The Fallout 1st Service.

Hey folks. Kelvoran Gaming here and today I’m going to be talking about the newly announced subscription service added to Fallout 76, which has been dubbed as Fallout 1st.

Fair Warning, if you want a moronic post where I rip into Bethesda for this, you’re going to be disappointed. Feel free to go visit YongYea or Upper Echelon Gaming. Or better yet, don’t, because you’ll get a better take on this issue from Juicehead, a YouTuber who actually plays the game and has a better grasp on this from the aspect of a player. In fact, I’ll share his video below, so feel free to watch it, then come back and read the rest of my article.

All done watching the video? Great, let’s discuss the particulars. You probably already picked up on them from the video, but if you didn’t watch it for whatever reason, I’ll go over the facts as we know them.

So here are the facts. Today Bethesda Softworks announced that a new subscription model was being implemented into Fallout 76, named Fallout 1st. This subscription service charges $13 a month (at least for US customers, but I’ll get to pricing a bit later) or $100 a year and in return for your money you get access to a number of unique perks such as:

Private Worlds, a gameplay feature that allows you and 7 other players on your friends list to join and roam around in a version of the game world cut off from random players.
The Scrapbox, a unique camp item which stores scrap and has an unlimited capacity.
The Survival Tent, a unique item which can be placed anywhere in the open world and acts as a fast travel point, with access to your stash and the ability to sleep.
Atoms, as a Fallout 1st subscriber you get a monthly stipend of Atoms that you can use to buy things from the Atom shop.
Ranger Armor, a unique set of armor that was featured in Fallout: New Vegas.
Unique Icons and Emotes.

Now many folks have been ripping into Bethesda for this. Most of whom don’t actually play the game nor are they part of the Fallout 76 community, so in all honesty I consider most of their opinions to be worthless. I would rather hear from folks who actually play the game, which is why I linked Juicehead’s video above. He’s not a fan of the entire thing either, but he comes into the situation with a level head and explains everything clearly without going into a detached rant about past failings from Bethesda, some of which they aren’t even responsible for. But now I’m the one rambling. Instead let’s focus on my opinion and I want to start by talking about the features that Fallout 1st provides.

Still with me? Good. Now as far as those features are concerned, there are three that I want to bring attention to. Private Realms, the Scrapbox, and the Atom Stipend. Let’s start with the Private Servers, and I’ll be blunt, I’m not a fan. While I can’t really fault Bethesda for wanting to keep private servers as a premium for now while they roll things out. I think ultimately it does need to be offered to the broader population. Give standard folks the ability to play on private worlds, but impose restrictions such as lack of access to public events (as they’re on private servers) and limited number of player slots, but for Fallout 1st, give them the ability to customize server rules and add more players for those who want to organize larger private gatherings for the community. The current implementation is ‘okay’ it’s ‘acceptable’ but it needs work (but then again what doesn’t in Fallout 76?)

Now moving on to the Scrapbox. This item, well it stores scrap, it’s in the name, and that’s all it stores. This is a key distinction, because the only other loot box that you can place in your camp is the Stash. Now previously, when players asked Bethesda to increase the limit of the stash, one of the reasons they gave for restricting it is that too much stash space could cause the game to crash. This is actually something that anyone playing Fallout 76 has seen, especially during the periods where there were a lot of duping bugs. Players with thousands and thousands of pounds of items were causing server lag and instability, so their reasoning behind keeping a stash limit in place is acceptable. The sheer number of items was the problem, not the weight of those items.

By comparison thousands and thousands of pounds of scrap does very little to impact the stability of the game, at least that’s how it was when I last played. It has been a while, since I’m genuinely waiting for the Wastelanders DLC before I jump back in. If you’ve got a thousand pounds of plastic, the impact you have on the game is minimal, but if you have a thousand pounds of fat man nuke launchers, then your impact is much more severe.

That doesn’t fully excuse Bethesda from not having the stashbox as an item for all players to use (or at the very least slapping it on the Atom Shop for players to buy) unless of course this is a temporary addition. Obviously the number of folks willing to jump in to Fallout 1st will be lower than folks who just want to play the game. Meaning that this could, and I’m just theorycrafting here, be a way for Bethesda to test the stability of infinite scrap on the servers before rolling it out for everyone, or at least rolling out a form of it for everyone.

