" but whatever. Let's go with them one at time starting with:
CAMP Slots
Now in Fallout 76 You can create a CAMP which has a set radius where you have a build limit ala Fallout 4's settlement system (excluding the settlers themselves of course) and throughout the game you can find plans to unlock new things to build or you can buy things on the storefront or get things through the SCOREBOARD. Basically, it's like the build portion of The Sims. And as someone who likes The Sims, it was fun to build things, once you got some damn plans to build shit. Here's the problem though... What happens if you want to build more things than one singular CAMP? Well you'd have to scrap everything you worked on and restart. That seems kinda dumb. Wouldn't it make sense to allow the player to have multiple locations where they could build their little sims locations? Why yes it would. In fact, I would have thought that this would have been a given from the get go, yet we had to wait until 2021 to get this.
Why? Well, on the ATOM SHOP there are these things called "Shelters" that are basically interior cells where you can place a hatch or a door or whatever it needs in your CAMP that players can interact with to get to the interior cell. Each Shelter has its own layout however it cannot have any of the benefits of a proper CAMP, like resource gathering or CAMP NPC's. And guess what these typically cost on the ATOM SHOP? 1500 ingame credits. Basically 14 bucks. So why did we not get additional camp slots until now? Do a big think and figure that out for yourself.
Now in my opinion, as someone who has played both Fallout 4 and The Sims I would have known from the get go that players would have wanted multiple slots. Yet they only introduced it this late and you only get 1 additional slot (meaning 2 in total) for free, any further slots cost money on the ATOM SHOP. So in my view, they withheld content from the game as long as they could to milk Shelters until they finally stopped turning as much of a profit as they're fucking useless and they did the bare minimum to allow more CAMP slots and even then we have to pay real money for more than 2 total slots.
SPECIAL Loadouts
Fallout 76 is not like an MMORPG where you need multiple class types to fill up a variety of roles to make sure a party stays alive. It's a free for all where you don't have to give a damn about anyone else and it isn't an RPG so "your choices matter" can sod off. It makes total sense of there to be a respec option in the game. In fact, based on previous MMORPG's and stuff it seems like a given that there ought to be a respec option from launch. Yet we had to wait until 2021 to get it, why?
Daily Ops Expansion 1
Daily Ops are basically a dungeon run that you go into and then the other members of your ingame party can join in. You fight in it, complete it get a daily reward, then there's no reason to do it at all for 24 hours. Now this dungeon thing only has one game mode and a few mutations that are cycled around but only one can be active at a time. So faster enemy speed or enemy attacks slow you down etc. The expansion brought in a new gamemode, took some base game enemies and cycled them into the pool and added in a few new mutations.
Crafting Sliders
W-what do you think that means? It means instead of crafting things one at a time you can choose how many to craft at once. It took them until 2021 to add that feature in which should have been there in Fallout 4 on launch let alone Fallout 76 on launch.
Mannequins
Armor you get you can put on these mannequins.
...
I'm pretty certain that this has been a feature of mods at the very least since Morrowind. Why the hell was this omitted from the base game?
And that's Locked & Loaded's features. Now as to why I don't think Bethesda deserves any positive reception for this: Multiple CAMP slots should have been a part of the game from the get go if not inplemented in the first few months, the fact that it took them this one and that they've beens selling Shelters on the store is a dead giveaway what their intentions are. Scummy. SPECIAL Loadouts or respec, crafting sliders and mannequins for armor/clothing should have been launch features, they deserve nothing but scorn for not including them at launch. Don't give me any shit about how hard it must have been for Bethesda to implement this stuff. They've been remaking the same game since Morrowind, there is no excuse for this.
Which leaves one thing, and that is Daily Ops Expansion 1. Is it new features? Yes. It is. But is it enough to make Daily Ops worthwhile? The answer is no. See Daily Ops is a lackluster feature that people only engage with solely for the reason for doing challenges to increase their rank on the SCOREBOARD. They didn't actually implement any new locations or enemies or whatever. Thing about Fallout 3 if you will, it got 5 DLC's. This is the meat of the update so it ought to be the size of at least one of the DLC's. But no, it takes vanilla locations, removes the entry point, adds maybe some new paths and spawn points and there we go. That's it. The actual mutations that enemies fall under hasn't been revamped or anything, it's still just one effect that is base game features. And it doesn't include many new enemies at all, the only new enemies it includes are the "final bosses" at the end of the run which is basically a damage sponge elite variant of the vanilla enemies most of the time.
So Locked & Loaded is basically a bunch of features that should have been a part of launch or shortly implemented after launch or it should have been a part of the Daily Ops original inception as it has always been extremely lackluster.
I'm gonna need to do another post after this....
So let's take a look at the roadmap for 2021 and 2022 then shall we.
