Patch Purgatory
There is a special sort of exquisite suffering involved in waiting for game patches. Like, there is an acknowledgement from the game makers that a problem exists, and they even have a date listed for when the problem will be fixed. That’s good! Fantastic, even. But it’s going to be next week. And seven days is so long from now, but it’s also entirely reasonable to have patches scheduled for certain days, and last week was Thanksgiving… so, yeah. Purgatory, basically.
Over on the Fallout 76 subreddit, Bethesda has laid out a general cadence for upcoming patches:
December 4, 2018 – Next week’s update will bring an increase to the Stash limit, as well as a variety of performance and stability improvements, balance changes, and multiple bug fixes to the game. We’ll have full patch notes available later this week ahead of Tuesday’s update. […]
December 11, 2018 – The next update after December 4 is currently planned for the following week. Like previous patches, it will include a variety of bug fixes, but we’re also planning to bring some more notable changes and features to the game. You can catch a preview of these improvements below, and a full list of changes will be included in the December 11 patch notes.
The post itself has actual details, but the big ones to me are the Stash limit increases and better boss loot on the 4th, and Push-to-Talk, (limited) Respec, and CAMP improvements on the 11th.
There are also a variety of possible bug fixes and balance changes that could materially improve my enjoyment of the game. Melee right now is incredibly OP, for example. I’m running a Rifle/Sniper build myself, and the fact that there are no rifle weight-reducing Perk cards (Gatling guns can be reduced to 2 lbs but a machine gun always weighs 20+ lbs) and apparently Legendary Hunting Rifles don’t exist in the game is a big bummer. Adding in a Perk card might be out of scope of a “bug fix,” but if they made getting the Lever-Action Rifle schematics easier to acquire, I would suddenly be back in business – I’m still using a level 25 one with no mods at level 50, because it’s still awesome despite the reloading glitch.
In the meantime though, it’s tough. I’m always dancing around the 400 lb Stash limit each time I log into the game. For the longest time, having too much Steel was a common event, but the moment you essentially delete 1000 pieces, you suddenly need that amount for something else, such as crafting bullets. There are vendors out in the world, but most are on a shared Cap limit, such that you can only vendor X amount of things each day.
The ideal solution to all of this is to simply not play the game until the patch hits. Which is perfectly acceptable as a solution… provided you aren’t actually that invested in the game in the first place. If you are though, god help you.
Posted on November 28, 2018, in Fallout and tagged Bugs, Fallout 76, Patch, Purgatory, Waiting. Bookmark the permalink. 2 Comments.
In An Age 
If it was World of Warcraft, many people would describe the situation as bad game design. I’ve used some console commands to never worry about my inventory weight in Fallout 4. I don’t like looting stuff one by one in that game because I need to collect so much crap to craft things.
More often than not you are better off playing another game while waiting for patches to fix game-breaking bugs or redesign some major components of the game.
Tom Clancy’s The Division 1 was not so good at start. It became gradually much more interesting as new patches were released. Survival mode is like a totally different game. So refreshing.
I wouldn’t want to criticize you much but buying a game on release is probably not a good idea these days unless it is something from CD Projekt Red like Witcher 3. TotalBiscuit is no longer around, may he rest in peace. But surely there are other reviewers. And there are torrents if you want to try something firsthand. Or twitch.tv.
Don’t feed greedy game developers with your hard-earned cash.
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I was actually also thinking about WoW when I wrote this post. There are a lot of changes in 8.1 that sound like they will fix a bunch of issues. Waiting for them is agony if WoW is your primary game, and having to pay a subscription in the meantime is a double-whammy. Luckily for me, my interest in WoW has dropped off a cliff.
As for purchasing Fallout 76 on release… I fully knew what I was getting into. My original plan was to preorder to get access to the beta, and then cancel/refund if the beta was not what I expected. As it turns out, I had loads of fun in the beta, to the point that I had zero desire to play anything else. Of course, I did get burned by the game getting discounted down to $35 during the holiday. Given how obsessively I’ve been playing though, and how little I wanted to do anything else when I couldn’t, it’s tough to be too angry.
In general though, yes, I agree that buying (non-MMO) games on release is a bad idea.
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