Finally I want to talk about is the monthly atom stipend. This type of feature is not at all uncommon in games with optional subscriptions. Both Star Wars: The Old Republic and Elder Scrolls Online, MMOs with optional subscription models, give players a monthly stipend of points for their online store to be spent on whatever they want, and if you’re the type of player who is spending a portion of their money on the atom store every month, what is offered in the stipend for Fallout 1st is actually cheaper than buying the same number of atoms from the store directly, something that Juicehead points out in his video. It’s good value for money, and it remains so even if you’re not someone who spends real money on atoms, because well, you can use the atoms you grind and the monthly stipend to get access to outfits and such that would otherwise take you a while to grind.

With all that said. Do I think Fallout 1st is good value for money? Well, yes. I think currently it is, provided you’re living in the United States. Are there things I hope change or that I would change if I was in a position to do so? Absolutely, but for now it’s not ‘that bad’, certainly not as bad as many folks on the internet are claiming.

But note that I said ‘If you’re living in the United States’ because there is one thing that is absolutely damaging Fallout 1st and preventing, at least me from getting into the feature. It’s the price. For US residents, Fallout 1st is priced quite fairly, $13 a month is less than what most MMOs charge for their subscription services, and $100 a year is far less than what those same MMOs charge for annual subscriptions. That changes when you’re in a place like Australia, where the price for a single month of Fallout 1st is $23 and an annual subscription is $174, far more expensive than the subscription prices for MMOs both on a per month and per year basis. Now I am not sure why the price for Fallout 1st is so expensive for Australian customers, especially since it’s not a currency conversion issue, and I doubt I’ll ever find out why. Sadly, because of that I cannot justify paying for Fallout 1st, meaning even when Wastelanders is available in 2020, I won’t be touching Fallout 1st at all.

Finally before I sign off on this article, I want to point out something to the outrage crowd, and I imagine those that got this far are frothing at the mouth and slamming their fingers on the keyboard in a rage as they type vitriolic messages at me explaining why I am ‘part of the problem’ or that I’m ‘ruining gaming’. To those people I say to watch who you direct your anger at. Decisions like these are not made by the PR people, they aren’t made by the support staff at Bethesda, they’re not even made by the development teams that implement all the features. These are decisions made by executives and upper management, so if you are going to direct your anger about this at anyone, make sure you’re not unleashing it on folks that weren’t actually responsible for the mess.

Granted I don’t expect you’ll listen, you’ve probably got the line “Bethesda Bad” running in your head repeating over and over, but I figured I had to say something.

Until next time!

Fallout 76 – Improvements

Hello everyone, Kelvoran back again and it’s time I got into the second part of my promised Fallout 76 discussion blog. For those of you who read the first part where I discussed my thoughts about the game, I did say that I was going to write a post concerning what I thought could be changed to make the game better.

Now, to be clear, I am not in any way a game developer, I have some background knowledge, having studied it to enter the industry but I have no formal qualifications and no experience, so this post is not an attempt to tell the people at Bethesda Softworks how to do their job, nor am I saying that their current version of Fallout 76 is trash and that it should be replaced. These are just my humble suggestions, so keep that in mind before you roast me over an open flame.

So, let’s begin with what I would remove from Fallout 76, starting with six enemies of the Fallout games. Those six being Super Mutants, Mutant Hounds, Feral Ghouls, Deathclaws, Gulpers and Anglers. These enemies above all others don’t really make a whole lot of sense existing in the game as it currently stands and let me explain why.

Super Mutants: These hulking mutated humans were created as a result of human testing of the Forced Evolutionary Virus (or F.E.V) which had only just been named such in 2075 and was still being trialed on animals all the way in California when the people of Huntersville West Virginia were supposedly infected with the FEV by West-Tek. Human trials of the F.E.V would not begin until 2077 and even then they were done in absolute secrecy.
Mutant Hounds: These beasts first made an appearance in Fallout 4 and they’re unique to the Commonwealth, having been created by the Institute (who were also responsible for creating the Super Mutants of the Commonwealth). Now it is unclear as to when the Institute created the Mutant Hounds, but it is highly unlikely that they would have existed in West Virginia 25 years after the bombs fell, which is when the events of Fallout 76 begin.
Feral Ghouls: While Ghouls would have existed by the time of Fallout 76, the concept of Feral Ghouls would not be widespread, as it generally either took a large exposure of radiation OR excessive time for a Ghoul to go feral so there would not have been large numbers of them in places like Morgantown.
Deathclaws: While iconic to the Fallout universe, these creatures were primarily created by genetic manipulation and the FEV in California. They were considered mythological and rare in the Year 2161, meaning that they would be non-existent in West Virginia during the events of Fallout 76.
Gulpers: Gulpers are a unique beast that can only be found on the island of Far Harbor. Regardless of when they were created as a species, they would not be present during the events of Fallout 76 in West Virginia.
Anglers: As with the Gulper, the Angler is a unique beast that can only be found on the island of Far Harbor. Additionally, as they are mutated from a deep-sea fish (the Angler Fish) they would not be found in the landlocked region of West Virginia in any capacity.

