Fallout 76 - Superheroes and Duct Tape Part 2

It’s time to get back to reality, or at least the pseudo-reality of Fallout 76. Let me begin with a confession. For all my desire to go through this particular version of post-apocalyptic life with only a single punch, I have to admit I did carry and use guns in Fallout 76. Sadly, they were littered throughout the wasteland so much so that you couldn’t take two steps without tripping over a submachine pistol with an integrated silencer.

One of the superheroes I invented, Madman (see previous post), had a theory about this; Guns are now the ultimate life form on Earth. The radiation of nuclear war caused them to mutate and achieve sentience. Now they silently wait while we use them to kill each other. In the end, they’ll be all that’s left, birthing their broods of bullet babies to fill the world. Madman may be onto something, or not. Whatever the case, to parapharse the Player from Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead on the Fallout universe; “we can do comedy, we can do tragedy, but the guns are obligatory.”

The main reason for using guns in the post-apocalypse is the non-pausable single timeline nature of this persistent online game. In previous Fallout games, you could pause or slow down time so that you could plan your moves carefully, even avoid the ranged attacks of your foes as you closed in for the “ol’ coop de gravy,” as the vigilante hero The Street would say. And if things weren’t going well, you could just load a previous save file and try again.

I’ve always had an issue reconciling save games with realistic representation of combat in video games. It just doesn’t make sense for my seemingly-ordinary non-super-powered character to constantly travel back in time to try different things. They would have to be some kind of Time Lord or temporally-based superhero, and that’s seldom makes sense in the story of these games. I guess you could look at it like your character is just a run-of-the-mill psychic prophet, like the Nicholas Cage classic film Next in which he can live out different versions of the future in order to find the best outcome. They should have named that movie “Save Slot 1,” instead.

Anyway, none of that exists in Fallout 76 because it’s persistently-saved multi-player, even when I play it on my own private shard/world. You go into combat and if things go south you have to immediately adapt, or just bravely run away. When I started playing this no-takebacks version of Fallout, it quickly became clear that I couldn’t just rely on my trusty fists to take down snipers and flying monstrosities. As much as I wished for some kind of rocket punch or flying eel kick, it just wasn’t meant to be. So, I plucked a mutant gun out of the ground and started blasting.

The superheroes I created out of old laundry (see previous post) then roamed the wasteland equipped small arsenals of firearms to soften up any opposition before they charged in with the right hook, right hook, right hook combo. Metal Fighter S at least had some head canon for this; Through the use of his electro-chi he can form a rifle-like extension of his arm and fire small pieces of scrap at supersonic speeds. He calls this technique; “Long-range flying metal punch!” I never shouted this at my monitor either. It would have given away my position.

But I kept thinking about Madman’s theory about the guns being alive and mutating. I mean he’s an escaped mental patient who thinks he’s an alien warrior out for justice, so he’s crazy, or he could be an alien who thinks he’s a mental patient out for justice, so he might know what he’s talking about.

First of all, guns in Fallout 76 have levels. Think about that. The other things that have levels are player characters and enemies. Living things that grow stronger over time.

Second, the guns actually mutate. You can find a pistol that has a “legendary” quality which allows it to shot two bullets for each one fired. How is that not some Professor X type stuff?

Third, the guns mutate. You can find guns that don’t like certain enemies. How do guns know you’re shooting them at super-mutants versus shooting them at ghouls? It’s not like you’re loading super-mutant-killing bullets. They’re all the same bullets. The guns just know. And not only that. These mutant guns hate certain groups of enemies. I shudder think about what my guns think about me.

Fourth, the freaking guns mutate! You can get guns that work better when you’re on drugs, or when you’re about to die. They want you weak and close to the end. That’s when they take over. And the powers they have defy time and space. You can get guns that have more bullets in them then the size of their clips. The guns have access to dimension bending technology, and they use it to hold more of their bullet babies. How can we possibly survive? How can we beat them if they are that powerful?

But I used the evil mutant guns and kept looking for more powerful versions so that I could get close enough to punch things. I mean my Power Fist was probably mutant and sentient too. I could somehow square that better with reality. I can imagine making a stronger version that works faster or has spikes designed to pierce super-mutant skin. Maybe it was sentient, but I think it was on my side. Maybe the only hope we’ll have in the coming war against the mutant guns is the mutant unarmed weapons we make ourselves. I suppose we’ll have to mutate too, but I’ll get to that later.

I guess this type of nonsense comes from taking weapon itemization from classic fantasy RPG games and trying to apply it to a sci-fi shooting game. It’s easy to say a particular sword or bow is “enchanted” to do X more damage to Orcs. But this doesn’t really translate to our Sci-fi setting without some crazy technological explanation. Do these guns have built-in nanobots that change the nature of every bullet as it’s fired? I mean, that would make for a cool explanation too, but nothing like that exists in Fallout 76. So I’m left with Madman’s head canon about the guns becoming sentient mutants. Like I don’t have enough to worry about in the end times.

