While we’ve been slowly getting answers to the huge amount of questions everyone has about Bethesda‘s upcoming online game, Fallout 76, there’s still a ton of things that need explanation. We didn’t get everything, but today’s QuakeCon panel certainly shed some light on a big question – how will the game deal with griefers?
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For those who aren’t familiar with the term, griefing is when someone goes out of their way to, well, give you grief in a multiplayer game. If you’re just trying to go about your own business, it can be a real pain in the ass. When it comes to player interaction in Fallout 76, Bethesda’s game director, Todd Howard, says choosing to battle someone else is a little bit like starting a bar fight.
“When you shoot somebody, you do a little bit of damage,” Howard said during the QuakeCon panel. “It’s like slapping somebody in a bar, like, ‘you wanna fight?’”
In other words, you’ll only do full damage to each other if you decide to engage in a fight, but if you don’t feel like it, the other player can only dish out those small hits. However, they can still kill you if they keep at it for long enough.
If you do decide to fight, there’s a bottle cap (the game’s currency) incentive based on your opponent’s level – the higher their level, the higher the reward for winning. If you die in the fight, you’ll be given an option to seek revenge, which doubles the incentive given for winning.
But here’s the best part: if you kill a player who didn’t want to engage in a fight, you become a “wanted murderer” and everyone in the server will be able to see your location and kill you for a bounty which comes out of your own pocket. On top of that, you’ll get no reward for the initial killing.
“You get no caps, you get no XP, you get nothing for becoming a wanted murderer except for the kind of social incentive people have online to be assholes,” Howard said. “We turn assholes into interesting content.”
If you decide that you’d like to become one of these assholes, your location will appear on the map as a red star, inviting everyone else to come and fuck you up, only you won’t be able to see them on the map.
On the point of dying, the team played with a number of different penalties, but found the best way to approach it was to have you drop only your junk when you die. You won’t lose any of your weapons or fancy items, you’ll only lose the junk items which you’ll be using to upgrade your base, your weapons, and other things. So if you do get taken down while you’re out scavenging, you’ll need to decide whether or not the amount of junk you had on you at the time is worth going back to your corpse for. Of course, once you stash your junk, it’s safe.
The panel also discussed the perks system, which will work as equipable cards you gain as you progress. Every time you level up, you’ll get a card pack to open which even comes with a stick of gum and a joke. Each card costs points to equip, with more points awarded to you as you reach higher levels. This means you’ll be able to make tweaks to your character throughout the game based on different situations. For example, some cards will work better if you’re playing with other people as opposed to going lone wolf.
If you’re hungry for more details, you can check out the entire sessions in the video below.
