Tag: Bethesda

Gamestop Recalls Fallout 76 Helmet Due To Mold Exposure


You didn’t think the Fallout 76…fallout was over, did you? From broken promises to broken mechanics, broken merchandise, and overall just an embarrassment to Bethesda, Fallout 76 continues its trek down “how can this get worse” avenue with the latest news this week. The Consumer Product Safety Commission has posted a recall notice for Fallout 76’s T-51b Power Armor helmet. Forget a low quality canvas bag, how about a $150 helmet that could (theoretically) kill you?

Yes, Gamestop is recalling the T-51b collector power armor helmet due to concerns of mold being present in the fabric inserts.

“Mold can be present on the fabric insert inside the helmet, posing a risk of respiratory or other infections in individuals with compromised immune systems, damaged lungs or an allergy to mold.”

The CPSC notes that there have been no reported incidents/injuries related to the product at this time. Owners of the helmet are being urged to stop playing with it and immediately call Gamestop in order to procure a refund. Gamestop is apparently reaching out to all known customers so you might be getting a phone call within the next couple of weeks.

Source: CPSC

[NM] Bethesda Introduces More Non-Cosmetic Cash Shop Items


It’s a new day, and that means another opportunity for Bethesda to remind us that the company can’t be trusted. The latest update that hit live servers just yesterday (July 16) introduces a new item to the Fallout 76 cash shop: Scrap kits.

Yes, scrap kits. Another instance of Bethesda selling items for real money in order to fix an inconvenience that they purposely added into the game in order to set up the player base to later spend real money. As the official website states:

“Scrap Kits are new one-time use items that you can use to scrap all the junk you’re currently carrying and immediately deliver the resulting components to your Stash. They can be used anytime, anywhere, without needing to visit a workbench or your Stash. You can unlock Scrap Kits in the Atomic Shop using the Atoms you’ve purchased or those you’ve earned by completing in-game Challenges. Upon purchasing Scrap Kits, you will be able to select which of your characters you’d like to receive them. Any Kits you own will appear under the Misc. tab in your Pip-Boy and can be activated there. Upon using a Scrap Kit, it will be consumed.”

And just to remind everyone, I have included a link to the Gamestop article where Pete Hines states that the Fallout atomic shop would be cosmetic stuff.

“All the content we ever put out for Fallout 76–all the DLC, all the post-launch stuff–is going to be free. That’s important. And to say, the Atomic shop is cosmetic stuff. To make sure folks understand–look there’s a line. There are people who have crossed it, but we’re going to stay on the right side of it in terms of the things you can spend money on and how this stuff works and what you’re getting for your $60,” Hines said. “That you know, when they put out new content or features or whatever, I’m getting that stuff for free. That feels right.”

The update comes alongside the addition of a greenhouse building that players can purchase and plop down, one that does not actually allow you to grow plants inside of it.

More Fallout coverage as it appears.

Mobility: Blades Changes Silver Chests


The Elder Scrolls Blades has received an update. As revealed today, the mobile spinoff of the immensely popular role playing game series will see some much requested balances made to the chests and how they are unlocked. The silver chests will now take one hour to open instead of the previous three, and the game will now ask for confirmation before spending more than 11 gems to open a box.

The full list of changes is below:

  • Silver Chests! These now only take one hour to open, or 12 Gems. (They were 3 hours and 36 gems before).
  • Wood Chests and Elder Chests have been added to Job rewards. Elder Chests are extremely rare, but possible.
  • Silver Chests no longer appear in the Abyss.
  • Adjusted Abyss floors below your level to reward more experience points.
  • Added confirmation for any Gem use above 11, so you don’t accidentally use higher amounts.

Source: Blades

Mobility: Elder Scrolls Blades, the Disappointment I’d Never Hoped For


Have you ever looked at The Elder Scrolls and thought to yourself; “Self, I want to play more Elder Scrolls, but this quality of work is just too high. Why can’t Bethesda deliver a shoddy, low quality version on my phone that isn’t really fun to play and is chock full of predatory microtransactions?” If you’ve ever thought this, boy do I have the product for you. It’s called Elder Scrolls: Blades, and it just dropped on the mobile store for the low low price of zero dollars and zero cents. It’s also in early access, because Bethesda is an independent company who has yet to make a hit game, and needs the money to continue “development.” It is absolutely not a sign of low confidence in their product.