Another thing I had to worry about in the end times was garbage or “Scrap,” as the game labels it. More so than the ubiquitous bottle caps that have served as currency in the Fallout wastelands since the 90s games, Scrap is the real money of this particular corner of the post-apocalypse. You can buy things with bottle caps, but everything is ridiculously overpriced and not everything is available. Scrap on the other hand is what you need to build everything from bullets to bastions. You also need it to repair all your weapons and armor, constantly. Scrap is so key to the game that the main benefit of the monthly subscription is a tent with a magic container in which you can always store all the magical garbage Scrap you find in your adventures.

You wouldn’t think garbage management would be the core aspect of a futuristic sci-fi roleplaying game like this. I guess they need to explain how players can build small-town-sized forts in this Home-Depot-less future. Not that turning a Garden Gnome into concrete shavings from which you then build a stable foundation for a multi-story tower makes any kind of sense in our reality. Never mind that duct tape is the most valuable piece of junk out there. You need a constant supply of it, crazy glue, and even sticky fluids you find on mutant horrors to keep your equipment functioning. That’s right, all those pretty little mutant guns are actually held together with duct tape and crazy glue. That’s what’s actually happening even though it’s not represented visually.

I once read a post online, in the real world, on the real internet, in which a gun nut asked whether they could just glue on the tactical accessories they wanted onto their semi-automatic home-defense rifle. The gun experts in the post basically laughed at this crazy gluer, saying that the action of any firearm would shake any glued components off, potentially making the firearm unusable or even dangerous. My own experience with gluing guns is limited sticking them onto little plastic and pewter miniature space marines, and those fall apart all the time. I don’t know. Maybe they have better crazy glue in the Fallout future.

Then there are the screws. You find them in all sorts of things, like clocks, fans, even kid’s toys. And you use them mostly to make guns, and gun-adjacent things like turrets, but also gun accessories like telescopic sights and bigger clips that hold more bullets.

The superhero Businessman explained this one to me; you see, bro, a few decades before the war, the Makemoney Co. came out with an ingenious product they called the Onescrew. It was a universal screw and thread system that allowed for almost all handheld-sized objects to be constructed using one size of screw. Not only did this allow for simplification of manufacturing but it allowed Makemoney Co. to corner the appliance repair market. Now, in the post-apocalypse, most things you find will contain only Onescrews and those screws can be used to repair almost anything. And you shouldn’t put any stock in the story that the depleted plutonium from which Onescrews are made is in any way harmful. I mean, simple cotton can absorb the amount of beta radiation emitted by Onescrews. Just buy a protective lead-lined onesie for your baby from Makemoney Co if you want to be extra safe.

It sounded crazy when Businessman explained it to me, but I have to say it does make a kind of sense. Imagine going into your garage or workshop or pantry (where I keep all my screws, next to the pasta and rice) and not having to dig through dozens of containers for the one weird-shaped screw you need to repair the door knob so that you can go back to enjoying the silence of the apocalypse. Maybe there’s a unicorn startup idea in this. Now all we need is some depleted plutonium. I used to know some people from eastern Europe, let me look into it.

So that’s how I rationalize the universal screws. The problem is that there are a lot of things to rationalize in Fallout 76. Like when I asked Businessman how could universal gears work? How would you have different gear ratios if they’re all the same size? Businessman kinda of dodged the question and started talking about optimizing throughput with product synergy or something.

I haven’t even mentioned the real-money store that sells mostly cosmetic items for your characters. Yes, it’s ridiculous and overpriced, but I don’t mind it that much, mostly because there’s not much to buy. It seems that most of the stock is rotated and only appears for a day or a week, and sometimes it’s gone forever. I get that this is a common FOMO (fear of missing out) tactic and that many games utilize it. But it just doesn’t mean much to someone like me who picks up a game for a few weeks or a month, finishes what little it has of a story and moves onto the next thing.

If everything was available all the time, I would probably spend a bunch of money to make even more cool superheroes, and maybe play a little longer. But as it is, there is little for me to spend actual money on. And I doubt I’ll be logging in every day for six months so that I can buy the elusive Groknak the Barbarian loincloth and pretend to be hero Vandal Visigoth, the time-lost savage from the past pulled into this future through an atomic fissure in timespace (which is different from spacetime - think vanilla and chocolate, both are ice cream, but one tastes better). 

