Hey everyone, Russ Frushtick here and I am talking to
senior reporter Owen. Good,
who just spent three hours playing Fallout 76.
One of the things that has been kind of confusing to people—
the leveling system seems like a big
change from traditional Fallout. Can you kinda walk us through it?
Yeah. I didn't get to see too much of the
leveling system because I only went up to level five and you can go,
you know, multiple,
tens high. But this is all based on a card system
and a perk system now. Now you will still level up the,
uh, traditional,
uh, seven categories of your SPECIAL,
which everybody remembers.
But you're going to start at ones across the board.
You're not going to spec your character at creation,
which is what I think some people expect of a traditional Fallout game.
And, and from there,
as you level up, you know,
you can pick a SPECIAL to increase, you will get the attendant benefit to
it, whether that's carrying capacity or
accuracy or whatever. And then you're going to get access to
perk cards that you can equip to your SPECIAL.
And this is where it gets a little complicated because the number of cards
you can put on a specific SPECIAL category is equivalent to,
you know, what number that is.
So if you're like a four in Perception, you can take four cards that are
Perception-based and lay it out there or you can take 2 that are ranked up to
level two, which we'll get into more in a second,
I guess, and put it there.
So you kind of have to see it in action to make your choices at the outset to
sort of really understand, okay,
what's my strategy for building my character here?
One thing that they were very clear on telling us is when you,
when you hit the level up and you choose which part of your special to increase
the perk card that you take after that
does not have to be correspondent to that category.
So you know, what you can do for example,
is say you've already got duplicates
of a perk card, and you want to increase endurance to
take advantage of that. So you put one on endurance,
you upgrade your perk card, but then you take a perk card in another
category because you know, you just want a new card and see how you
can play it. So there's a little bit of mix and match
you can enable and disable perk cards at will,
um, you know,
by going into the menu for the, for the character.
So let's say you were building a sniper type character so you had a bunch of
perk cards that enhanced sniping, but then you decided oh, I'm going to do
some melee attacks. Now you can deactivate the sniper
attacks and sniper cards and activate like strength building cards
essentially. And it's
adaptable in the sense that, you know,
you may have one vision for how you want to play,
but then you just get a bunch of cards that are very useful to another style
and you go might as well. Um, and I think it works for again a game that
is multiplayer in nature. Um,
whereas, you know,
if you've spec'd yourself at the beginning,
I mean I think a lot of people, I don't know,
they might, it might imbalance the game somehow.
I don't know. I think it's all better for people to
just sort of start up in rank up and go in the direction that they prefer to
play if they can and then take advantage of the perks.
Yeah, it is a pretty complex and as you said,
kind of hard to visualize without having played it yourself.
But I know Todd Howard has commented on it and it sounds like the idea is to
make these characters that aren't the Jack of all trades,
like I'm great at everything but more specialized in the traditional Fallout
sense. One of the perks that I was
particularly curious about that I know you had some questions about
was charisma, um,
how does that sort of manifest? Obviously strength is obvious and
endurance and stuff like that, but Charisma is kind of a tricky one.
Well, charisma,
they have the typical, or they have some of the typical perks that you may
have seen in past games, but I would say broadly speaking,
it's mostly about conferring your benefits or buffs to others in your
social group. But if you group up with,
you know, several other teammates and I believe
it's at once your charisma is three or better,
you can start to share and it's share any perk card.
It's not just your charisma cards of course,
but what you will see with the charisma perk cards is sort of a communal
benefit, say in accuracy,
or communal benefit in health or something like that.
So charisma is less about dialogue options because this is,
I'm sure we'll talk about, you know,
there are no human npcs in this. Um,
so it's less about what people remember, which is hey,
there are different dialogue options if you have a high enough charisma and it's
more about being social with other human players that you play with.
Right. It's more of like a bard role in like
the traditional DND sense, like you're giving these passive buffs to everyone.
I would say that's a good comparison. You talked about the NPC thing.
to everyone. Yeah,
I know a lot of people have talked about the fact that there are no human npcs—
For those who, who haven't been following what's been
said about the game so far, you will still have mission givers.