Alright, now that the hyperbole is out of the way, I’ve had a fair amount of time to play through The Elder Scrolls: Blades and I have come off of it with the idea that the game is…about as bad as you’d expect. Just as an early start, you will not find much enjoyment in Blades if you absolutely need any of the following in order to consider playing:

  1. A full-fledged Elder Scrolls experience.
  2. A full-fledged RPG.
  3. A half-assed RPG.
  4. A game without microtransactions.
  5. A game without loot boxes.
  6. A game with movement during combat.
  7. A game with stealth
  8. A game with ranged combat
  9. A game with meaningful interactions with the world.
  10. A game with any interaction with the world.

Elder Scrolls Blades follows none other than the Blades. Once hired to guard the Emperor, and then in the service of the Dragonborn, the Blades are no more. You return back to your village to find it a smouldering ruin, possibly because some group of mercenaries came and burned it down but more likely because the village idiot left the oven on and wants an easy scapegoat so homeowners insurance doesn’t deny a payout. As the designated player character, it is your job to figure out who tasked the village idiot with cooking a hot pocket and why nobody was supervising him at the time of the incident.

Let’s start by talking about people who can immediately go find something else to do with their time. If you came into this game thinking “boy, I’d love to create a stealthy assassin,” I’ll disappoint you now and let you know that’s not possible. In the time since the Oblivion crisis, biology in Tamriel has undergone a drastic change. Crouching is no longer possible, as is moving your body around while engaged in combat, or jumping, or traversing terrain. The world has suffered a crunch and has essentially become one very long corridor. The bows and arrows, much like the crossbows from Morrowind and Dawguard, were turned into a pyre to burn Bethesda’s respect for their customer’s time and money. Similarly, those of you who want to play a dedicated mage can walk off as well, you’re not welcome here.

This leads to what I like to call “unnecessary frustration,” like when fighting the myriad of beasts whose attack pattern is to stand just out of your range and then attack and then go back. Maybe it’s my lack of depth perception but the game doesn’t really seem to be good at figuring out distance with how close enemies are and you miss more than you’d think and you want to walk two feet forward to attack but you can’t because the game firmly roots you to the ground and that’s not annoying at all. It also doesn’t remind you how much the lack of ranged weaponry really degrades the experience in this game.

Elder Scrolls: Blades is exactly what you would expect from a mobile spinoff of a well loved franchise; an unreasonable facsimile that takes the original recipe, replaces most of the ingredients with water, and then expects you to pay over the course of the meal an approximate three thousand percent premium over the original piece. And my contempt of the title isn’t just warranted by Todd Howard, the most prolific compulsive liar in the games industry next to Peter Molyneux and the guy who with a straight face told the world that Blades was a genuine Elder Scrolls experience. It’s also fueled by members of the media waxing poetic about how quaint and charming Blades is because the armory vendor lets you sell items and salvage them all in one space. This truly is Elder Scrolls.

But truly nothing says insulting intelligence quite like the fact that Blades introduces a guiding light letting you know where to go for your objective. Yes, this game has so little faith in your ability to move that it will guide you down a single path corridor like an infant. Combat in Blades is a matter of holding down the screen to attack and trying to line up the inner circle with the outer circle so you can get a more powerful attack. You can also block enemy attacks. Over the course of leveling up, you’ll add more abilities to your little bar, but it’s basically the same from start to finish.

Combat is initiated by getting an enemy’s attention and having them approach you, thus changing the interface to combat mode. As I said earlier, you can’t move in combat mode so dodging attacks is out of the question.

Let’s talk about the loot boxes because Blades has these out the wazoo and they are so much worse than in other games. As you travel through the environment you’ll pick up wooden chests which are the bare essentials of life in Blades. For every mission you finish, you’ll generally receive a silver chest (sometimes gold) and occasionally a few gems if it’s a story mission. It’s possible to obtain gems during missions themselves but they are rare and drop one at a time. A wooden chest takes five seconds to open and generally contains miniscule amounts of building materials. The silver chest takes three hours to open and contains better building/crafting materials and maybe some cheap weapons/armor, and the gold chests take six hours to open and contain better stuff than you’ll find in the lower chests (naturally).

The problem that Blades has that players will figure out early on is that the game is very cheap on dropping equipment naturally. I think in the numerous hours that I have played that maybe one weapon has dropped that wasn’t from a chest in the entirety, and that weapon may have actually been from a chest. Remember the days of killing guys and having to sort through their inventory because they were carrying full sets of gear? Those days are over, loser. If you want to get decent gear, you’re going to have to wait like the plebian you are or dish out some hard cash to open those boxes faster.

