Author: Trafficblast

Compared to the previous entries in the series, Fallout 76 is a very different kind of game. It’s the series’ first online game, with a far more in-depth focus on survival and crafting. This new approach on the familiar post-apocalyptic RPG’s mechanics will take some time getting used to–and players will be doing that together in a shared world. In the beta for Fallout 76 on Xbox One–with PC and PS4 coming next week–those who’ve pre-ordered will get an early chance to dive into Bethesda’s experimental take on the Fallout experience, with all of their progress carried over into the final game.

In this feature, we’ve come up with several tips and a short list of things to do during your first few hours exploring the ruins of West Virginia. As the earliest game in the Fallout timeline, set only 25 years after the bombs fell, the inhabitants of Vault 76 will explore a world that’s still in disarray after the nuclear apocalypse. Though the setting of West Virginia was largely spared from the bombs, radiation and chaos have seeped into the valley, irreparably altering wildlife, and unearthing creatures that many thought to be legend.

The first of Fallout 76’s betas is now behind us, but Bethesda has already announced when the next test will take place. Expect plenty more between now and the full game’s release date on November 14.

We recently went hands-on with Fallout 76, and came away with a number of interesting observations. While the main hook is the focus on surviving a violent, irradiated world full of other players online, the familiar aspects of the Fallout experience are alive and well in 76–there are even some surprises for the eagle-eyed fans to uncover. With that, here’s a quick survival guide to help you overcome the odds.

For more info on Fallout 76, be sure to check out footage from the first 50 minutes of the game, and along with our chat with Pete Hines about the current state of the game, and what lies ahead.

Whether or not you’re on board, Bethesda’s decision to make the next entry in the Fallout franchise an online-only game is bold. But just because it’s an online endeavor doesn’t mean you’re forced to play with others. Among all the questions I had about Fallout 76, the most important one that came to mind was: can the game work as a single-player experience? So, when the first beta launched, I played entirely as a one-man party. After about four hours of exploring, looting, and shooting, the foundation of Fallout seems readily apparent, albeit diluted. Of course, you’ll be missing out on an important aspect of Fallout 76 by going it alone, but its features that require a bit more patience make themselves clear. As a result, lone wanderers are likely to be rewarded in ways full parties may end up glossing over.

From both past experience in other games and watching my colleagues play Fallout 76 as a group, I understand there’s a tacit agreement to move at a rapid pace, going from one area or quest to another in search of action and high-level equipment. While that’s not exactly what the Fallout series has traditionally been about, it comes part-and-parcel to this style of game. That doesn’t leave much room for carefully listening to audio logs nor reading through notes left behind, let alone soaking in the environments in relation to those narrative pieces. Playing alone affords you the opportunity to do that.

One of the many notes you’ll read throughout Fallout 76.

Environmental storytelling has become a bit of a cliche when describing how games embed a narrative in the actual game space. It’s an indirect approach to story, and one that Fallout 76 has to rely on given the absence of NPCs and dialogue trees. Audio logs serve to paint the picture of how townships tried, and failed, to survive the harsh wasteland while simultaneously being a guide through the game’s world and systems. Audio logs are also the crux of unraveling the mystery of Vault 76’s overseer–the seemingly “main” questline. It’s your avenue to understanding the past and present of West Virginia. Admittedly, these vary in quality in terms of how interesting they are, but they’re critical to worldbuilding.

The wonder of discovering and rummaging through a new location, or taking in the scenic views after trudging through brutal swaths of the wasteland, has an intrinsically rewarding feel.

We’ve seen other games use these narrative techniques in the past. Much of the original Bioshock was built on the premise of listening to recordings from Rapture’s citizens as you navigate the desolate underwater society. Some of the most impactful moments in The Last Of Us came from a series of handwritten notes that communicated the desperation and humanity in the face of a zombie outbreak. Fallout has used these elements in previous entries, but they matter now more than ever.

There’s a lot to see in West Virginia with a variety of scenery.

While what’s missing are the societies and factions that made previous games’ roleplaying dynamic, it’s thematically fitting given that the setting predates the lore established from past games. And it’s strikingly lonely out there despite being an online game–only 24 players roam around West Virginia in the same instance. There’s so much ground to cover that it’s hard to see a collective of online players emerging from it; very rarely did I run into other parties. West Virginia is huge. It’s been in headlines that Fallout 76 contains the largest map in all the franchise; about four times the size of Fallout 4‘s rendition of Boston. It sometimes feels too big for its own good, as there’s a noticeable lack of density. However, like any other Fallout game, the world naturally instills a sense of curiosity to see what’s just beyond in the next town.