You, you will still have quests,
but these are going to be — They're going to take place through
your overseers log. In the story.
things like, you know,
your overseer has left the vault ahead of you and you were following her out
into the world on the larger story-based mission.
And so you'll find holotapes for her. But you'll find holotapes for other
people who live out in the world and these may have,
you know, quests associated with them.
You're gonna run into a lot of robots. Who,
I mean, an example of one that I ran into was I ended up at
an army installation and there was still a,
a drill sergeant type robot there who wanted to put me through basic training.
So I said, sure.
And, you know,
tried to do three of these obstacle courses.
It, that's an example of this,
I think where it is a little bit jarring is at the beginning,
you know, you wake up in Vault 76 and
technically you're alone. It's like where did everybody go?
You might see a bunch of people hanging out in the lobby area as they're
beginning the game and sort of understanding because a little bit of an
onboarding that goes on in Vault 76 and then you get out into the world
and there're all these people sort of running around doing their own things
near the vault. Um,
I think one thing that, that Fallout,
you know, really delivered a lot of it as the
traditional rpg was that sense of isolation of you against the world.
Um, and so,
you know, if you see somebody that could be dangerous, well
what they wanted to, what Bethesda game studios wants to do
here is if you see somebody who is human, you know that that is a human player.
And I get the value there. But it's also the question is,
you know, does that person want to play with me?
Do I want to play with them? I mean less so even about griefing,
which of course is on everybody's mind, but it's just like,
you know, would I prefer to really be a rugged
individualist in this, which is something that Fallout really
serves or do I want to play it with friends.
Um, and,
you know, if I don't want to and I see all these other people running around doing their own thing
how does that fit with me narratively in terms of the overall purpose of what my
character is doing out in Appalachia.
Sure, did you,
did you dive into the PVP mechanics at all?
Do you have any thoughts on that?
I did, um,
get into pvp just to see how it worked because I knew I would be the one who
was likely to die. Uh,
and, and I did.
I believe Famitsu killed me. Um,
but, uh,
it, it's,
it's somewhat confusing because you have something called pacifist mode which is
enabled until you reach level five, but you can turn it all off before then
if you choose. Now.
Pacifist mode isn't about what others can do to you.
It's about what you can do to them and it's about um,
it's basically no friendly fire if you are teamed with other human characters.
So you can't accidentally shoot, you know,
somebody on your team and of course as
they've explained already and it's tough to pick up.
If somebody shooting you and you don't want to be involved in Pvp,
they're only going to do like chip damage to you.
It's going to be until you return fire. It's just,
it would take a long time. I mean they can hassle you and I think
there is an option in there. I didn't see it,
but we were told, you know,
if somebody is just being a pain in the ass,
you can block them. But that's on an individual user level.
But to get back to the bigger sense of things,
what we're kind of troubled me a little bit about this,
about Pvp was: within VATS
it was still possible for me to end up targeting people I didn't want to shoot
who were human players either they were on my team or they were other humans in
the area that I didn't want to engage. And even if I'm not doing any damage or
killing them, taking them out of the game where it's an "oops, I'm sorry,"
I'm still wasting ammo. And Ammo is like anything else in this,
it's a resource that you really gotta be careful about.
You know, melee weapons figured a lot into my
early stage playthroughs just because you know,
those 38 rounds were so precious.
Yeah. And in terms of the,
like you talked about VATS briefly. Like obviously this is a multiplayer
game. You can't just slow down or stop the game to like decide, hey,
I want to do an arm shot for 39 percent chance to hit.
How does it feel differently now?
VATS, as you said,
it doesn't slow or stop time. What happens is it brings up the
familiar HUD of the target outlined and it's very useful for finding out where
someone is shooting at you. There's a lot of cover in Fallout 76 and
as they've mentioned, you know,
it's like, it's the first green fallout game
because it's set 20 years after the bombs fell there,
so a lot of foliage. So you can use VATS to like find somebody and go,
that person is shooting at me or that thing is shooting at me.
Um, and it costs action points to do so.
So you can't just spam it. Um,
but from there you cycle through body parts,
you know, by flicking left or right on your right
thumb stick. Um,
and at the outset some of those percentages were really low and I think
that may be attributable to just below perception that I had because I only got
up to level five.