Now let’s talk about what could be added/changed, and in all honesty, there is only one major thing that could be added, and that’s living human NPCs. This, in my opinion, is vital because not only does it allow for players to be more invested in the world because they’re getting quests from living, breathing humans, it also allows for greater storytelling as human NPCs will have their own goals and their own personalities. Factions would have different personalities which could clash, and we could even be forced to choose between them as we did in previous Fallout games. Take this scenario for example:

We emerge from Vault 76, seeing Appalachia for the first time in 25 years. Upon leaving the immediate area we get our first encounter with the enemies of the region. The giant ticks, feral hounds and scorched. We find the Overseer’s camp, but instead of finding a holotape we actually find the Overseer herself. This is where we learn the basics of survival, how to set up the camp and the importance of scavenging supplies. Then she recommends that we scout out Flatwoods to see if there are any survivors there, as she heard gunshots from that region. She has her own mission to undertake, which takes her in another direction altogether.

Now at this point, we can choose to go just about anywhere. We can roam as we see fit, but, for the sake of this scenario, we go to Flatwoods to find the area under attack by a raider gang. We help the survivors who are holed up in the church, and after we kill the raiders we are introduced to the First Responders. This is the first faction we discover in the game and they are trying to survive despite constant attacks by raider patrols. Here we can discover some side quests, such as discovering who killed the town Reverend who also served as the cooking teacher. Originally chalked up to an unfortunate casualty of the raider assaults, we investigate and discover that it was a fellow First Responder, Sofie, who killed him and she has been sending messages to the raiders, essentially offering inside intel on when to attack.

After we’ve finished helping out the people in Flatwoods, we get tasked to report to Responder HQ up at Morgantown who have gone radio silent. We get informed that the best way to get there is through Sutton, but the Responders who went that way didn’t return, so there’s something dangerous either on the road or in the town. When we reach Sutton we discover that it has been overrun by Raiders who are using it as a base of operations from where they launch their own raids on the surrounding region. We clear out the raiders and continue on, discovering a town decimated by the Scorched and we get our first sighting of a Scorchbeast, although it doesn’t attack, it just flies around the area. Continuing on we discover some survivors from the scorched village living in an abandoned crash site who have begun to call themselves the Shadow Walkers, and they’re under constant assault from the nearby scorched who are making their lives difficult, although they have to eliminate their targets quietly as to not attract the attention of the scorchbeast, so they sell throwing weapons, crossbows, silenced weaponry and muffled armor to those who earn their favor.

Eventually, we reach Morgantown and this is where we encounter our first faction rivalry between the First Responders and the Fire Breathers. Once a part of the First Responders, the Fire Breathers have since separated and become a far more zealous group with a unique outlook on how humanity must be saved, which is to purge all non-humans with purifying flame, especially ghouls and any individual remotely infected with the scorched plague. The First Responders disagree with this view, they want to save as many people as possible, especially the victims of radiation and the scorched, going as far as to attempt to create a vaccine for the scorched plague. Right now the player is not a part of either faction, but, they will eventually get a choice as to whether or not they want to join the First Responders or the Fire Breathers and joining one faction makes you an enemy of the other and reflects what weapons, armor and plans you get access to. Additionally, the Brotherhood of Steel has an outpost in the town. They are regarded warily by both the Fire Breathers and the First Responders, as they seem to be interested in securing technologies rather than aiding humanity, but as they were former West Virginia military, their firepower makes them difficult for either faction to contend with, so neither wants to openly trade blows with them.

…

Now I could go on and on here but I am sure you get the idea. Living, breathing NPCs allow for more in-depth stories and that is something I feel Bethesda should embrace, not ignore.