The wonder of discovering and rummaging through a new location, or taking in the scenic views after trudging through brutal swaths of the wasteland, has an intrinsically rewarding feel. After getting a grip of the game in the areas near Vault 76, I wandered to the Northeast and stumbled upon Grafton–a snowy town populated by Super Mutants, Protectrons, and the high-level blob-like Grafton Monster. It was a definite highlight digging up the town’s history and how it came to be run by Protectrons, and getting into tense firefights with enemies above my level. Unfortunately, I had to move on. Over the next northern range was an abandoned amusement park where I dabbled with the photo mode to take selfies with its alligator mascot on a broken rollercoaster. All the while, my radio is playing the undeniably catchy tunes of old-timey Americana (many of which are reprised from earlier games). These moments are, of course, available if you play in a group, but they make the single-player approach more meaningful.

Catastrophic events and inter-player tension very much seem to be integral to the end-game, so it’s tough to speak on the sustainability of exclusively playing alone. So far, quest structure and public events haven’t been much more than killing a certain target or finding an item in another town. And by virtue of axing traditional RPG interactions, combat becomes a bigger portion of what you do. Fallout 4’s shooting mechanics are the basis here, and while it’s more fluid than Fallout 3 or New Vegas, it doesn’t stand with the best modern shooters (and VATS won’t slow down time for targeted dice-roll shots)–it sometimes feels at odds with the type of game Bethesda’s trying to create.

Fallout 76 is a little unceremonious in its early hours, but I’m willing to give new approaches to long-running franchises a chance. It still has that distinct charm, where both the delightful and disturbing aspects of a bygone era in American history are frozen in time amidst post-apocalyptic retrofuturism. As more beta windows open up, I’ll be continuing to search for the game’s story and trekking along to see what’s beyond the wide forests and mountain ranges. Also, there are just as many questions left even after four hours. I can’t say that the single-player experience will hold up entirely, and we shouldn’t expect it to contend with the likes of New Vegas, but there are signs that it can work, and I’m hopeful. I’m also not sure where it’s leading me, and that seems to be exactly what Fallout 76 is about.

My Hero One’s Justice is a 3D arena-style fighter based on the popular manga and anime My Hero Academia. Unfortunately, One’s Justice offers a bare-bones recreation of My Hero Academia‘s story, and it doesn’t succeed at differentiating its offline modes. The game does have its moments, though, capturing the thrill of grandiose superhuman battles and the distinct fighting styles of the series’ main characters.

My Hero Academia takes place in a world where most individuals are born with superpowers called Quirks. Izuku Midoriya, the main series’ protagonist, is unlucky enough to be born without one. However, when Midoriya’s role model, All Might, sees the young boy bravely try and rescue his childhood friend/bully Katsuki Bakugo from a supervillain, the world’s number-one hero takes the Quirkless teen under his wing. All Might helps his protege get into U.A. High School, Japan’s top school for those who want to be superheroes, where Midoriya ends up in Class 1-A with Bakugo and 18 other first-years who all have powerful Quirks.

One’s Justice’s Story mode briefly touches on this before jumping ahead to My Hero Academia‘s sixth arc, “Vs. Hero Killer.” That’s fine if you’ve been keeping up with the manga or anime, but confusing if you’re using this game as your entry point into the franchise or just hoping to understand what’s going on at all. Even when you do understand what’s happening, there’s a lack of any kind of emotional impact, as the story plays off characters’ prior relationships with one another without actually telling you what those connections might be. However, the choice of later story arcs does justify the inclusion of certain characters, including the League of Villains.

You may also find it tough to follow the story since the whole game is presented in Japanese with English subtitles. The entire Japanese voice cast from the My Hero Academia anime return to voice their respective characters, and each delivers noteworthy performances. However, with no option to play through One’s Justice’s Story mode with the English dub’s voice cast, you’ll be fighting your opponents in Story mode while trying to read subtitles at the same time. It’s not impossible, but it’s not easy.

The game’s Story mode isn’t bad, though. One’s Justice’s campaign has optional “What If” missions that offer a look at what certain characters might have been doing between the story’s major events. Even though these missions aren’t canon, they’re written well enough to fit the larger plot and it’s believable that they really took place. Plus, they further flesh out minor heroes and villains that haven’t gotten as much screen time in the anime.