A gem is worth roughly $1.2 cents USD, going by the value that the base cost of a pouch of gems being $1.99 for 160 gems. A golden chest (unlocked) costs 250 gems ($3) and contains 1400-1700 gold, 1 uncommon, 1 uncommon or rare (75-25% split), 1-3 stacks of materials, 50% chance of potions, 50% chance of jewel or rare ingot, and a whopping .1% chance at a bonus artifact. The Elder Chest at 750 gems ($9) gives 3500-4300 gold, 1 epic, 1 extra rare/epic (90-10% split), 1-5 stacks of materials, 2-6 potions, 2-3 scrolls of revival, 3-9 jewels or rare ingots, and a whopping 1% chance of a bonus artifact. Then we have the legendary chest which, at 2,500 gems ($30) offers a whole 5% chance at a bonus legendary artifact.

Elder Scrolls Blades feels like going to a restaurant and having the waiter say “we don’t have root beer, but we do have Dr. Pepper.” Really it’s like going to a restaurant and ordering a root beer only for the waiter to slam a twenty year old can of Slice on the table. This isn’t what I ordered, it isn’t even close to what I wanted, and you can almost see the toxic fumes coming out of the can.

Another thing I’d like to note is that I went ahead and bought the legendary sword that was up for grabs in the first week for $10. In all the time since I bought the sword, nothing that I have found in crates has been even halfway as powerful which should hammer home how hard Bethesda is going in on the pay to win for this title.

Otherwise I have no opinions on the game.

Bethesda’s Support Website Leaks Personal Information


Fallout 76: It’s a game that was afforded maybe two hours of good press before Bethesda drove it straight into a brick wall.

Bethesda’s games are notoriously buggy, but evidently not even their support system can escape the company curse. Such is the story of Reddit user Jessiepie who found her account suddenly able to view the support tickets of other users including their email addresses, home addresses, receipts, credit card details, and every problem that they are currently having with Fallout 76 and more specifically receiving their replacement canvas bag.

For their part, Bethesda claims that the issue has been resolved. As one user on the forums put it,

“That’s a shocking departure from their usual meticulous attention to bug-free systems. “

[Review] Fallout 76 Is A Roaring Dumpster Fire


For all intent and purpose, Fallout 76 could have billed itself as Fallout 4 With Multiplayer, and people would be knocking down the walls to get in. Set in Appalachia, West Virginia, Fallout 76 is a Frankenstein’s Monster of various systems coming together in the hopes of providing an interesting, engaging experience. In reality, Bethesda pushed out a title that highlights the worst of its franchise while mostly ignoring what Fallout has always done best.

Fallout 76 is an open world multiplayer sandbox. As has become a series staple, you the player are a vault dweller who at the start of the game finds themselves pushed into the post-apocalyptic wasteland to do mostly whatever you want. The meat and potatoes of the game sits with the various quests that players will take on from letters, holotapes, and robots that dot the land.

Bethesda’s decision to remove all of the NPCs and replace them with holotapes and robots has been called ambitious and it absolutely is in the same sense that being too cheap and lazy to shrinkwrap my windows is an ambitious take on the Buffalo cold winters. It feels like a natural conclusion to assume that Bethesda’s lack of human NPCs has less to do with immersive storytelling and more to do with not wanting to spend the time and resources on drawing, building, and animating those characters, preferring instead to recycle Mr. Handy models and stationary computers.

Todd Howard stated that Fallout 76 is Bethesda’s most ambitious project, and I can’t for the life of me find out where all that extra work went. Visually, the game looks worse than Fallout 4, there are clearly less resources put into animating characters and scenes that might be found in a Fallout game. The assets are 99% recycled from previous Fallout games, evidence has come to light that enemies like the Scorchbeast had their AI code copied and pasted from Skyrim’s dragons, and the only thing new to the game seems to be the occasionally functioning online play.

By all counts, Fallout 76 would be an impressive undertaking by a more competent group of programmers. Unfortunately, Bethesda is not that group. Perhaps analogous to the ultimate demise of Telltale Games, a company that refused to fix its aging, janky engine and ultimately paid the price for it, Fallout 76 appears to be floundering in a market where Bethesda previously seemed impervious to releasing a title that didn’t easily bring in more revenue than the GDP of a small country. It’s telling how seriously Bethesda is taking Fallout 76’s apparently disappointing performance, because they’ve actually started/committed to fixing bugs that have been present in the engine for several titles now.

