REP

Let’s begin with a quick set up of how Fallout 76 is to play. You and your pals get together as a group to start playing again, there’s some back and forth on times to get together, when you can all play so-on and so-forth. If you’re me, you’re thinking of playing as a group because the game by itself is a boring slog with narry a thing to do other than hunt for items in the eternal quest for Number Go Up. I’m about at my quitting point after playing recently for about 60 hours, and I think that’s quitting early. There’s plenty of game left, but I don’t want to fucking play this piece of shit for a minute longer because I just accomplished my goal. Our group got together about two weeks ago to start playing and we’ve had maybe about 12 of those total 60 hours of actual playing together. This is owed to how Fallout 76 actually plays: everyone has to do their own thing at their own time at their own pace. Participating in each others quests isn’t really possible, due to the questing format not being designed to actually progress everyone’s quests simultaneously.

You can’t play Fallout 76 with your friends. Not really. Not in a way that actually progresses everyone together in a herd. The idea of instancing and group quest progression has been something of a problem for MMO’s for many years, this difficulty arises from the technical hurdle of syncing people’s quest statuses, making sure all of the levers and doohickies line up across multiple players. Characters don’t behave like they can have variable save states, it’s not like you can do much if a quest is completed for player (A) as player (B). There’s no incentive or mechanism to align quests together, if anything it’s both faster and more rewarding to clear quests solo because instanced dungeons require repeated runs and the health scaling of enemies is such that you’re just wasting resources in some cases where many players are present. More players doesn’t mean more enemies, doesn’t mean more complex encounter design, doesn’t mean anything because this game is hardly a Fallout game to begin with, let alone one where play along with pals is meant.

In Childhood Psychology, the term “Parallel Play” refers to the behavior where kids are playing together in proximity whilst engaged in their own isolated activities. A classical example of Parallel Play might be one child doing a crossword while the other draws. Interaction in Parallel Play is idle chatter, rarely Parallel Play may incorporate both kid’s activities being interpreted in a shared narrative (my bestie growing up did this with me when we both played separate videogames, resulting in a shared fiction that incorporated narrative elements and scenario set-dressing). Fallout 76 is perhaps one of the most noteworthy examples of parallel-social gaming I have seen, as it separates your action from your peers’ so completely that you might as well be doing separate activities entirely. While Parasociality usually refers to a one-sided relationship, Parallel-Social activity might refer to what Parallel Play used to refer towards. We don’t occupy physical space, or even social space, or even virtual space… we exist in isolated pockets of space, time, and place with activities that have nothing to do with one-another.

Think of it like you’re all together in a Group Discord voice call, and playing separate games. That’s about the level of Parallel Play that is the default assumption in Fallout 76. I’ve noticed in a lot of different online games that this component of Parallel Play appears to be the default assertion, where many multiplayer games are isolating, solo experiences dressed up with “play with your friends” attached loosely onto the back of it. Since you might not always be able to play with your friends at the same time every time you boot the game up, the game has to have some kind of way to enable solo play. There’s a restraint problem on the half of the player as much as there is a problem for the developers to maintain restraint as well. I think this is a problem for many games which are built around gear grinds, loot drops, daily activities, and so-on; they are intentionally designed to eliminate the GROUP part of group play. Not every game has the capacity to tolerate this kind of Parallel-Social design, but most of the popular multiplayer games out there have some kind of independent tracking for level ups and progression which do not depend on group play. Incentives for group play are almost non-existent in a variety of games, Fallout 76 weakly offers some bonus EXP for specific group types and activities. You don’t have the capacity to increase drop rates per group member or anything, so it ultimately results in a flat experience where the game quickly loses its depth and interest.

Since Combat was never designed in the Fallout series around dynamic gunfights where players have to coordinate to take out foes, there’s no mechanism to actually challenge players. The main solution is to pump up health, as the game and engine cannot handle say, spawning a few extra enemies into a tight space. The AI isn’t made for it, the mechanics aren’t made for it, the whole experience as-is should be dead on arrival. If not for it getting very clearly monetized around convenience fees for dedicated solo players, the game would have absolutely no legs on it whatsoever. This essay is sort of my chance to tell myself it’s okay to walk on games like this because they have nothing to actually offer me. I can’t really get invested in a game with no group mechanics, no group dynamics, and no interest in fostering connection and synchronization of play between players. Even when they’re your friends, they’re playing the game solo. Everyone is isolated, no one shares resources, no one shares equipment, no one shares anything except maybe shooting the same 3 raiders together possibly at the same time. As a result, I think my final opinion is that I need games to actually design with social play in mind. I know it sounds inconvenient as fuck, but it really does matter here.

To developers who will never read this nor have the incentive to do it: Give me games where play groups are something that fucking matters. Where I can start a campaign or special string of missions with my playgroup that lets us all contribute to each-other’s progress, that requires us to all work towards the same goal, where Solo-play contributes towards that goal. That’s all I ask, and I think that’s what people need.