- An incredibly exciting year
at Bethesda Game Studios,
given some of that excitement
impressed you're still here.
(audience laughing)
- [Jim] Haha, look at the affected
corporate self deprecation guys.
They're so self aware,
they're so on our level.
You don't get to make the
jokes about this Bethesda,
you are the joke.
♪ Born different ♪
♪ We're Born innocent ♪
♪ We're Born perfect ♪
♪ I'm not like you ♪
♪ I'm a born lover ♪
♪ Born living ♪
♪ And I know, I'm I'm not like you ♪
♪ I was ♪
♪ Born clever ♪
♪ Born knowledgeable ♪
- Boglin, boglin, boglin, boglin, boglin.
At the tail end of last year
I produced a video called,
Six Times Bethesda Was
Massively Incompetent.
And even when I published
that video I worried that
Bethesda's ineptitude is
so frequent and so constant
that it wasn't a video that could be set
in any kind of stone.
They would always find
some new way to mess up,
some new disaster for us
and, well, I was right.
Because the humiliation
conga line for Fallout 76
was only just getting started.
And oh my word, what a
spicy few months its been
since that game squirted itself
into out faces hasn't it.
It is time at last, although
they could always find
some new way to mess up,
to do a post-nuclear
postmortem of Fallout 76.
And don't worry, I saw the
Bethesda E3 press conference,
we'll talk about that as well.
Here we go, take me the buggering
flick home country roads.
- We both know why you're
here and that's to talk about
the next Fallout.
(audience cheering)
- [Jim] Oh, oh if they knew
what they were cheering for.
♪ Country roads ♪
- [Jim] At its E3 press conference in 2018
Bethesda revealed to world
what the next Fallout would be.
A prequel to every Fallout that
had come before, Fallout 76.
Todd Howard proclaimed it
the biggest Fallout yet,
four times the size of the original.
But after showing off
a pre rendered trailer
things became almost instantly concerning.
With Bethesda unveiling an
always online survival game
that seemed to cynically jump aboard
the alive service bandwagon
that was steadily ruining the,
so called, triple A games market.
With yet another single
player focused studio
trying to adopt the service model,
there was a lot of well deserved
skepticism floating about.
But, how bad could it really be, right?
That's what you could of
been thinking at the time,
how bad could it be?
Bethesda surely got this locked up
and Todd Howard, Todd Howard,
Todd Howard said it's gonna be good,
Todd Howard, Todd Howard
said it's gonna be good.
He said, you know, you can
play it solo if you want,
there'll be engaging quests
and stories to get involved with.
And if Todd Howard said it,
well it's gotta be true.
Oh wait, no, no, no,
that's not how it works.
Oh no, what happens when
Todd says something?
I'm gonna have to check
the manual, hold on,
I've got a manual for
these sorts of things.
(book pages crumple)
Sorry, I'm just checking the book.
Where are we?
S, T, Toad, ToeJam &
Earl, Todd Howard, okay.
Todd Howard and, oh,
there's just a picture of
a horny cow doing a poo here.
Oh, fair enough.
In all truth, at the time,
it was hard to tell exactly
how Fallout 76 would turn out.
I personally refused to
have much of an opinion
about it at all until it
was finally in my hands.
Direct hands on previews
from the gaming press
didn't offer much,
remaining cautiously
optimistic as they were,
which is basically how 99%
of game previews present.
However a lot of the pre
release press tried hard to warn
their audiences not to
expect a real Fallout sequel,
echoing sentiments from
Bethesda own development team.
In a preview article
from Variety, Fallout 76
Design Director, Emil Pagliarulo,
delivered their own warning
in a way that now seems
remarkably poignant.
"For players who want Fallout
5, and this isn't Fallout 5,
"are they going to enjoy
playing this game?"
He said, "I wonder about that."
"I worry about that."
It doesn't really get more
fateful than that does it folks?
The games own project
lead openly wondering if
Fallout fans would enjoy
the latest Fallout game.
A question that in retrospective
seems almost tragic
because, and I'm being
completely diplomatic here,
Fallout 76 was total dog shit.
Before the world could see
just how awful the game was however,
fans had already mobilized to protest
the lack of a true single player mode.
A petition was formed
because of of course it was,
to request a real solo mode of Bethesda.
"The lone wanderer was
meant to wander alone",
read the petition,
which accrued thousands
of signatures in one day.
"Sure it would be fun to play with others
"and experience the wasteland
alongside other real players."
"But the heart of Fallout
"has always been conquering
the wasteland by yourself."
