This article originally ran under a different banner/website in June of 2019 and is now being here re-uploaded for purposes of convenience and consolidation. Please enjoy.
My loyal followers, imagine wandering a large barren desert. No water, no food in sight. The sun beating down causing the one bead of sweat dripping from your forehead to evaporate before it can even reach the ground. Your feet sink deep into the sand to the point where you wonder if they have become part of the desert. The weight continuing to pull you down deeper and deeper. You know to stop is to embrace the cold hand of death. So, you crawl on knowing that you can’t stop. Eventually, you see a small little tent with an oasis behind it. Hope at long last rushes through you. You continue crawling to it until you can see a hooded figure.
“Please, sir,” you gasp with your last breath, “water.”
“But of course,” replies the hooded figure, leaning down to reveal the greed in his eye, “We have a sale on the ‘Last Hope’ pack, only $19.99, including a cup of water from the oasis.”
This, my loyal followers, is how I view the crop of live services that has infested the games industry of late. While some, such as Fortnite and PUBG continue to be popular, it is no doubt that there are too many releases that are half-baked and void of content. From your Battlefield V to Sea of Thieves to Anthem, too many games are promising to be complete further down their road map. No other game was more guilty of this than Fallout 76.
On June 2, 2019, Bethesda game director, Todd Howard, interviewed with IGN where he admitted Bethesda knew they were shipping Fallout 76 unfinished:
“We knew we were going to have a lot of bumps. That’s a difficult development. A lot of new systems and things like that. Hey, we are going to try this new thing. Anytime you try something new like that, you’re going to have a lot of bumps. You know you’re going to get a lot of that’s not the game we wanted from you, but we still want to be someone how is trying new things. And that was a very difficult development on a game to get it where it was. And we were ready for the … you know. A lot of those difficulties ended up on the screen and we knew. Hey, look, this is not the type of game people expected from us and we are going to get some criticism from it. A lot of those, well-deserved criticisms.”
Is this what the games industry has become? Have we abandoned any sense of quality that we are willing to accept utter failures in the name of trying something new? My loyal followers, you can try something new and still produce a quality product. Take a close look at the Resident Evil series. Resident Evil 4 became a hit in the series when it moved away from the fixed camera angle in favor of a third-person camera. A camera angle that not only revolutionized the series but almost all third-person action games from that point on. When that was not enough for the series, Capcom burned the Resident Evil design philosophy to the ground. In the ashes, Resident Evil 7 emerged to strike fear with its first-person camera and Texas Chainsaw Massacre inspiration. Both Resident Evil 4 and 7 were able to rebuild the franchise without sacrificing quality as Fallout 76 did. No matter how long Bethesda continues on this bumpy road known as Fallout 76 it will never be considered a revolutionary title for the series as the recent Resident Evil games.
Todd doubles down on his ideology that shipping a mediocre game and patching it later is perfectly acceptable:
“All the games like this, whether it be us or someone else, and look at them. There is a period once you launch. It is not how you launch, it is what it becomes.”
This infamous fix it later culture created by No Man Sky is becoming much too common with live services. From Sea of Thieves to Anthem to Fallout 76, too many games are hoping to get your money now only for the game to be complete later down the line. More games are coming out with less and less content to the point where games may devolve into a blank empty map. Don’t worry though, the in-game store will definitely be complete upon release. Sure the game itself might not be ready, but I don’t think publishers will ever turn away recurring user spending. The lifeblood of the games industry and live services game.
I have always believed Bethesda created Fallout 76 cause either they weren’t intelligent to know why fans loved their games or too avarice to not get on the live service bandwagon. Well, thankfully Todd gives us some insight in that same IGN interview:
“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 it up. It is staggering. Millions and millions of people. Every month, playing those games, and we have no touchpoint with them. Right? We ship the game, we do some mod stuff but here you go. So [Fallout] 76 was also, we need to learn how to be engaging and being able to update and see how players are doing. Be more engaged in that experience and than zero.”
One could snicker at the thought of Bethesda not recognizing that people play Skyrim and Fallout 4 for an impeccable story and interesting characters absent in Fallout 76, but I don’t see this as Bethesda’s idiocracy. I believe this is an act of avarice. Bethesda would probably like nothing more than to have those Skyrim and Fallout 4 players playing Fallout 76. Flocking to their Atomic shop to spend eighteen dollars on a blue power armor skin. Don’t believe me? Remember when Bethesda attempted to introduce paid mods for Skyrim. Twice? Once working with Valve in 2015 and a second time with the Creation Club. The customer-friendly mask that Bethesda wears has been ripped off to reveal they are just as greedy as EA, Activision, or Ubisoft.
Too many games are being cobbled together to be tossed out the door. Too many games are just looking to launch so it can shove the game’s microtransactions into your face. Publishers want games with cult followings like Skyrim or Fallout 4, not to create a quality experience, but to increase the chances of hooking another whale to increase recurring user spending. The old gods have fallen to leave us in a world of endless sand with shady merchants selling survivor packs. All I can say is the video games industry is slowly but inevitably wandering to its own demise. The end is mostly nigh.
Source:
“Bethesda Knew Fallout 76 ‘Would Have Bumps’ – IGN Unfiltered.” IGN, 2 June 2019, www.ign.com/videos/2019/06/02/bethesda-knew-fallout-76-would-have-bumps-ign-unfiltered.