Fallout 76 - Gameplay Footage

14 days til launch!

We're merging files tonight to start packing up for release, and another quick update on the 10th. We're testing installation packages on the 12th to ensure the files work correctly on various systems (the 6.17GB total package is kinda big for the 32-bit FOMM and NMM, so we need to be sure it won't hang on unpacking. MO2 is totally untested.)

So we'll run those tests, check to ensure everything is working, if not we'll fix it so it does.

Then I think by the 16th we should have everything ready to go and just waiting to upload to Nexus and ModDB.

That's really exciting!

7 years is a long time to work on one thing, and preparing to get it online in a finished state is a very rewarding feeling.

I'm sure we'll uncover bugs of the kind that turn up when 1000+ people play your project fresh out of the gate after only a few dozen have tested it over the last year, but we'll get those fixed ASAP once we know what they are. (You just never know with this kind of thing until it happens and can be replicated.)

We have a day one or two patch planned for any major emergencies, and a true deep patch a week later for any secondary emergencies. That's BETA 200, 201, and 202.

Then in November we'll issue 210 to patch up some audio I know for a fact I want to replace now, but we just can't afford it. I need to get the old Jenn Hail voice actress out and get a new actress in. And we have some fixes to do in preparation for the bridge to New Vegas that will happen in 220. That's again stuff that needs to happen after release, and won't affect the gameplay experience until late November.

Then in December on the 15th I plan to switch to 1.0, and that is the version of the mod that will be locked and done forever.

1.1 in 2019 will be all make by the community, and/or if Rick or I have anything we want to go back and touch up, which I doubt. 7 years is more than enough to call it done. Maybe the Frontier will want to add something for when they release? Backwards compatibility with some of their systems? But otherwise FNC is done on December 15th.

We win mod of the year, lock everything down, and switch gear to the new Game, on Unreal, using a new IP I've invented over the last several years called Project Morning Star.

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Morning Star will be fucking awesome.

I've always wanted a game like this, but one has never been attempted.

If you like the idea of a Game of Thrones type world with big medieval factions set on the ruins of an Alien Megastructure with cyborgs and aliens instead of fae and dragons? A kind of Fallout 1 and 2 role playing party mechanics mashedup with Rimworld-like basebuilding, survival, and mood mechanics? You'll love this.

It's meant to be infinitely replayable, more so than FNC.

Not a rouge-like, but vaguely similar. Romworld-like is much closer, but instead of focusing on base building, focusing on the daily survival of your main player characters and their exploration & dialogue with NPCs in the world.

You create your own backstory out of playing card like snippets that form your character Stats, Traits, and Skills based on your personality, life events, and past jobs on Earth.

Then you wake up on a beam of light, dropped off in an alien wilderness, with no directions other than to try not to die.

Major plot events happen as wars between the faction break out and treaties form, as global disasters befall the malfunctioning life-support platform that keeps the Shard alive, and virulent alien diseases and monsters are unleashed when new people/creatures are randomly dropped off on the Biros Pillars from across time and space.

It's going to be crazy, and that's an excellent gimmick. If you want to see ancient Vikings and Romans battle futuristic cyborgs and parasitic tentacle monsters? In a Role playing game where your decisions as a character starts and end wars? You're in for an awesome ride.

It'll be 2D with 3D elements, top down isometric, and using Unreal Engine and my art will look typically gorgeous and strange. I'm excited for it.

The loss of that pesky 3rd dimension really frees us up to do some lower budget storytelling that will be easier to mass produce with a smaller team. Keeping out total budget under 300,000, and we can do Early Access in a way that /makes sense/ since new stuff is dropped in Morganshir Shard from beyond the darkness all the time as part of the lore -- and the storyline is emergent as opposed to linear and explicitly scripted.

You want to build a little town and just focus on trade relationships, your pacifist religion, and making monuments to your god of peace? Go for it.

You want to be a nomadic raider warlord slowly building up a band of ravenous psychotics who thrive on murder, ravaging your way across the Shard? Have fun.

You have to keep your tribe from starvation in a world that doesn't care about you, in an ecology that was gradually falling apart millennia before you ever got there.

Working out how to navigate those age-old alliances and enemies through dialogue with primitive chieftains and imperial emperors will be the core of the game, all while surviving the narrative curve balls Morganshir throws at your tribe in the sandbox you started out on.

I'm excited to take that from the design docs to the engine.

It's going to be complicated later on, but the base of the game is actually very simple. No worse than making something like Hyper Light Drifter or Fallout 1 & 2, then adding the Rimworld-like elements on top of that.

There will be Local Maps to visit or settle on, then a Global Map of the world to travel across graphically, similar to Fallout 1, 2, and Rimworld. No levels as such (except the caves and pre-planned Main Faction locations that will factor into quests.)

Most NPCs you meet will use an emergent procedural quest generator and dialogue system, so you can build relationship points with any random NPC you trade with or engage in politics. That will let you dynamically build your own story without ever talking to a pre-programmed main NPC.

Those Main NPCs you do talk to can either be allies or enemies, and their quests are not essential to "win" the game: ie: Survive the Coming of the Light-Eaters. They will be the Main Faction leaders (there are only 16 of them) and they will be the only fully voiced NPCs in the game. The rest will all be text based. But those 16 will be deep, and they'll act a lot like the Leaders in a Civilization game, reacting to your alliances and behaviour in the world, but with a Fallout/cRPG dialogue box.

The tone of the game will kinda be Game of Thrones meets Stargate SG1 and Farscape. It's a medieval world, most of the technology is bronze age, based on human cultures abducted from the stone age and iron age. But instead of faeries and elves and dwarfs, the Faeya are humanoid insect-like bird people with no concept of human ethics or morality, and instead of undead you have the Nightmare-kin, who are possessed by semi-sentient parasitic organisms that pass through oral contact.