Well, one can laugh at online petitions
and I often do because so many
of them are fucking clownish.
The sentiment behind this
protest is one I agree with.
I find Bethesda games to
be very personal experience
when they're done right.
I specifically come to
Bethesda for that lonesome
experience of facing off
against the world by myself.
For Bethesda to explicitly
not do one of the things
they do best dampening
my expectations for the game dramatically.
And when it came out I
became clear this refusal
to play to Bethesda's own
strengths would turn out
to be the entire core philosophy
of their shit awful product.
♪ Country roads ♪
- [Jim] Fallout 76 was
released on November 14th 2018
and it was the utter fucking pits.
A bad idea, executed
badly, Bethesda had managed
to strip away every single
thing that made their games
the critical darlings they'd
been up until that point.
Its not that the concept
of multiplayer in Fallout
is inherently a bad idea
but Bethesda's concept
of what such a game should look like
was completely ridiculous.
Rather than to make a
genuine Fallout experience
with online elements, Bethesda instead
decided to take away engaging story lines,
take away the clever writing,
take away even basic NPCs and
settlements for gods sake.
Because they expected the players
to build it fall for them,
to be each others NPCs,
to make their own fun,
to make the video game.
And there's a major problem with that,
that's not how most players operate.
That and you would rather
hope that the game developers
would be the ones to develop the game,
not the people who
bought the bloody thing.
If you did find a player in
the West Virginian landscape
you'd find them doing what
you were trying to do.
Desperately searching for a
scrape of engaging game play
in baron, desolate, content
dry, wasteland of wasteland.
I certainly rarely got to
interact with any of them
and if I did it would be
to get shot at by them.
Because it was online, Fallout's
classic V.A.T.S system,
where the action pauses to allow for
specific locked on attacks
had to be completely retooled
and by retooled I do of
course mean utterly ruined.
It was basically an automatic
lock on feature in real time
and it didn't frickin' work.
Because enemies would around a lot
the percentile chance
to hit when locked on
was in a constant and dramatic flux.
Going from 90% chances to
hit, to 3% chances to hit
in less than one full
second at any given time.
It soon became apparent that using V.A.T.S
did more harm than good
and one had better
accuracy firing without it.
The problem with manual gun play however
was that Bethesda's first person combat
had always been a clumsy,
archaic, inaccurate mess
and classic V.A.T.S had
gone a long way to covering
just how clunky and mechanically stilted
the real time shooting was.
With a V.A.T.S that hurt
more than it helped,
the roughness, the shoddiness
of Bethesda's combat
was laid thoroughly bare.
Which again was Fallout 76's
in a problem in nutshell.
Bethesda has a lot of faults,
it's games are buggy as hell,
almost amateur hour at times.
It's assets often recycled
and it's mechanics consistently outdated.
But they were good at
making involving quests,
fun little townships in a
world people could easily
find themselves lost in.
All of that was gone with Fallout 76,
there were no towns, no characters,
no involving story lines, the
world was populated by robots
and any human characters
appeared via audio logs.
You got to retroactively
hear other characters
going on adventures without
really going on any yourself.
You were following in the
footsteps of what felt like
the actual Fallout
protagonists who'd been part
of what sounded like an
actual Fallout story.
I spent my first four
hours with Fallout 76
waiting for the game to start.
Because I'd avoided much of the games
pre release build on purpose I didn't know
I was stepping into a
Bethesda game that lacked
every positive trait a
Bethesda was supposed to have.
And the worse part was,
for everything Bethesda had torn away,
it replaced the missing
positives with nothing.
Total, fucking, nothing.
For all its hype, for all its investment
for all its promise, all Fallout
76 really turned out to be
was a bargain basement survival game.
Just another one, just
another survival game.
Several years after the survival
game boom had died down.
It was nothing but an empty world
with no actual point to it.
I spent hours looking
for the reason to play,
the justification for what
felt like pointless rambling.
I found myself asking, to what
ends am I playing Fallout 76?
But as the hours wore on and
the stakes neither raised
nor lowered I realized
the answer was nothing.
The game feature nothing more compelling
than picking up shit to build shit
and then picking up some more shit.
It was Rust with a license,
it was Minecraft without the Minecraft.
You know I spent those first four hours
looking for a town or a
city, I know stupid right?
Because again, I didn't know
the game lacked the things
I play Bethesda games for.
How foolish I felt when it
became clear that Fallout 76
had nothing.
That you're suppose to play
Fallout 76 for the sheer sake of
playing Fallout 76.