(click to enlarge) ->
First up is Locked And Loaded.
It includes a variety of things, none of which have anything to do with "locked and loaded" but whatever. Let's go with them one at time starting with:
CAMP Slots
Now in Fallout 76 You can create a CAMP which has a set radius where you have a build limit ala Fallout 4's settlement system (excluding the settlers themselves of course) and throughout the game you can find plans to unlock new things to build or you can buy things on the storefront or get things through the SCOREBOARD. Basically, it's like the build portion of The Sims. And as someone who likes The Sims, it was fun to build things, once you got some damn plans to build shit. Here's the problem though... What happens if you want to build more things than one singular CAMP? Well you'd have to scrap everything you worked on and restart. That seems kinda dumb. Wouldn't it make sense to allow the player to have multiple locations where they could build their little sims locations? Why yes it would. In fact, I would have thought that this would have been a given from the get go, yet we had to wait until 2021 to get this.
Why? Well, on the ATOM SHOP there are these things called "Shelters" that are basically interior cells where you can place a hatch or a door or whatever it needs in your CAMP that players can interact with to get to the interior cell. Each Shelter has its own layout however it cannot have any of the benefits of a proper CAMP, like resource gathering or CAMP NPC's. And guess what these typically cost on the ATOM SHOP? 1500 ingame credits. Basically 14 bucks. So why did we not get additional camp slots until now? Do a big think and figure that out for yourself.
Now in my opinion, as someone who has played both Fallout 4 and The Sims I would have known from the get go that players would have wanted multiple slots. Yet they only introduced it this late and you only get 1 additional slot (meaning 2 in total) for free, any further slots cost money on the ATOM SHOP. So in my view, they withheld content from the game as long as they could to milk Shelters until they finally stopped turning as much of a profit as they're fucking useless and they did the bare minimum to allow more CAMP slots and even then we have to pay real money for more than 2 total slots.
SPECIAL Loadouts
Fallout 76 is not like an MMORPG where you need multiple class types to fill up a variety of roles to make sure a party stays alive. It's a free for all where you don't have to give a damn about anyone else and it isn't an RPG so "your choices matter" can sod off. It makes total sense of there to be a respec option in the game. In fact, based on previous MMORPG's and stuff it seems like a given that there ought to be a respec option from launch. Yet we had to wait until 2021 to get it, why?
Daily Ops Expansion 1
Daily Ops are basically a dungeon run that you go into and then the other members of your ingame party can join in. You fight in it, complete it get a daily reward, then there's no reason to do it at all for 24 hours. Now this dungeon thing only has one game mode and a few mutations that are cycled around but only one can be active at a time. So faster enemy speed or enemy attacks slow you down etc. The expansion brought in a new gamemode, took some base game enemies and cycled them into the pool and added in a few new mutations.
Crafting Sliders
W-what do you think that means? It means instead of crafting things one at a time you can choose how many to craft at once. It took them until 2021 to add that feature in which should have been there in Fallout 4 on launch let alone Fallout 76 on launch.
Mannequins
Armor you get you can put on these mannequins.
...
I'm pretty certain that this has been a feature of mods at the very least since Morrowind. Why the hell was this omitted from the base game?
And that's Locked & Loaded's features. Now as to why I don't think Bethesda deserves any positive reception for this: Multiple CAMP slots should have been a part of the game from the get go if not inplemented in the first few months, the fact that it took them this one and that they've beens selling Shelters on the store is a dead giveaway what their intentions are. Scummy. SPECIAL Loadouts or respec, crafting sliders and mannequins for armor/clothing should have been launch features, they deserve nothing but scorn for not including them at launch. Don't give me any shit about how hard it must have been for Bethesda to implement this stuff. They've been remaking the same game since Morrowind, there is no excuse for this.
Which leaves one thing, and that is Daily Ops Expansion 1. Is it new features? Yes. It is. But is it enough to make Daily Ops worthwhile? The answer is no. See Daily Ops is a lackluster feature that people only engage with solely for the reason for doing challenges to increase their rank on the SCOREBOARD. They didn't actually implement any new locations or enemies or whatever. Thing about Fallout 3 if you will, it got 5 DLC's. This is the meat of the update so it ought to be the size of at least one of the DLC's. But no, it takes vanilla locations, removes the entry point, adds maybe some new paths and spawn points and there we go. That's it. The actual mutations that enemies fall under hasn't been revamped or anything, it's still just one effect that is base game features. And it doesn't include many new enemies at all, the only new enemies it includes are the "final bosses" at the end of the run which is basically a damage sponge elite variant of the vanilla enemies most of the time.
So Locked & Loaded is basically a bunch of features that should have been a part of launch or shortly implemented after launch or it should have been a part of the Daily Ops original inception as it has always been extremely lackluster.
I'm gonna need to do another post after this....