Now for some additional things that I feel should be changed:

C.A.M.P Improvements: Todd Howard said during E3 that we would be able to build our camp anywhere, but in reality that is not at all true, and instead we are forced to build in the wild, fairly far away from any structure. This is a mistake. What better place to set up a base than in a ruined home or an already established (then abandoned) outpost? There are plenty of prime C.A.M.P locations which could be used, but because of this restriction, they can’t be touched. Obviously there would need to be ‘some’ restrictions to prevent people from locking down quest NPCs or quest items, but generally speaking, there should be more freedom with C.A.M.P setups.
Workshops: The current concept of Workshops should be removed entirely. Instead, have workshops exist as an upgrade to the C.A.M.P which you can earn by working with a specific faction in the Wasteland. When you upgrade your C.A.M.P to a workshop you increase the budget of items that you can build and increase the radius that you can build in, allowing you to construct bigger and better things. Workshops should also allow you to open up your base to other players (whereas C.A.M.Ps should be player owned only) so if you want to create a base where players can congregate to trade and use various workbenches to build or upgrade their gear, you can do that.

Now I am sure I can think of more suggestions and as I do I may create more posts about this in the future, but here are my base ideas. Let me know what you think, I’d be interested to know if anyone reading this likes my ideas or whether they’re horrible garbage.

Until next time!

Fallout 76 – My Thoughts

Hello folks, Kelvoran here with another Fallout 76 post. This time though, I’ll be giving my thoughts about the game and I will be creating another post later today detailing how I feel the game could be improved.

Before I begin though, just a note to anyone reading this hoping to see a rant about the canvas bag mess, or the atomic shop, or the recent customer support data leaks, you’re not going to see that here. This post is going to be focused on the game, it’s performance (from my perspective) and generally how it plays. I will also be including an honest rating based on my own experiences. There will be minor spoilers ahead as well!

So first things first, what is Fallout 76? Well unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few months, Fallout 76 is Bethesda Softworks attempt to use the Fallout universe to get into the multiplayer survival genre. You start off as a member of Vault 76 and you are released into a portion of West Virginia 25 years after the nuclear war which ravaged America in the Fallout universe with the goal of rebuilding America from the ground up. To assist you in this endeavor you are given a Construction and Assembly Mobile Platform (or C.A.M.P for short) which you can place down in the world and when you do this you are allowed to build a base in a radius around the camp using materials which you’ve salvaged from nearby areas by scrapping just about anything you can pick up, just as you did in Fallout 4.

Speaking of Fallout 4, if you enjoyed that game, you’ll find Fallout 76 remarkably similar, because it looks and plays the same way. Many of the staple enemies will be familiar to you (including feral ghouls, super mutants, mole rats, mutated hounds etc) and the terrain and structures also use a similar style. There’s no point beating around the bush on this, Fallout 76 reuses many assets from Fallout 4 and let me be clear for a moment here. There is nothing wrong with that! I am sure that there are plenty of gamers out there who would like nothing more than to see game developers create all game assets from scratch when they create a new title in a series, but this is not feasible from either a time or financial perspective, which is why assets are reused in game development as much as they are. After all, why recreate a ruined house when you have the model for one already built in another game that uses the same engine?

But I’ve gone off track.

Anyway, as a member of Vault 76 you emerge from the Vault and begin to explore Appalachia, which is the first ‘zone’ so to speak that you’ll fight enemies in, most of which being between levels 1 to 10, and one of the first quests you get is to head to the Overseer’s Camp and find her. Unfortunately, you don’t find her, but you do find a holotape she left behind, and this sets the theme for the entire game as far as quests are concerned. Listen to holotapes, listen to repeating radio messages, talk to robots with personalities etc, because as Todd Howard stated during the reveal of Fallout 76 at E3, every human that you encounter is a real player.

Unfortunately, this statement from Todd and what it means for the game does spoil a lot of what made the Fallout games under Bethesda so good, because one of the key features of the Fallout games has been, at least to me, seeing the survivors who did not get into a vaults do the best they can in the now ruined America by constructing their own settlements whether they be civilians trying to get by, or Raiders trying to assert dominance over a particular region. Knowing that the only human that I will see will be players not only makes entire areas of the game feel empty and lifeless (quite literally in the case of the latter) but it also ruins certain quests. Here I’ll give you two examples of what I mean:

Example 1 – The Town of Flatwoods: This is the first major destination that you’ll go to if you follow the Overseer’s instructions on the second holotape you find of hers. She encourages you to go to the town of Flatwoods if its still standing, and meet her there. When you arrive you’ll see signs from a faction called ‘The Responders’ and many of the buildings are intact. Unfortunately, as you explore Flatwoods there are no surviving human NPCs. Every single one of them is dead and has been for a short while, and you’re tasked with listening to more holotapes and completing objectives assigned by computer terminals.