And if I'm gonna play a game
just for the same of playing it
I'm gonna play one that's
actually fucking fun.
I'm not gonna wait months,
years for your roadmap
to rollout, for you to actually bother
to put some content in Bethesda.
So many games have come out
between Fallout 76's release
and now and I'm busy playing those.
I'm not wasting my time,
I didn't waste my time
meandering your digital
oblivion, waiting for you
to finally give something
to care about, Todd.
And of course Bethesda being Bethesda
they had no demonstrable experience
or even basic competence with running
fallout 76's online features.
I'll go as far as to say
they had no fucking business
running an always online game like this.
It would frequently lock up and disconnect
and because Bethesda had no
clue what they were doing
your progress was not
guaranteed to by saved
should you be tossed
back into the main menu.
I frequently found myself having to replay
up to five minutes of
progress that got lost
whenever the connection failed.
And given how dire the experience was,
five minutes felt like an eternity,
especially if said five minutes
involved a lot of trashy combat.
To this day I still
cannot get my head around
how fucking neglectful this was.
As I explained Fallout
76 played to exactly none
of Bethesda's strengths,
having willfully scrapped
all of the things
that made their games beloved.
And this is where they really
screwed themselves over
because without the stuff
that usually protected them
from critical savaging,
their faults and their incompetencies
were laid bare for the world to see.
Without the writing, the atmosphere
and authenticity backing them out,
the lackluster visuals, sloppy gameplay
and endless parade of broken
bugs had no shield, no filter.
It was more obvious than ever.
When I first reviewed the
game I said it was mess
even by Bethesda's usual standards.
On reflection I wonder if that's true
or if it was just that Bethesda offered
so little of the good
stuff that the bad stuff
simply soaked into my
experience more readily.
Either way, for a
company with so many bugs
and breakages in their work as Bethesda,
taking away everything that
distracted from said problems
and replacing them with precisely nothing
remains one of the most
boneheaded, laughable
and pathetic things the
company has ever done.
And give their track record of inadequacy
that's really saying something.
Sitting at a 52 in Metacritic,
which absolutely appalling
by triple a game review standards.
And miserable 2.7 average
among user reviews,
it's safe to say that Fallout
76 was a critical flop
and this all before Bethesda
continued shitting bed
with it's post launch messes.
♪ Country road ♪
- [Jim] You know your
games off to a good start
when you discount the
price heavily after a week,
but with black Friday being
November 21st in 2018.
The critically maligned
Fallout 76 was marked down
by a whopping 33%, adding
instant fuel to the raging trash
fire that the game already
become over seven short days.
Since cutting the price
to $39 select retailers
Fallout 76 word see
another price reduction,
Cyber Monday, seeing the
game drop to $35 on Amazon.
It was amazingly
tasteless move considering
how bad the game was being received
and how many disappointed
players had already spent
60 bucks on the thing.
Once again Bethesda managed
to score an own goal
and highlight its own damn floors.
I mean what better way is
there to compound how badly
the games being received
than to rub lemon juice
in the eyes of people
how already bought it.
On December 16th the console
versions would be cut to
$30 on Amazon, Jesus fucking Christ.
Fallout 76 was either as
broken as any Bethesda game
or more broken with the
company acknowledging
frustrating issues,
but just as aggravating
was the games pathetically limited
weight and storage limits,
stuff they'd actually designed.
Seemingly designed for no other reason
than screw with players only 400 items,
later expanded to 600,
could be stored in a game predominately
about collecting and storing shit.
What's more, the players
carry capacity was a joke,
you'd get weighed down and slow to a crawl
after pretty much any collection run.
At its most extreme, it
was discovered bobby pins
weighed 60 times more in the
game than they do in real life.
Because of course.
Bobby pins would be realistically
weighted in a later patch,
but a patch that came after that
would make them heavy again.
Because wouldn't they?
Why wouldn't a new fix break the old fix,
classic Bethesda.
Todd Howard would later
note that somebody sent him
some physical bobby pins in
the mail with a note attached
that said, weigh these.
Another issue involved nukes,
one of the features promoted the most.
In Fallout 76 you can
launch nuclear missiles,
if you find the launch codes.
And because they were
such a heavily marketed
feature of the game, Fallout
76 had to absolutely nail them.
Naturally Bethesda fucked them up.
Firstly they were broken
within one bloody day,
as cheaters cracked the
launch codes required
and then released a sypher online
allowing others to do the same.
Four days later it was
discovered that firing
three nukes at once
would crash the server.
Yeah, that sounds about right.
