Fallout 76 B.E.T.A. and released game

This game is several things right now (Nov 1 2018):

1) multi-player, which I do not do.
2) Aggravating, which I do not like.

I'm playing on the Xbox, a 1X, on a 4K TV, so it looks beautiful. Far more detail that F4/etc, and apparently a much larger map.

It really seems like you MUST do it as part of a team, because what happens a lot is that you get swarmed by opponents 10 at a time--by yourself you are dead fast. And while you can respawn, you dropped all your "junk" at the death place. You can go back and get it, which is good. But the swarms are aggravating.

It is like playing survival-mode F4. I did not do that mode--the excessive focus on food/water/rads is aggravating--you spend way too much time worrying about them. I don't personally burn through food and water anywhere near that fast, IRL, so it's quite aggravating here.

The card-based "perks" system is aggravating. The Skyrim approach to all this is best; F4 is ok...but it really should be the case that you get better at lockpicking by doing more lockpicking, not by finding a perk card.

You can do PvP if you want, or you can turn that off. Which is good, or the aggravation of having others attack you would lead to servers all being populated by assholes who go around killing newbies.

As it's the Beta, there are problems. One of the worst is that there is a serious issue about clipping. More than once I have found myself "inside" an opponent, that is doing melee hits on me, and because I'm inside it, I can't even see it, so I can't shoot, but I can't even know that it's there.

Do I recommend this game? Well, no, I guess I don't. Not yet. When it's $20. It needs to become less aggravating. Am I going to continue to play? Well, yeah, but not a lot. Can't really play at home, don't have enough bandwidth--or a 4K--but of course the worst thing about multi-player is how to you put together a team? Clans? Not interested even slightly. So if you play solo some, and team some, your team is going to be level-lopsided. That said, it does feel better than ESO; I have that, may have played 4 hours. It wasn't interesting. Only paid $10, not sure it's worth even that. ESO seems very weighted towards teams, too.

Events are weird things. Every so often, in various places, there's an "event", like X is attacking Y, help out for 20 minutes. Morgantown Airport has one, where five waves of "scorched" attack. You kill all scorched in all five waves, in the time limit, you get goodies, and there's a large goodie-box dropped on you. I did this battle once with a friend, and bumped into it solo...turns out if you don't participate, it times out, there's only the first wave, and they stand around being stupid.

You have a portable "C.A.M.P." that is a "base" location. You can build walls, crafting stations, etc. In fact, you really kinda need to. But it's portable, so if you DON'T build stuff, you can relocate the camp.

Excess weight doesn't slow you down, but it takes Action Points to run. Power armor is just like F4: there's a frame, takes fusion cores to run it, and you can eventually put armor pieces on it. I have seen some power armor crafting frames, but no armor, although I know of a place where it does spawn, because friend got it there. Not really that useful unless you are able to find/make fusion cores. In F4 I have approx 100 cores, perked them up to double-duration, and I use PA non-stop. In F76, not clear that you EVER use it.

As much as anything, F76 is about finding or creating useful loot. Occasionally you do find really interesting things: I have a piece of armor that does health regen--I love that stuff.

I think the BETA agreement is that I don't publish anything about the game until it's officially released, in a couple of weeks. So this waits until after that.

Have seen critters attack each other; saw a mirelurk fighting some rats today. Robots fight each other, too. This is good; it can't be true that all the opponents are friendly towards each other. One of the robot varieties is rather much like a headcrab, all jumpy and bitey.

Apparently there are giant bats that look like dragons that somehow create[d] the scorched. A swarm is scorched is aggravating, but they carry guns and ammo. (OK, that giant bat is the ScorchBeast, L50).

Not enough merchants, so you probably do more scrapping than selling.

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Released game

Not enough merchants. For sure. Altho I did bump into an L50 Super Mutant wandering Merchant named Grahm; he's friendly, you can trade/sell. Saw him getting attacked by the other SMs at Grafton Steel and doing nothing. Eventually he "woke up" and beat the snot out of them (they were L10, so there was no way it was going to go well for them).

Have found things to be glitchy. The released game seems to have more trouble than the BETA; I would bet that is server issues related to the sudden large increase in players.

It has "crashed out to desktop" on me several times, leading to the conclusion that the BETA was more stable. Well, the server load was less.

Found an L50 Queen Mirelurk. And a L40 "glowing one" protecting a loot cache crate.

A weird thing I've experienced a couple times: some actions suddenly cause the respawn of a batch of opponents. Right next to you. Which then kill you fast.

The weapon swapping UI is terrible. FO4 did ok with this. FO76 is bad. They need to change to the FO4 approach.

You can play OK by yourself. You will want to be careful and stealthy if you do, there are plenty of places where you can get unexpectedly overwhelmed by a crowd.

I don't think the ability to have a "Permanent CAMP" is going to work. Today I wandered past someone's camp...if that is permanent in all map/world instances, one of these days the entire map will be filled with CAMPs. How could it not? Imagine 100 thousand players, each makes a permanent CAMP, that will dominate the landscape as far as the eye can see.

Power armor shows up here/there randomly. You'll find it before too long. I have a frame, have seen several others (which is nifty because you can take the fusion core from each one, and they have had a couple of other pieces of armor...Armor that I can't use yet, but I do have T46 (L25) and T51 (L30) armor pieces.

This is a survival game. You have to manage your food, water, rads all the time. This is really mostly annoying, because you can find enough stuff to drink and eat that there's more or less zero value to having to craft it, or be extra careful about what you're doing here/there. It interrupts game flow.

I did find a piece of "regenerating leather armor" that I am wearing. It seems not to work in power armor? But I do like these items, they let you not have to use your stimpaks all the time. Sleeping works too, but I never do that--where would you be safe? (OK, your CAMP, if you built it in such a way that it was virtually inaccessible from the ground; seen this done...it of course violates physics and construction realities--in essence the weight of all walls/floors/etc is zero, but their strength is infinite...so you can build in a choke-point corridor killing field where a wad of turrets can shoot anything on an approach vector, because you control the vector)