Fallout 76 is a landscape of wonderfully, shall we say, unique bugs. My character occasionally gives off a grunt like they’re being hit when nobody is around, like they’ve stubbed their toe but without taking any damage. I was forced to quit the game on several occasions because the depth of field bugged out causing the game to look nauseatingly blurry when walking around. I’ve hit points where my character will holster and then refuse to pull out whatever weapon I have equipped, where weapons/grenades get randomly unequipped, and where my character will simply not attack. Then of course there’s the building pop-in, where entire buildings will just not render and take minutes to show up. This would be unacceptable in an alpha release, but Fallout 76 wants sixty bucks for this amateur showing.

Todd Howard stated that you would never see a server for Fallout 76, and you won’t…unless of course you happen to have the bad luck of being placed on an unstable server and find yourself hopelessly hacking, whacking, and smacking against enemies that refuse to acknowledge your hits or find yourself smashing that play button only for the game to repeatedly tell you that there are no worlds available. They, on the other hand, have absolutely no trouble landing hits on your character in spite of any server lag. You may also acknowledge the server when, for instance, you fail a timed mission because the node you were required to hit simply didn’t feel like responding in time.

Sharing a world with other players is both a godsend and a curse upon Fallout’s gameplay. On one hand, Bethesda shakes up the formula by allowing people to tackle towns of scorched, mutants, or super mutants with friends and strangers. On the other hand they risk trivializing certain elements of the game as while player acts are constant, loot is not.

In my experience, this led to numerous incidences where otherwise high level safes or locked doors were wide open, allowing anyone to loot their delicious innards just because someone at some prior point came through the same building. Bethesda loves adding quests into their games that require players to navigate buildings only to provide an easy way out once they find the macguffin. Because the door then does not shut for an indeterminate amount of time, anyone else taking on the same mission can simply walk in and finish the quest in a snap. This also means entering buildings with the goal of finding a mission item or to kill a specific NPC, only to find your target has already been taken by another player at some unspecified time. With the time it takes them to respawn, you’re honestly better off just going and doing something else.

Then there’s the fact that a high level character can really ruin your experience. Enemies in most areas will automatically scale to the highest level player nearby, which means that if you the level 10 player are rolling around Grafton, you’re going to encounter generally level 10-15 super mutants. If Remy Remington and his clan of level 60+ hunters decides to take a stroll through the city, however, you’re suddenly going to find yourself getting steamrolled by level 60+ super mutants with crazy stats and buffs, making the area completely unplayable until those players leave.

The worst part about playing Fallout 76 is the knowledge that there is something fun hidden under all of the technical issues. I like the world building elements like how every pack of perk cards comes with a joke and a stick of gum, or the various stories involving the war. Bethesda can do a lot with this game as an online living world and they plan to do so with in-game events, opening new vaults in further expansions, etc. If Bethesda can fix the more glaring bugs and create some semblance of an ongoing story that updates every so often, that would be great.

I’d like to see a few of the prior Fallout staples come back into Fallout 76, like the ability to combine identical weapons in order to repair them. Weapons and especially armor break far too damn fast in this game, and you’re constantly on the lookout for items to make adhesive because if you’re like me you’ll be consistently out of it due to how much goes into repairing each piece of gear. I’d like bobble heads to be items that offer permanent bonuses for having them in your inventory, even if that means they have to be scaled down a bit, rather than consumables that offer minor enhancements for just a couple of minutes.

I haven’t engaged in any PvP since launch simply for the fact that the feature is mostly vestigial and few people outside of hackers even use it, and the same goes for VATS. In terms of player vs player combat, Bethesda should just remove their current system and replace it with one for consensual duels and clan wars. Attacking someone in Fallout 76 is pointless since, unless they attack back, you can expend your inventory worth of ammunition and do enough damage to be nullified with a single stimpack. VATS on the other hand is a barely functioning mess that winds up being less accurate than simply aiming and firing your weapon. Odds are you will completely ignore both of these features in your time playing Fallout 76.

And I haven’t talked much about the story because frankly I can’t find much attachment to it. There are no human NPCs in Fallout 76, this much has been made obvious, but Bethesda for some reason decided to tie a number of missions to radio distress calls that you need to respond to. The implication of course is that you’ll rescue someone, but you already know that whatever you come across is going to be dead, transformed into a ghoul, or a robot. That removes a fair amount of the suspense and interest. Otherwise questing rolls down to hearing about the lives of people who have lived before you, and are already dead or moved out of the area. It’s interesting, but only to an extent.

