Exhausted musings of Fallout 76 (Patreon)

So for now I haven't played 76, and I'm not sure I'm going to.  Maybe in a few months I might come back to it, but I've been thinking of what I'd do if I was in Todd Howard's place and had to design the next fallout game.

I am told: it has to be multiplayer, and it has to have pvp, but NOT be an MMORPG.

Okay.  I can do that.  I'll leave the actual bugs aside since I have no idea how to code a game engine.

So first: the premise.  You, the player, are a convict.  The game starts with you being unloaded at a facility where Vault Tec is experimenting on the technology they're putting into the vault.  You get a mug shot where you can design how your character looks, and then get a little bit of Q&A where you can defend your innocence, say you were just following orders, or fuck the man.  You then get fitted with a special Pipboy and then told to fight someone.  When you do, you're electrocuted and dropped, and the guards laugh at you and say that so long as you got an inhibitor cuff on, you better not think about touching another player.

So you're given an injection, warned 'don't worry there's only a 30, 40% chance of death, tops, and that is when the bombs drop.  Everything goes dark and the lights go out in your cell.  There's yelling and screaming and then darkness.  You're then snapped out of it when a scavenger thaws you out, then offers to let your friends out if you guys can behave yourselves and help them get out past the VT RD drones.  Now your friends can help the scavenger, or kill them.  Eventually you get out and outside the gates of the VT facility is a half track truck.

Now here's where group and character interaction matters.  Dialogue has seven options: reasonable, humorous, intimidating, passionate, sympathetic, strange, and begging.  When dialogue is initiated, each player in the group has a response and the average wins, or else it selects one response at random, turning to the player that made the suggestion and moving to the next line of dialogue.  This is to make the group feel like they have some common dynamics.

Anyway, meet Reggie.  Reggie is teamed up with the scavenger, and he drives the truck.  If you help him out, he'll drive the truck for you.  He's also wearing one of the inhibitors, so you can't just shoot him, but he warns against trying to steal his truck.  After all, you don't know if he's got it rigged with a thermonuclear deadman's switch.  He just needs you and your friends to clear out some nasties on the road and make the route to the nearby settlement of Haven.  It's a dump, but most people won't try and shoot you.  Probably.

So Reggie is how you fast travel.  Instead of picking an icon and wooshing to your location, Reggie will drive you to a location once you've got it cleared.  This helps direct players towards places of interest rather than just randomly walking towards a quest icon.  Haven's a quest hub where you and your gang can either help people out or exploit them for all you're worth.  That's right.  Gang.  As if you and your friends aren't murder hobos, but proto-raiders... or proto-settlers.

You find out by doing adventures in Haven that W Va missed the worst nukes, but there's still plenty of problems with super mutants, dangerous critters, crazy robots from the army, and, of course, ghoul and human survivors.  There's three big groups fighting with each other, and three smaller ones.  Plenty of opportunity for someone with nothing to lose.  You also find out that Vault Tech injected you and your gang with a variant of the FEV virus that has, potentially, made you immortal... provided you don't die of cancer first.

So the factions can be broken down into order, anarchy, and entropy.  The order are proto-enclave members of the us military trying to rebuild the old government.  The anarchists simply want the freedom to do whatever they want.  The entropy want to tear it all down and start anew.  None of these factions are 'good'.  They're all different ways of looking at the world.  The player's gang can decide how they want to tackle it.  They can switch factions.  They can become raiders or they can become heroes.  Or they can just play all three against each other.

The main quest is finding a cure for your FEV, and avoiding those who want to cut it from your still twitching corpse.  The leader of a powerful cabal called The Senator wants the immortality, cancer be damned.  And he has no problem if the gang wants to kill off the leaders of all the other factions and give it to him.

So how does the PvP work?  Well, Reggie finds a route to an 'isolated location'.  Might have some nasty things.  Might just have junk.  He pulls in to an isolated instance at one of  4 random 'starts' and an NPC quest giver.  The quests are the usually 'kill X' or fetch Y'.  Nothing plot critical.  Problem is that your gang isn't the only one, and in this area, the inhibitors are off.  Oh, you probably won't die thanks to your FEV.  Reggie will pull your asses out, minus your caps and some ammo, if you get knocked out.

Now whomever completes the quests turns on a beacon and gets an hour long, map wide buff.  60 minutes later, the beacon resets and others can fight for it if they want.  The battle fields will be interesting and dynamic.  An underground coal mine.  A bunker.  A hydro electric plant.  A cavern.  Whatever.  People can go there and shoot the bajesus out of each other.  Don't want to PvP other players?  No problem.  Just don't go to any of the arenas.  One settlement even offers an arena where players can PVP for an NPC crowd watching from a stadium.

Now Reggie isn't just your transport.  Nope.  He's also your stash.  And if you do quests for him, his weight increases from 500 to 1000 to 2000 pounds.  Heck, you can also upgrade Reggie's ride.  Want to add a camper so you can get a sleep and food buff every time you rest inside?  Sure.  Want to add equipment containers and increase the stash even more?  Sure.  Want to add a power armor repair and fabrication bay?  Sure.  Want to add a turret so that Reggie can pacify the fast travel points?  Sure.

Eventually you find a sweet piece of equipment: the molecular operational rearrangement equipment, or MORE.  Reggie can tow it where you need it, and one of the factions can offer you an engineer who knows how to use it.  (They don't want it because MOREs have a tendency to, occasionally, blow up.)  With it, the engineer can fabricate a base of operations for you.  You choose the site.  The engineer provides the aesthetic.  The settlement is a player instanced base.  You can own your own base, or tag your friends to be able to make choices about the base.  You tell the engineer what you want built, and he tells you the materials you need to scavenge to build it.  Periodically your base will be attacked, and if you ask an inhibitor de-activator be built, it can even be raided by other players.  But you decide.

Now this means players aren't laying out their own bases.  Instead the bases will be molded according to the players wishes.

Anyway, those are just my thoughts.  Time to sleep now.