Not long after, Fallout 76
celebrated New Year's Day
with a bug that completely
disabled the nukes by accident.
It was temporary, but
if perfect encapsulated
what a fuck up Bethesda really is.
It was like that notorious time in Skyrim
when the dragons were glitched out
and started flying backwards.
Dragons, one thing they
should of got right
more than anything else and
in true Bethesda fashion
they dropped the ball, pissed on the ball
and then tried to fuck the
ball in an abandoned quarry.
Stop marketing a single
feature in your games Bethesda,
you're gonna fuck 'em up.
But these shenanigans
paled in comparison to
that bag thing.
Yes, one of the most notorious
examples of blatant lines
and false advertising in
recent gaming history.
Fallout 76 $200 Power Armor Edition
promised a bevy of goodies
including a posh looking canvas bag.
Now, while many collectors
editions are over priced
pieces of garbage, this
was a whole new level.
Because despite clearly
advertising a canvas bag,
explicitly even using the word canvas.
What customers got
instead of this nice looking duffle,
was this nylon atrocity.
This wasn't just an item looking inferior
to the promo shots,
this was a literal bate
and switch situation.
Making matters worse, when
initially asked about it
customer support said,
"The bag show in the media
"was a prototype and was
too expensive to make.
"We aren't planning on
doing anything about it."
Oh no!
Bethesda would obviously
be forced to apologize
for that goof and it offered 500 Atoms,
Fallout 76's micro transaction
currency to angered players.
This was a pathetic amount,
sorry a bethetic amount.
Unable to buy much of
anything it felt more like
a exploitatively cynical way for Bethesda
to just get people invested
in its in game economy.
500 Atoms it turned our wasn't even enough
to buy the mail carrier skin
that had the in game version
of the canvas bag. (laughs)
Bethesda!
Todd, oh Todd, my sweet Todd.
Bethesda blamed the bag
situation on, (laughs)
I knew this would happen.
I'm sorry, I shouldn't
laugh at a disaster of game
but at some point you
start wondering if you're
recapping what happened with a game
or you're recapping an episode
of Faulty bloody Towers.
Bethesda blamed the big situation on
unavailability of materials,
which even if there
had been a mass canvas
shortage we'd never heard about
wouldn't excuse the false
advertising they continued
to utilize to sell the collectors edition.
Then it turns out that a different bag
made of canvas had been given
to press and influencers
and that turned out so well
for them, best PR move ever.
Eventually Bethesda would
offer a real recompense
for those who bough the
special edition under false
pretenses and yes, say it with me,
they managed to fuck even that up.
When players were encouraged
to register there complaints
with Bethesda net support a number of them
were accidentally granted access
to the support system itself.
Which showed them the
credit card information,
home address and emails of
others who'd submitted tickets.
Roughly 65 people had
their personal info leaked
within in a 45 minute
time span and just wow.
Fucking wow Bethesda.
These were already people you'd upset
by selling them a falsely
advertised product
and then you leaked their
info, well done chums.
Half a year later and
Bethesda had not replaced
the canvas bags as promised.
Only now, as I speak,
is the company finally
preparing to the ship them.
Presumably they'll arrive without a hitch
and look as advertised,
but knowing Bethesda
there's always a chance
they'll manage to mess it up.
Like inadvertently filling
the bags with burned dog bones
and spiders eggs before mailing them.
In between all this
Bethesda had to ban a player
for sustained homophobic harassment,
not their fault that this
pud fuck was doing that.
But the story itself wasn't
exactly sunshine and rainbows.
When is it when comes to Fallout 76?
After that whole mess Bethesda
started going back on its promise
that this shitty games
shitty premium store
would be cosmetic only.
The arrival of repair
kits which lets players,
well, repair their items,
was quickly lambasted
as pay to win mechanics.
Which, yeah they kinda were.
At any rate item derogation in Fallout 76
was a common aggravating problem,
armor and weapons ready to
fall apart all the time.
In offering premium repair kits
that didn't use up the players materials
Bethesda had done what many
slimy publishers like to do.
They sold a solution to a
problem they'd invented.
Bethesda itself decided
items should degrade
and at what rate they degradation occurs,
neither of which do anything to enhance
the actual gameplay, only stifle it.
On top of all that it flew
in the face of what Bethesda
on Pete Hines said when he said,
"The Atomic Shop is cosmetic stuff."
The advantage provided by
repair kits was only slight,
but it was no the less an advantage,
one that was being sold
on the so called cosmetic
store storefront.
'Cause they just couldn't
fucking help themselves.