Example 2 – The Order of Mysteries: The Order of Mysteries appears as a small faction which you can become a part of a short while after starting the game after you locate a deceased member of the Order and clues found on the body lead you to their headquarters. After you arrive at the secret headquarters, you’ll get your first mission, to find your handler and receive your training. Unfortunately, because of Todd Howard’s statement about the only human characters that you’ll see being players, you already know exactly what you’re going to find when you arrive at the last known location of your handler. She’s dead, you’ll get no training, and because she can’t exactly stop you, you pinch her holotape from her body and give yourself a promotion to a higher rank which gives you access to more quests.

See what I mean? Because you know that every human you encounter will be dead, there are no humans to interact with and get a story from, nor are there living raiders to kill or spy on as you hear them rant about enemies they’ve fought in the past, meaning that even the raider outposts and fortresses are empty, or filled with Scorched who all look identical more or less, which is a shame because even the feral ghouls have more varied looks in this game.

Everywhere you go, all you’ll find are dead human bodies, and sure, you can piece together how the humans may have been killed by looking around and trying to ‘solve the puzzle’ but ultimately it doesn’t really matter because there’s no real bonus for doing so. Unfortunately, in my opinion, this really does drastically impact what makes the game fun and it also hurts the developers as they are limited in what quests they can add to the game.

So what else in the game is there to do aside from robot quests and collecting the holotapes? Well, you can capture Workshops. Now, for those of you who played Fallout 4, you know what a Workshop is. A workshop is a small building which exerts control over a larger area and if you control the workshop you can build within a large area. Now in Fallout 4, Workshops were the only way you could build settlements in the game, and the number of workshops was limited (compared to the number of locations you could visit at any rate). In Fallout 76 this changes somewhat. Workshops still exert control over a large area, but this time they are controlled by whoever captures the workshop and other players can come along and ‘steal’ your workshop from you if you leave it unguarded. Additionally, if you log out, either because you’re done with the game for the day or because of a crash/server disconnection you lose everything including control over the zone, and any structures you built in the workshop area. This makes building in workshop areas seemingly pointless, save for defensive buildings (such as turrets and traps) and resource collectors for the unique resources that are found on workshop sites. This doesn’t mean that the Workshops aren’t worth trying to get control of though, because the resources you can gather from these places are much harder/slower to obtain if you try to get them elsewhere.

And finally, I have to mention PvP. Now, PvP is in an interesting spot in Fallout 76, because in all the reviews I’ve read about the game, none of them talk about the PvP mode, but rather, how PvP is initiated. Now how PvP is initiated is fairly simple. You just attack other players. However there are caveats to this, and that caveat is that unless the player you’re targetting starts attacking you, they take greatly reduced damage, meaning that they can’t be killed by you even if you have some of the most powerful weapons. If they, however, decide to unload on you, the attacker after you’ve already engaged them, they will do full weapon damage to you, easily allowing them to kill you, especially if they have high powered weapons equaling your own.

But that is not the PvP mode that I am going to highlight. The PvP mode is called Hunter/Hunted and it is accessible starting at level 5 when PvP is enabled for your character. To access it? Go to your radio and turn on the Hunter/Hunted channel. This triggers a quest which tasks you to hunt down another player who also has Hunter/Hunted turned on. Additionally, anyone with Hunter/Hunted radio turned on is automatically ‘flagged’ for PvP, meaning that you’ll do full damage to your target without them needing to fire back. Unfortunately due to the fact that this is hidden away as a radio station, and there are no real indicators to point out that it exists (with the exception of a loading screen hint which may, or may not appear depending on how long your load times are) there aren’t many players openly using it to engage in PvP with other players.