It was easier for me in the early goings to just run and gun a headshot.
Um, and I think I cracked off a couple on
some super mutants in there, uh,
you know, it was like I would see in VATS,
you know, somebody's leaning over say the cornice
of the building and the headshot or you know,
the head body part percentage will be something like 58 and I would go, you know,
well, the hell with it, and just aim down sights and get the
same effect now on the fly. So there will be some users.
I think will see what I'm talking about when
they pick it up and it may be that this is just something that is only for the
early goings in is once it's your perception and your accuracy increases,
VATS becomes more useful. But it's definitely a different way to
do combat in Fallout 76.
Sure. Do you get the impression that VATS is
in there basically for people that aren't maybe super adept with like
aiming with a controller?
I mean, I can't speak to their intent,
but sure, that is a benefit if you are not,
you know, if you're,
if you're worried about this being a multiplayer shooter,
you know, like overwatch,
like call of duty, like you know,
the big names where you get shot up by teenagers and that's no fun.
I'm sure that VATS can provide a little bit of an edge to at least let you get
your licks in, especially if you're doing pvp.
Um, but I,
I think it might also just be a familiarity thing.
Like, you know,
this is Fallout. People expect VATS.
Um, and so they,
they've provided as best they can, a way to do that with multiplier.
Yeah, absolutely.
Uh, in terms of dealing with other people,
obviously it's not just pvp. You can also do trading with folks for
people that have played games like Destiny, trading is verboten.
Like there's just, it's just not an option.
A lot of the reason is because they don't want players at level one to just
like get the best gear. Did you sense any like limitations on
the trading systems in Fallout 76 or any reason why they've included it here and
whether it's sort of how it impacts the gameplay.
So when was trading, I was trading with
developers in the world we were in and they had a lot of high level stuff.
I was just more going for staple goods like ammunition.
Um, but there are,
there are level gates to certain items. So I think that addresses the question.
You can't just, you know,
somebody is a buddy and they've got, you know,
all kinds of good gear because they've been playing longer and they buff you up.
But you can, I mean it is,
it can just be a completely, you know,
donation thing, you can set the price to zero of
anything and you know, the person says thank you very much and
you know, that's just the same effect it's giving over.
So they encourage trading, there's a specific emote for it. saying you're willing to trade
and I think it's also sort of the scavenging mentality of going around the
wasteland who knows what you have that's useful to somebody else.
I mean obviously as you get into creating your camp and your base,
building up a workshop, that sort of thing.
You know, raw materials become very important to
the infrastructure and especially to crafting.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think the biggest question just to close this out,
is for people that are fans of Fallout, the addition of multiplayer,
the lack of human npcs, do you feel like this is too far beyond
like apart from what a Fallout game is or do you think this feels like Fallout
DNA with like some new stuff added in?
Um, I think,
I hate to be wishy washy about it, but I mean I think it's a time will tell sort of thing.
I can't make that judgment even off of three hours of play,
especially as frenetic as it was because it wasn't just the three other people in
my team. It was everybody else in the room,
about four dozen folks runnning around
as I really respond to it, you know,
yes, I'm excited to play it because it's more
Fallout and I'm a big Fallout fan and it will have a main quest line and some
things that, you know,
I identify with, if you know,
the, the big payoffs of playing Fallout,
what makes me feel good about it, but it is going to be a different thing.
It's not going to be the kind of role playing game that people usually
see from Bethesda game studios like Skyrim or like a Fallout 4.
It is definitely Fallout with friends and there are a lot of things that are geared toward that.
So as you get more the, I think the direction where you will get
more out of it is that you play it with other people even though you can solo
it, they're very careful to say you can go through this whole thing by yourself
you know, Pete Hines was saying that's the way he prefers to play it.
I'm just going to have to play it by myself for a lot longer before I get a
sense of okay, where does this really fit in with New Vegas, with 3,
with 4 — the things that I have really enjoyed playing the most,
um, as,
as far as its appeal.
Well, I thank you so much for taking the time
Owen, I really appreciate it. Thank you very much for having me.