There's no magic, it's all sufficiently advanced sci-fi.

No flashy bullshit effects on screen either. Numbers popping up or big green particle crap. Just swords, arrows, and the occasional laser rifle.

Level-ups are all but gone. Getting stabbed in the guts with a cheap rusty sword sucks as much at level 30 as it does at level 1. But you can upgrade your skills, armour, and wealth, so you can send the well armed and armored plebs to die for you instead.

Gritty, often dark, each NPCs feels like they have personhood and a value worth keeping alive, and the factions will be very unique and rich with lore.

You know, the stuff you enjoyed from me on FNC.

Once FNC is released and patched up, I'll be switching to that project and getting funding for it. First via opening a Patreon and doing weekly blog posts and videos about the development process. Then in April-May after everybody has financially recovered from the holidays, and we've built the basic prototype, we'll aim to do a Kickstarter.

Morning Star's prototype will just be combat mechanics (which will be unique, timing based attacks that use HMBA tactics as the base of inspiration instead of press X to win) in a single map, with a story-driven sandbox throwing procedural events at you from the edges of that map, as you build up a small campsite to defend yourself. Some early dialogue too, which I already have written up.

Really cheap, easy, just enough to show the basics of the player's party management, combat, and some dialogue and base building.

We'll expand that vertical slice over the months to start including all the world exploration and other maps to visit, and then introduce the trade and crafting, then introduce emergent quests and factions, then global weather and narrative events, then finally add the main quest and deepen all these feature systems. That will end year one to one and a half.

From there it's just building the full game, and we'll do that for another year and a half, two years.

I need a core team of 5 people.

3 full time programmers
-----------Base Systems, Factions, World Map, Global Events, Economy
--------Gameplay Mechanics, dialogue, AI, animations
------ UI and Systems, Toolsets, Character Generator
3D Animator
Another 3D artist.
(I will also do 3D art, writing, 2D art, and GUI, dialogue, etc.)

Then I need part time accounting and payroll.

I have contract writer and lawyer, also part time.

I will need a few Unreal systems that will be short term contracts that only last a few weeks to a few months, some of which will need to come back a few times.

We will use a FEW stock art assets, but I plan to radically transform those myself and make enough original art that no one will notice. You see one medieval Survival RPG bed you've seen them all, but I plan to make our modular and fairly unique.

All our buildings will be modular, interior and exterior and snap to a global isometric grid. Never quite been done like I plan to do it but that's part of the adventure of game dev, right? You want to do something worth playing it'll require some risks. Ours just include slapping a modular roof on a modular wall (seamless interior and exteriors.)

Because this is all lowpoly and modular textures it'll be fast to make many iterations of weapons and armours, and building roof types, for our various 4 main factions. It's all the little things that'll get me, if I have to do it alone, so I think paying another full time 3D artist to come along will help, especially if we have a full time rigger and animator to do the various animals of Morganshir, which are alien and bizarre -- made from scratch and will take a while.

My design document is currently 137 pages long, but only the first 35 pages outline core mechanics. The next 40 pages are lore and a big list of all the items in the game that need art made, and what their stats will be.

The rest outline our scripts for the procedural land, character, and quest generator. <- which will be a programmer's call to fame after he codes that. It's a really sophisticated, very well thought out mechanic which ill allow us to rapidly iterate on emergent quests, and build a world full of rational simulated character with wants and needs the player can interact with and exploit (when they're not getting their ass kicked by it.)

It's inspired partly by Starsector's factions and map, but with some Civilization-like war, trade, and politics. But very simple, using my PENTA System to refine those needs down to just 5 core stats and a trade economy that's reasonable, based on historic justifications for war and trade. I think that backdrop will make for a way more deep and interesting RPG, one that's never been done before.

It's definitely not, "oh, I'm just going to go sell all my bear asses to this trader and finish this quest," it's, "the Vyn declared war on the Gehenna, and now their arms dealer in their forge city needs iron urgently. I'll bring him my iron, if I can get past the heavy taxes they just placed on iron at the gate. So now I'm smuggling iron ingots past the guard from my mine I built back home. But the Gehenna are hardcore religious fanatics, so I need to send my Gehenna loyal NPC to do it, then kill them on the way home before they convert my tribe to Rygar's insane personality cult. Then smuggle my money out of the city with my other NPC before the guilt of killing his friend makes him go crazy."

Which is the stuff I've always wanted in an RPG, but no one has ever been brave enough to do it with simple mechanics like this in a sandbox. They've always relied on heavily scripted quests (which I did too in FNC.)

So instead of focusing on explicitly, purposefully crafted dialogue narratives that are pushing you from point A to point B on fetch quests, I want to focus on emergent quests and have our dialogue remark on that.

I'll be hard to put together, but the lore and world building is going to be very fun, and I enjoy the stuff I have made so far.

It's rich with potential for narrative fiction, as well as gameplay.

Morning Star would actually make a really good table top as well, so maybe one day we can do that, reusing our materials and farming it out to our associates who make table top RPGs. (I have friends that do it for a living.)

So yeah.

14 days left til FNC is public, then I finally have a plan for the next thing.

I'm excited.

Tonight I'm gonna work on the last audio that needs to be cut, and those last videos, then tomorrow I'll update the last yellow items on my bug list.

And that's really it.

Go do some copy editing til release, and help that project out. Make sure the Russian Localization team has everything they need to be ready to go. Then pack up, test distribution, and we're off.

Wish us luck.