Thanks for Convincing Me to Cancel My Fallout 76 Preorder

August 12, 2018 •

I just saw this Reddit post of a video talking about the upcoming Bethesda game, Fallout 76. Previously to seeing this video, I was looking forward to playing Fallout 76. I have owned and played every other Fallout game and enjoyed them immensely. But I just canceled my preorder of the game and will not be playing it because the designers made the decision to allow non-consensual PvP.

From the interview:

When you shoot someone, you do a little bit of damage … it’s like slapping someone in a bar.

The issue is when you don’t want to engage in it, right? Someone’s coming up to you and slapping you and slapping you and slapping you. Um, and you’re like, “I really don’t want to deal with this right now.” Um, we have a lot of ways you can get away from them, but we still like it where they do, if they keep going at it, they have the ability to kill you. Which sounds terrible. We like to turn that into a dramatic moment. So the player that kills someone that didn’t want to engage in [non-consensual PvP] … then becomes a “wanted murderer”.

So, there is no reward, you get no [money], you get no [experience points], you get nothing for becoming a wanted murderer except for the kind of social incentives people have online to be assholes. Which, evidently, there’s quite a few.

So here they’re admitting that they’re intentionally creating gameplay opportunities for people to literally be assholes.

They go on to explain the mechanism where they paint a target on the back of the “wanted murderer” for all the people that enjoy PvP, which is all well and good. But that still doesn’t prevent or even discourage people from engaging in non-consensual PvP. It just, once again, is a system that is designed to make people who don’t want to engage in PvP into content for people who do under the guise of “PvP creates risk”, all the while admitting they’re catering to “assholes”.

Thanks for saving me almost ninety dollars Bethesda: