Fallout 76 - UK Sales down by 82.4% compared to Fallout 4 - Sensationalist Headlines

Are we assuming the whole no NPC's is some type of engine limitation they couldn't solve? I can't understand why they would make a conscious choice to not have any life in the game besides holotapes. You could have spread out other characters that were in the vault instead and are just your story vectors for any other stuff going on in the area. I get why they wanted to say no humans were out surviving when this vault opened but i feel like there must be some other limitation that caused them to do that. Do you talk to people on the radio or is every voice just a prerecorded holotape? Maybe i'm just giving beth too much credit by saying it wasn't necessarily their choice. But im also not excusing using an engine that doesn't work for their idea if thats what they wanted to do.

Prolly didn't help to come out right after RDR2 as well. Few people can afford two $60 games in one month.

A Fallout game could be perfectly done with the GTA/RDR2 engine, you could even add vehicles, something that many players have wanted for ages and couldn't be done for engine limitations. What game has a bigger map? Because the only reason I could see them to stick to the Gamebryo engine would be if changing the engine would mean having way smaller maps.

Yes, a few headlines are erroneously reporting that HITMAN 2 sales are down 90% from Absolution. However that's a comparison of physical sales and Absolution likely didn't have such a presence on the digital market. Reception for it seems to be great so hopefully the sales will follow, but with that said it's only managed 8,238 players today on Steam.

I've thought about it and one of the theories I've come up with is that they didn't want to tackle the challenges of how to handle having their usual towns with many friendly npcs with shops, homes, and schedules with 32 players running around who could pull all kinds of shit like steal things or attempt to murder them while other people are trying to complete quests or shop. Maybe they felt trying to deal with all that was too much effort and were unsatisfied with simplifying their handling of NPCs down to them just standing in one place and being untouchable. A more optimistic take is that it was a deliberate design decision to place more emphasis on player interaction and CAMP creation like with Fallout 4 lacking a lot of towns to leave space for player created settlements. But even then the current handling of camps is so weird and ephemeral I can't imagine someone making anything more than a shed with water purifiers for fear of having it forcefully uprooted the next time they log in. Honestly I'm not sure what to make of a lot of the weird decisions they made with this game, though I'm leaning towards the former since that feels more in line with how slapdash 76 feels.

At least the lore they wrote around it isn't Shaun levels of terrible. It's actually passable and interesting, great voice acting too.

That just makes me sad that it's in this game that I don't want to buy because of it being a pseudo MMO, in a format where you can't really appreciate it, and that they couldn't manage to have decent writing in Fallout 4.

The term 'RPG' is very broad. I don't think FO3 or FO4 are bad RPGs, really, although there are some elements in FO4's story that didn't feel very RPG-like, granted. FO76 not having NPCs is almost all of the reason I'd never buy it, even if they fix the bugs.

Fallout 1, 2 and NV were tested and done as a tabletop campaign before they were games. They're intrinsically tied to Pen and Paper RPGs which F4 threw out much too the detriment of the story, lore consistency and replayability.

They had zero writing editors as well, and the lead writer has a background in gameplay, not writing.

Not to mention that over-time sales for Absolution were so dogshit and the game's development cost so much it managed to blackhole itself. It sold well in physical and pre-orders but ultimately made dick all money. I should note that 8,238 players for a Hitman game, a week after release, is a very good retention rate, and a lot of people play in bursts and come back for ET's.

Honestly, you should have at least one game designer on the writing team, but you should have actual writers and editors as well.

just make a fallout game in the style of borderlands, with co-op open worldness and single player as a viable option instead of this mess

I'll agree with you in regards to FO3 but FO4 is an RPG in name only imo.

I was barely aware it was even released. With all the marketing noise from other games, I've totally missed it.

Which country allows to cause mayhem like this in gamestop and walk out?

I thought it was going to be Fallout + Rust styled game but it's... not even Fallout... not very much freedom in the game or depth to characters/quests.