All of which brings us to Todd Howard,
basically admitting he knew fallout 76
wasn't all that fucking
good in the first place.
♪ Country roads ♪
- Oh, we knew that going into this,
we knew it's not that right?
- Yeah.
- You could say,
look this isn't a game,
even from the beginning,
this is not gonna be like, you know,
high Metacritic game,
that's not what this is.
Given what it is.
And, but, we knew, we felt
strongly this is a game
we wanna play, this is
something we really wanna do
and all of the games like this,
whether it's us or somebody else,
you can go back and look at them.
There's a period once you
launch, it's not how you launch,
it's what it becomes and you know.
- [Jim] Yes, it's what
the game becomes Todd
and what has Fallout 76
become exactly, Todd?
A joke Todd?
A laughing stock Todd?
A product, Todd, over which Bethesda lied
on more than one occasion.
A game that had three price
cuts within it's first month,
that's what it became Todd.
That's what it became.
Fallout 76 was a multiplayer
component of Fallout 4
that was repackaged and
sold as its own shoddy,
unfinished nonsense because executives saw
how many people still play
Skyrim and they were upset
that Skyrim had no micro transactions
to sell to those people.
I mean that's basically what you implied.
- If you look at a Skyrim and
Fallout 4 and those things.
The amount of people that
play those games still is,
you can look up, it's staggering.
Millions and millions of people,
every month playing those games
and we have no touch point with them.
- Right.
- Right?
It's just like, we ship the
game, we do some mod stuff,
but here you go.
And 76 was also we need to
learn how to be engaging
and being able to update and
see what players are doing
and be more engaged in
that experience than zero.
Engaging, engaged, engaging,
engaging, engaging.
- Yeah, that's more or less it, right?
Because even you, even you, can't give up
on the allure of having a 24/7
connection to your players
that you can exploit for financial gain.
Because you Bethesda like every other,
two bit, sleaze bag corporation
is less interested in games
than you are in these services.
Because you are willing to
humiliate yourself over and over
if it means you can jump aboard
the live service bandwagon
which you're not even very good at
because you're more comedically imbecilic
than "Police Academy".
That, is, was and forever
will be Fallout 76's legacy,
that's what the game became.
It's no a video game,
it's a unofficial "Police Academy" sequel.
(Jim vocalizes music)
In preparation for today's postmortem
I went back to Fallout
76 so many months later.
And before I fired it up I
thought to myself, you know what?
Maybe they have made some
dramatic improvements
in all that time, since
November maybe they have done
some hard work and made
this game something special.
No, no, I was stunned
by how bad it still was.
Terrible AI, boring escort
missions and crap like that.
Bereft of the players that
are supposed to be there
making the content.
Visually hideous, lots of glitches
and things in the
environment just breaking
and not working correctly.
And this was all within the
first 20 minutes of playing.
To say nothing of things
like lag in the combat
where you shot something
and you think, is it dead?
And then a second or
two later it falls over
as if it's just remembered to be shot.
Terrible, an utter disaster.
And then, and then, and then,
Bethesda took to the stage
with a fittingly piss
colored golden shower
rendered on the screen behind
them for most of the time
and he got a rapturous
applause from a seemingly
quite drunk audience for announcing
such groundbreaking features
as NPCs and quest lines
and meaningful choices in a Fallout game.
(dramatic music)
(audience cheers)
- That's right, that's right.
- They got a round of
applause for saying NPCs
would be in a Fallout game
and that just says it all
doesn't it folks?
When you set the bar as low as they have,
getting an inch of the ground
looks like a giant leap
for mankind doesn't it.
Well, I see through it,
it's a load of bollocks.
What they've announced
is the game approaching
not even finished status, I
would say a started status
and they got themselves all of this.
All of this applause for doing
basic fucking Fallout gameplay.
NPCs getting a round of applause.
Quest lines and choices that
mean something, dialogue trees.
All of the shit that's been
in all of the other games,
but that was Bethesda's E3
conference over all wasn't it.
Announcing shit that they did years ago
as if it's something new.
Oh my God, dragons!
Dragons, in Elder Scrolls
Online! (Jim gobbles)
Elder Scrolls: Blades on the Switch!
Fuck off, fuck off.
Your game is bad and you are bad
and you should feel bad.
Thank god for me. (sighs)
You know, I had the pride
tie and the pride gloves
and everything, even
some rainblowy glasses.
But, green screen init.
So,
fuck my gay life.
♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah ♪
♪ Oh ♪
♪ Everybody's thinking 'bout me. ♪
