400 LB Stash Box Limit
A new feature in Fallout 76 is the “Stash Box”: a personal storage container that’s only accessible by your character at a variety of locations throughout the world. Stash Boxes in Fallout 76 function just like Ender Chests in Minecraft, except for the problematic fact that they only have a 400lb limit currently in the BETA.
Calls to Bethesda to raise the storage limit of Stash Boxes is one of the most upvoted topics on the official Fallout 76 subreddit (even with the many duplicate posts). 400 pounds might sound like a lot but it adds up really quickly– even for a casual (non-hoarder) player who keeps only a few useful items and supplies on hand.
Stash Boxes fill up so fast because collecting lots and lots of things is a huge part of Fallout 76. You need to collect materials to build things, and you need to build things to collect materials– not to mention saving cool items you find until you’re the right level to use them. The stash limit is a serious bottleneck in a primary gameplay loop, and it makes a core mechanic of the game tedious and cumbersome.
Pete Hines (Bethesda’s senior VP of marketing) has given conflicting reports on whether the limit of the Stash Box in Fallout 76 will be increased come the full launch of the game. Mr. Hines has given both a definite yes and a definite maybe on Twitter, and his tweets are getting more and more inconclusive as we near November 14th.
Communication
My very first moments in Fallout 76 were filled with the unintentionally audible chatter of my nearby Vault-mate. It wasn’t endearing or atmosphere-building chatter either. It was a lot of cursing about the menus, and then more cursing about the player’s momentary inability to find the button he was looking for.
Fallout 76 has a proximity chat system, push to talk is not enabled by default, and a surprising number of people, it seems, have very little awareness of when their voice is being recorded. Making push-to-talk not the default mic setting is a small fix to expect before the full release (c’mon Bethesda you got this!), but there’s another issue with communication in Fallout 76.
Whenever you’re in a group, which is common, there is only group-chat– meaning you can no longer speak to any other players outside of your squad. In Fallout 76, teammates can often be spread far and wide across the map while still being able to interact, fast travel to each other, and access each other’s XP and quests– which is really cool! However, when you’re grouped, every other non-group player you encounter will not be able to communicate with you in any way (beyond the very limited emotes). One fix for this would be to add text chat! Hopefully we’ll see that, and more mic awareness with the final release.
Character Name
Your character’s appearance, including height and weight, can be changed at any point during Fallout 76 from the main menu. The name you decide on for your character cannot be changed later in the game. Makes sense. This is how RPGs typically work. However, whatever creative, meaningful, lore-inspired name you give your character will only be visible to you; and that Gamertag or Bethesda.net username you hurriedly decided upon will be how the multitudes of online denizens know you.
In many other MMOs, including Bethesda’s own Elder Scrolls Online, your character’s display name is decided by your own creativity, not your account settings. On top of how immersion-destroying it is to interact with “XxBigBUTTS99xX” in the middle of post-apocalyptic Appalachia, knowing half of everyone’s login credentials poses a legitimate security risk.
“What’s in a name…” you might be thinking (and quoting Shakespeare). Well for a lot of people, particularly RPG gamers, a name (especially one that’s in bright yellow capital letters above your head) is really important. And for Bethesda, this seems like a feasible fix for Fallout 76.
Display Customization
Some display changes are more useful for PC players, but more control and customization is beneficial for gamers on any system. Low-quality textures, buggy animations, and atrocious framerates are all things can be chucked into the pile of typical BETA problems that devs are working to clean up. But the inability to change the Blur, Depth of Field, Lens Flare, Brightness, and the Field of Vision that’s set on motion sickness, is hard to overlook.
Bethesda is really not doing themselves any favors by having a lot of fantastic gameplay in Fallout 76 trapped behind a blurry graphical soup that could be easily remedied. All of these things can be fixed before the full release on the 14th. Countless older games, including Skyrim, had many of these customization options available at launch.
We’re going to abstain from mentioning the V-Sync that’s locked to 60 FPS, or open the can of worms regarding the game’s engine being tied to framerate. That could be a whole ‘nother article in itself… and that’s a problem that doesn’t have much hope of being remedied in the next two weeks…
Squash the Big Fallout 76 Bugs
Bugs are expected in a beta, but some are larger and more game-breaking than others. We’ve already reported on a bug that YouTuber JuiceHead found that ended up scrapping his all-important Pip-Boy. There’s also the occurrence where none of the water in the entire map will load. And sometimes, if your Hunger level gets to the point of “Starvation”, you will never be able to fully recover– you’ll just be in a perpetual state of nearly starving to death (0 AP, and 5 HP) for the rest of the game.
Nevertheless, we’re still optimistic about the road ahead for Fallout 76. All of the problems in this article, despite being very large, and feeling very “game-breaking”, are all feasibly fixable in the relative short-term– which gives us hope for the future of a game we’ve had a lot of fun with so far.
Will all of these problems will be fixed by the 14th? We’re not so optimistic about that.
Published: Nov 6, 2018 09:52 am