If Fallout 76 is the most ambitious project that Bethesda has ever worked on, well a lot of people need to be fired for sheer incompetence. The state that this game is in is one that wouldn’t be acceptable for an indie developer early access launch, let alone a AAA developer with more money than God selling it for $60. I’m sure there are plenty of people who can find enjoyment out of the game as it is, but I’m not one of those people.

Verdict: 1/5 – Fallout 76 is an exercise in frustration that only gets worse the longer you play. What little redeeming qualities that the game has are overshadowed by crashing servers, crashing clients, lazy coding, persistent bugs, and other technical issues.

Bethesda Pulls Bait And Switch On Fallout 76 Canvas Bag


Fallout 76 is just two weeks out of launch but it doesn’t look like the controversies are going to burn out any time soon. In addition to the ongoing server issues, players this week began raising complaints in regards to an alleged bait and switch regarding the game’s collector’s edition.

Put on the market for $200, the Fallout 76 collector’s edition includes the game, a lifesize power armor helmet, figurines, a map, and exclusive in-game items. The collector’s edition also advertised itself as including a canvas duffel bag to keep the aforementioned helmet safe and sound.

Unfortunately it turns out that players are not receiving the canvas duffel bag but instead found a lower quality nylon bag. One player contacted Bethesda customer support only to receive a response that the canvas bag was a prototype that was found to be “too expensive to make” and that Bethesda wasn’t planning to do anything about it.

Bethesda followed up today by apologizing and announcing that the company would be offering 500 atoms as compensation to players disappointed with the falsely advertised product. 500 atoms translates to roughly $5 worth of in-game currency.

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[Column] Fallout 76’s Black Friday Sale Is A Warning Against Pre-Orders


Gamers were angry when Square Enix put Shadow of the Tomb Raider on sale for 34% off just a month after launch. They were just as angry when Bethesda knocked 50% off of Wolfenstein II a month after it hit store shelves.

Boy will/should they be livid now.

Fallout 76 launched eight days ago and Bethesda has thanked their loyal fans by giving everyone else a heavily reduced price. The few loyal fans, anyhow, since if the game’s UK sales figures are any indication there aren’t many of them left. 80% down over Fallout 4? Ouch. Not even two weeks after launch, Fallout 76 has been slashed a mean 33% off down to $40.

And critics aren’t going easy on the game either. The Playstation 4 version currently stands with a 50 average critic rating on Metacritic, the PC version at 55, and the Xbox One at 50.

It’s worth noting that this is a publisher-led sale, meaning Best Buy, Gamestop, and Amazon didn’t just unilateraily decide to drop their prices for Black Friday. If you purchased the game from one of those sources, it might be worth getting in touch with customer service to see if you can get a price match.

Best Buy will match a lower price within 15 days of purchase, which would cover early adopters. For Gamestop that is at the store’s discretion.

For everyone else, may this be another warning against early adoption. You might view your early sale as a sign of loyalty to Bethesda, but they sure don’t view the same about you.

Target Probably Leaked Bethesda Game of Thrones Title


Is Bethesda working on a Game of Thrones title? I’ll never tell, but Target apparently will. Target currently has a page listing for Bethesda: Game of Thrones, which may or may not be leaking an as-of-yet unannounced title of the same name by the same developer. There are two known Game of Thrones titles in the works: Season two of the Telltale series, an MMO being created by Bigpoint, however Bethesda has not yet talked about developing or publishing a game based off of the popular HBO series.

There has been no comment by Bethesda as of yet.

PSA: Brink Is Now Free To Play on Steam


In a rather surprising move, Bethesda Softworks has made first person shooter Brink free to play on Steam. Anyone can play the title without dropping a dime, however there is about $4 worth of DLC content.

Bethesda launched Brink in 2011, developed by Splash Damage, creators of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. The game was not well received, with critics pointing that the game felt incomplete and rushed to launch. On Steam, the game was virtually abandoned by the playerbase shortly after launch, and hasn’t broken 100 players on average since July 2012.

Speculation is running rampant that the free to play shift, especially after so many years of neglect, may be Bethesda or Splash Damage attempting to gauge interest in the IP. The game was not updated with any new monetization schemes, so players can sleep well knowing that this appears to be just a simple removal of the price tag.

Brink currently carries a 61% “mixed” approval rating on Steam.

(Source: Steam)