But what about technical issues and bugs? Well, the game has plenty, not going to lie, and this is part of the charm that is Bethesda game releases. It’s an ‘expected norm’ at this stage. Unfortunately one far less accepted this time around, but still an expected norm. There are performance issues with the game, but these vary depending on the rigs of each player being used. In my time playing the game I have encountered only a few bugs/technical issues. Notably a few CTDs, some framerate tanking and a few invisible enemies which I had to melee the air to kill effectively. None of which are completely game breaking. That being said, some of the other bugs and glitches that other players have experienced are more severe, and the prevalence of these bugs has contributed to the poor rating that the game has received on multiple platforms.

So if I had to give a rating to the game based on the 48 or so hours I’ve sunk into the title, what would I rate it? Well, I don’t generally like the singular X out of X number system, whether it’s out of 5 points or 10 points because I don’t really feel like that gives the game justice. Rather, I prefer to rate each individual area of the game, so here is my ‘score’ for Fallout 76.

Graphics: The world of Fallout 76 looks amazing, and the way the zones of the game look so different from each other allows for some rather amazing experiences and photomode screenshots. Rating: 8/10

Audio: The audio for the game is similar in many ways to Fallout 4, but there are quite a few new audio tracks to listen to, and the radio stations that play music can be interesting to listen to from time to time (but not all the time, need to hear the enemies sneaking up on you after all). Rating: 6/10

Gameplay: The gameplay for Fallout 76 is much like Fallout 4 but with some new changes here and there to bring some fresh elements to the game. The introduction of the C.A.M.P and being able to build a settlement anywhere in open space is great but hampered by the inability to place it in or around structures. Overall depends on the player as to how entertaining or boring it will be. Rating: 5/10

Performance: While my personal experience with glitches and bugs is minimal, I cannot pretend that other gamers are not experiencing their own issues which are much more severe. Performance for the title drastically needs to be improved if the game wants to have any significant longevity. Rating: 3/10

Story: The lack of living human NPCs has really impacted the story of Fallout 76 severely. In addition, while the Fallout series has always played fast and loose with the lore (even going back to the original games made by Interplay) there are a few lore changes here which don’t make much sense. Rating: 3/10

So there you have it folks, my thoughts on Fallout 76. I will be writing up another post later today concerning how I feel the game could be improved. So stay tuned.

Until next time!

Fallout 76 – The Atomic Shop

Hello folks, Kelvoran here with another thought of the evening, but this one is going to be short. We’re going to talk about Fallout 76, or rather, one specific portion of Fallout 76 which is the Atomic Shop, a digital storefront accessible from the menu of the game where you spend the digital currency ‘atoms’ to purchase cosmetic items that you can then use within the game in one form or another. Here’s a picture of the shop front for those of you who don’t play the game:

Now, as you can see you can purchase a number of things from the Atomic Shop all for the currency known as Atoms, which can be purchased with real money (with the cheapest price being $5 for 500 atoms) or you can earn atoms by completing challenges in-game. These challenges are not really difficult, pick a certain number of locks, kill a certain number of enemies, complete a quest or certain number of quests, there are multiple ways to earn atoms in game, and they add up over time, ensuring that if you don’t want to spend money you don’t have to, which seems harmless right? Especially since it’s not even that much of a grind to get the atoms with the current build of Fallout 76.

But unfortunately in true ‘gamer outrage’ fashion, this is not good enough, and what we’ve seen on the internet of late are multiple critics on YouTube lashing out at Bethesda for, among other things, having items that were freely available in Fallout 4 on the Fallout 76 Atomic Shop for atoms.

Let that sink in for a moment to see if you can grasp the absurdity of the argument that they’re making.

Because X item was free to obtain in Fallout 4 (which was a single player open world sandbox game), it is a travesty when X item costs atoms in Fallout 76.

Now let me be clear where I stand on this if I wasn’t already.

There is nothing wrong with what Bethesda is doing as far as the Atomic Shop is concerned. Just because gamers (myself included since I own Fallout 4) bought an earlier game in the series, does not mean that any of us are entitled to items in a completely different game that released years later, regardless of whether the assets in the game were reused or not.

Bethesda has done many things wrong with Fallout 76. From releasing the game in a bugged state, to the mess with the canvas bags for those who purchased the big ticket $200 collectors edition of the game, to most recently a leak of personal information via their support portal. There’s a lot which has gone wrong for them, but this? Well it isn’t one of them. So my honest and brutal advice to any gamers reading this post, and any YouTube personalities who may stumble across it, is to untwist your knickers and don’t let every tiny microtransaction cause you to fly into a steaming rage.

Your mental health will thank you.

Until next time!