There are also a lot of missed opportunities in Fallout 76. I could go down that rabbit hole for a week or two. I’ll just mention one thing that relates to superheroes. Not only does the radiation mutate super mutants and guns, it can mutate your character, giving you cool minor superpowers like a kangaroo feet and pouch that come with a little detrimental effect (the kangaroo feet and pouch somehow make you less smart). This sounds perfect for someone who likes to make superheroes, right? In practice, getting these mutations is too difficult or expensive for a casual solo player like myself. Either you stand in nuclear waste dump for hours hoping to get the random mutation you want or you pay all the money you will ever have (again casual solo player) to buy just one. And then you can’t change them out without going through the whole process again. But I guess the post-apocalypse should feel like a lot of missed opportunities, visions of what could have been, etc.

I have to admit that when I accidentally logged onto a multi-player shard or whatever it’s called, the only thing I did was run around player-created vendors to buy some mutations on the cheap (and some more costumes). But we’re not going to count that as going against my solo-play ethos. I rationalized this as some kind of inadvertent jaunt through a tear in timespace to witness other timecurves (like timelines but more wavy) in which I’m not the only survivor of the apocalypse. Maybe when I do get finally bored with this game, I may log in again and see if I can join a team (no mic) and see how bad playing multi-player feels to me.

By far the worst offender of things I had to rationalize was the endgame. In Fallout 76, this consists of dropping more atomic bombs on Appalachia so you can summon more powerful mutant monstrosities so you can get more/better mutant guns and drop more bombs on Appalachia. None of this was put into some kind of ironic context by the game, at least not that I found.

This just seems crazy to me. We should be fighting to stop some mad max supervillain tyrant who wants to use a nuclear bomb in a futile effort to try to destroy the Bat Queen of the Zombies that is the ultimate boss of this game. But instead, the endgame is hunting for nuclear keycards flying around in robot helicopters, launch code fragments carried by zombie officers, cracking said code, and then storming an automated nuclear launch facility to launch the things that destroyed the world. In order to save it. Even Madman shook his head when I explained this to him.

In fact, pretty much all of the heroes I created couldn’t get their heads around this. And none of them wanted to do it. Businessman did a presentation on some potential profit/loss scenarios in dropping the bomb, but I could tell that the red ledger which serves as his heart wasn’t in it. Atomic Cowboy was willing to ride one of the bombs like a bronco, but only if he could defuse it with some last-minute heroics. Only Death Clown considered it, but eventually came to the conclusion that it was a joke that was too on the nose. Also, it would mean he would have so many fewer souls to hunt down personally and invite to enjoy the Circus of Biles deep in Hell. You know you’re on the wrong side of the moral equation when even a demon jester thinks you’ve gone too far.

I did the only thing I could do in this situation. I returned to the wasteland to punch things. I may not be able to get very far or complete many of the Operations which are the other repeatable endgame content, not without the atomic “flux” that is required for endgame crafting and is primarily acquired in zones recently devastated by an atomic blast. But so it goes. The quest for Punchalla isn’t supposed to be easy or fun, it’s a hard road made of bricks that sometimes don’t break. 

I’ll be moving on to something new soon enough. I’m not sure what that is yet. Destiny 2 released some new expansion but the only thing I read is they’re making their gearing system more complicated. It’s already too complicated. But I get it, they need people to log on and spend hours figuring out how equip their characters for each micro scenario because some gaming consultant told them that the only way to make people spend more money is to have them play longer and longer. And I’m willing to mess around optimizing my characters, it’s when you have to switch your build from one mission to the next that I lose interest. Eh, it’s getting harder and harder to punch things in Destiny 2 anyway. They recently upped the cooldown time on some abilities like punches, so people use more guns.

Then there’s a new Path of Exile expansion but I think I’m done hitting the bricks on that road. Maybe if they release some actually useful unarmed attacks, I’ll pick up the Facebreakers again.

I’ve only read bad things about Square’s Marvel’s Avengers or whatever it’s called. On the plus side, you get to play as the Hulk, and he is a classical punchist. Captain America punches things when he’s not fiddling around with his shield. Black Widow does some cool marital arts I’d like to learn in real life. The problem is that apparently you can’t choose to play as who you want in the story mode. You have to play each chapter as a particular hero. I started the game and the first character you play as is some kind of Avengers stan with maybe mutant powers. She doesn’t even get immediately thrown into some kind of world-threatening danger. No, the opening act of this game that should be about saving the world is walking around an Avengers-themed fair and completing mini-games without punching anyone. It is maddening. I don’t use this term lightly; WHY?

The newest chapter of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla is also out. It’s supposed to be an all-out crazy trip to Viking Hell which looks suspiciously like the Christian conception of hell, but whatever. It’s a whole expansion of things I can punch with the gloves of thunder I bought from their money shop. Probably the best money I spent in a while. Maybe they’ll even add gloves of fire, so I can fireball punch people like my friend Jon did when he hacked Morrowind. Viking Hell will be a fitting stop on the road to Punchalla. Maybe I can even punch Satan, I mean Sutr, in the face, and say “ring around the rosie, we all fall down, in Hell!” Then I walk away, while all of Hell explodes behind me. Hell Yeah.