@thelostscribe: Here's the simplest way to explain the backlash. This game does almost nothing better than Fallout 4. And it does many, many things worse or not at all. Combat is worse, because VATS is basically broken. NPCs are gone which means that: Narrative is worse. Moral choices are gone. The stakes are gone. The ability to hear them talk about you is gone. Stealth is basically gone. Pickpocketing is gone. The New Vegas style conversation system *which should have been in fallout 4* is gone. Almost all the quests have to be fetch quests. We have nothing like the Silver Shroud quests, or the Pickman quest from fallout 4, or any of the great quests from the TES series. You know why? Because those quests required NPCs. The game world is live which means: Mods are gone. Waiting is gone. The UI is just the same, but it's impact is worse because the game won't stop while you're fighting with Bethesda's terrible menu. The bugs are more numerous than ever, and their impact is intensified because you can't just revert to an old save. Resting to regen health means you now watch your character sleep for a minute. The graphics are a little better than FO4, but they're not nearly 3 years better.
There's A LOT of reasons to hate this game.
But you're right that that doesn't explain everything. Because if it were just a bad game, people would meme it and then move on.
The issue is that people are fed up with/losing faith in Bethesda. They continue to make games with THE SAME problems over and over again. I could give you a list as long as my complaints about FO4. They've ignored fan pleas for an Obsidian-licensed Fallout. They continue to ignore the fan base's pleas for a new engine. They've announced, maybe 6 YEARS ahead of time, that they'll be using the same engine for TES6. Speaking of TES6, it's been 7 years and it's as many 6 years away still.
And now, they're tilting more and more towards the dark side. Remember paid mods? Where they got a 30% cut off modders work? Which they basically re-introduced as the "creation club"? And now they've got full-blown microtransactions in a 60 game. And let's not forget that time they refused to give out review codes until release day.
People have had it. They're tanking the metacritic score. Upvoting videos bashing this game. Flooding the comments section with vitriol. Telling their friends not to buy it. In part because the game sucks but in part because they want to send Bethesda a message loud and clear: This. Will. Not. Cut. It. Anymore.
@Barighm: I don't think so. The core problem is the game doesn't have an identity. It's not appealing to people who want a standard Bethesda experience because of it's lack of NPCs, non-fetch quests, choices, saving, mods, VATS and so on. It's not appealing to survival players because of the carebear centric PvP and the extremely low players density. The only people who are defending this are treating it like a co-op game, but co-op games don't retain a high enough player count to justify the investment in the total overhaul this game needs.
@ronthallsballs: That's not fake news, it's an honest mistake. Because Bethesda bundles all of their assets into archives, if they want to make a change to any file in an archive, the patch has to contain the entire archive. So, for example, if they have a textures archive that is 13 GB, and they realize they left out a texture for Nuka-Cola Diet, the patch will include a new 13.1 GB archive that includes all the old textures and their new Nuka-Cola Diet texture. It's a really inefficient way of handling things, especially for an always online game, but Bethesda, Bethesda Never Changes.
Anyway, what this means is that if each department squashes only a bug or two from the beta, they'll wind up replacing pretty much every file in the game.
So, games sites saw that the base game was 45 GB, saw that the patch was 54 GB and, without realizing how Bethesda games worked, concluded that the total size would be 45+54=99GB. They were uninformed, but you basically wouldn't know this unless you get way into modding. Most people don't know what the file structure of their favorite games is. Not fake news, just an understandable mistake.
@ronthallsballs: If by "summed up," you mean you went through and picked out the weakest and rarest complaints, then yes. But you used the term like someone who actually knows how to English you'd see the complaints are more like:
The story is boring. The world is lifeless. The gameplay is bad when it works and and it doesn't often work. The performance is garbage, which is especially galling given that this is not a pretty game.
In short, there are serious gripes about every major aspect of the game. Except the music. The music is pretty good.
@Mogan: Fallout's always been about the way all these disperate systems--including quests, combat, dialogue, stealth, free-range exploring, looting and a whole bunch more--all tied together. None of these systems are great in comparison to other alternatives, but they came bundled together in a way that was uniquely Bethesda. You can't strip a Bethesda game down to three or four parts (even if those are the best parts) and expect to have a game that works.
This game is basically DOA. It's super-telling that even it's defenders only defend it as fun with friends. But here's the thing: it's only fun with friends, until one of your friends gets bored and moves on. Then is less fun for the rest of your friends, and then it's pretty much dead. If the game doesn't work solo and if it doesn't work PvP, it's not going to last.
@mistertech: This is the EXACT problem with Co-op centric fallout. Co-op games don't have long tails, because as soon as someone gets bored, the whole team collapses. The games needs to be fun solo or else PvP-ing randos. Otherwise, it'll be dead before the first DLC.
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