Fallout 76 And The Death Of Video Game Franchises – Reader’s Feature metro.co.uk

A reader discusses the launch of Fallout 76 and how it’s contributed to a year that may have killed off more major franchises than any other. Well, this has been quite the week. After the beta I think we all realised that Fallout 76 wasn’t going to be a classic, but I at least assumed that it would brute force its way to a halfway decent score because of the brand, Bethesda’s reputation, and the fact that Fallout 4 was pretty buggy too but people enjoy that fine. But no, apparently the game’s even worse than imagined. I haven’t played it myself, although if its price drops really low on Black Friday – which seems likely – I might well own it by the time you read this. Although the fact that a game that was released less than two weeks ago could already be almost half price is the sort of mind-boggling situation I wouldn’t have believed possible even a month ago. But at least that means Bethesda are being punished for their failure, which is never a given in these situations. But as others have already pointed out they’re kind of stuck supporting Fallout 76 now because 1) it’d be years before they could ever make Fallout 5 and 2) it’d make them look even worse if they decide to just leave everyone that had bought it in the lurch. Which means we’ve now got to endure weeks and months of stories about how Fallout 76 has received some magic patch that suddenly makes it the game it should’ve been. Except then we go and play it and find out it hasn’t fixed anything, just added new features nobody asked for. I can already picture the less scrupulous parts of the Internet already writing their ‘This is why you should play Fallout 76’ articles ahead of time and just editing in a few details when it actually happens. The only thing I’m not sure about is whether this would happen before or after they run their, ‘Fallout 76 isn’t as bad as people thought’ features. It’ll probably be them first though. In fact, I’d be surprised if they don’t start appearing before the end of the month. The whole thing is a disaster and the worst thing is that the game just doesn’t seem to deserve the attention in the first place. The only reason any of us are talking about it, and I’m contemplating buying a game I know to be bad, is because it’s part of a famous franchise. If this was Ballout 77 from some no-name developer none of us would be giving it a second though, it probably wouldn’t even have been reviewed by most sites. And yet here we are and we’re probably looking at months and moths of coverage on a game seemingly no-one likes and everyone agrees is badly broken. One thing you can bet on is that next week’s chart is going to show that yet another major franchise is going to have seen a major drop in sales. And then everyone that likes the game will claim that it’s just because of digital downloads and then people that don’t like it will be pointing to it as proof that it’s a complete failure. Neither will be entirely true, but there does seem as if there’s something odd going on with the majority of big franchises at the moment. Since everyone seemed to love Call Of Duty: Black Ops 4 I expected Activision to immediately hit us with, ‘fastest selling Call Of Duty ever’ stories or at least ‘fastest selling since Call Of Duty 4’. But all we got was some vague stuff about it being PSN’s best digital download. Battlefield V has obviously been a flop, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey seems to vary wildly by country, and even FIFA 19 was strangely quiet about how it had done. Hitman 2 seems to have killed the franchise more effectively than Square Enix ever could and I imagine we’ve seen the last of SoulCalibur and maybe even those indentikit Lego games. And then you have Fallout 76 which may have been the final nail, destroying the illusion that franchises can go on for ever and are effectively critic-proof. If that’s its legacy then it will have actually done more good for the games industry than most. I’m pretty sure that’s not what Bethesda were shooting for, but then if they were using V.A.T.S. it’s no wonder they missed…