RE: Fallout 76: How Not to Launch a Game
See, I played Fallout 4 and Skyrim pretty much on release, and modded them before doing so was officially supported, and I had a much better time with them. Heck, Skyrim on a laptop that technically barely skirted the minimum specs ran better than 76 does. With that said, I agree that it was unrealistic to expect a particularly smooth launch. Bethesda's ambitious in their design and content creation goals, and that ambition comes at the cost of some stability. However, 76 has some glaring stability and connectivity issues.
Part of the thing about dropping the price is that yeah, they probably have to do it to attract players (though if they manage to deliver on private servers with mod support and other features that are on a lot of peoples' wish lists they could get past some of this), but at the same time you don't ever want to drop so close to the release. Each world in 76 only has something like 20 players at a time, so player-on-player interaction is pretty rare. Even if their peak players dropped really low they wouldn't probably have an issue with keeping servers populated, which is the main reason why multiplayer games tend to drop prices close to release.
With Fallout 76, you have a big AAA experience that didn't come out feeling AAA and immediately went on sale. That's going to cause some real backlash from fans who preordered.
The first part was just a bit of a joke. :p
I'm just saying that the lowered Price isn't really something you can do anything about after a bad launch. It's not really a cause so much as a symptom, the result of a bad launch rather then a cause of it.
Yeah, it's going to make those that pre-ordered feel kind of shitty, but so is an online only game tanking and the servers going down. I really don't believe Bethesda would have lowered the price if they felt there was any other choice to keep the game going.
TBH, I wouldn't be surprised of Fallout 76 has some fall-back singleplayer code and if the private servers don't already exist in a beta format. They could keep the servers going for a long time on the preorders alone.
They really should have gone the Conan Exiles route, though, with public servers being an option in an ecosystem with private servers. Then people could have personalized experiences easily and be able to have PvE and PvP environments separated and so forth.
I mean, the whole launch and many of the decisions made are so bad that there are conspiracy theories that Bethesda tanked Fallout 76 on purpose to not have to do multiplayer anymore.
This is ironic, because I've played TES3MP, which is a kludged-together attempt to do Fallout 76 for Morrowind, and even a year ago (it's in active development), it was a blast. Fallout 76 is beautiful and offers deep exploration, but the multiplayer elements don't shine.
The only part here that I disagree with is being able to keep it going off pre-orders alone.
Despite the 'no Refunds' policy, they are in fact giving out a lot of refunds to people, and considering the myriad of people complaining, there has likely been a lot of refunds issued.
I honestly think even with the price drop, an early death is going to be the most likely outcome of 76 at this point.
I mean, I'm not sure about the server costs, but I don't think they're that large. Maybe I'm wrong, but Bethesda already has ESO servers and has probably either figured out how to use those for Fallout 76 or get really cheap server setups.
It's probably the refunds and whatever they have to do to keep from being sued over the "canvas" bag that will lead to any issues.
I don't know that Fallout 76 is going to necessarily suffer an early death, but it's basically Bethesda's Fallout Tactics.