One’s Justice’s other four major modes–Local Match, Online Match, Arcade, and Missions–are where you’ll probably be spending most of your time with the game. Local and online matches pit two opponents against each other in a best-of-three fight, with the former allowing you to go up against a computer or a friend in couch co-op and the latter sending you online to try and climb up in the rankings. You can also dress up your characters with new costumes and cosmetic items that you unlock by playing the game and show off your custom outfits in local and online fights. A fighter’s wardrobe doesn’t provide any in-game benefits, but it is rather fun to dress someone up as one of My Hero Academia‘s characters that aren’t included in the game, like Mei Hatsume or Gunhead.

In Arcade, you face off against computer-controlled fighters in a six-tier ladder where opponents get stronger on every rung. There is a slight bump in difficulty compared to Local Match, but it’s not enough to make Arcade feel different from playing six consecutive local matches against AI. Missions mode is like Arcade, but with added optional requirements that you can fulfill to earn bonus cosmetic items. Those optional requirements are typically what you’re trying to do anyway–such as winning every match or getting a good rank from a well-placed combo–so they don’t force you into playing differently from the other modes. All four modes play essentially the same, with the biggest difference being whether you’re going up against a computer or another human being.

Each of the fighters in One’s Justice’s roster are unique. Some handle similarly–Tenya Iida, Gran Torino, and Deku: Shoot Style are all speed-based fighters, for example–but no two characters attack the same way, even the ones who have the same Quirk. 19 fighters are available at the outset, with another unlocked by playing the story and two more offered as DLC. Attacking is fairly simplistic, with one button for melee moves and another two for using different aspects of a character’s Quirk. That said, each fighter’s moveset is varied enough that you can form multiple strategies with a single character. Bakugo’s powerful Explosion Quirk, for example, doesn’t usually have much range, but he can charge it up to do larger, albeit slower, attacks. His Quirk also has a bit of kickback, so while in the air he can attack to quickly change his trajectory, and even keep himself airborne almost indefinitely for a faster, hit-and-run approach to combat.

Each fighter’s moveset is varied enough that you can form multiple strategies with a single character

Learning the different fighting styles for a particular character–and then implementing their unique unblockable, grab, counter, and Plus Ultra attacks into your strategy–is key to mastering each one. Once you understand the basics, going up against computer-controlled opponents won’t hold much challenge, but it does pave the way for more enjoyable moments in PvP play. When two players who know their respective fighter’s strengths and weaknesses go head-to-head, it leads to some tense, yet exciting battles. And with One’s Justice’s relatively easy learning curve, it’s not all too difficult to feel competent with at least a few characters and jump into a ranked Online Match.

The small moments of fan service during each fight are a nice touch too. Most Easter eggs come through in the characters’ Plus Ultra special attacks, such as Ochaco Uraraka’s Meteor Shower, but they show up cosmetically as well. The sleeves on Midoriya’s suit will tear and his fingers will break if he uses an all-out Delaware Smash, for example.

It’s a shame My Hero One’s Justice’s Story mode doesn’t do a good job introducing the world of My Hero Academia, with several important narrative beats either missing or revealed through subtitles while you’re busy trying to fight. The offline modes against AI don’t do much for the game either. However, One’s Justice’s combat is both accessible and enjoyable. When two players face off–either online or off–the game captures the adrenaline-pumping feeling of My Hero Academia‘s most notable fights. Pulling off moves from the manga/anime and outsmarting an opponent with devastating combos feels rewarding, and that’s enough to keep the player coming back to the game for more.

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Red Dead Redemption 2 is out now on PS4 and Xbox One, and we’ve been pouring hours into Rockstar’s open-world Western. And if one thing is apparent, it’s this: there are a LOT of different ways to spend your time in this world.

In the video above, Jake Dekker (@jacobdekk), Lucy James (@lucyjamesgames), and Mike Mahardy (@mmahardy) discuss the ways they’ve enjoyed Rockstar’s open-world, from incidental dialogue to seemingly minor mini-games. They also talk about the different HUD options available, and whether it’s worth playing the game in first-person.

For more on Red Dead Redemption 2, stay tuned to GameSpot throughout the coming weeks. We’re publishing guides, discussions, video essays, livestreams, and more throughout the rest of the year. There’s a lot to cover in Rockstar’s newest release – see you out there.

Eighteen million copies of Football Manager have been sold over the last decade. Of the 1 million-plus people who bought Football Manager 2018, 46% were still playing it in September this year, 10 months after the game first launched. Of all those who bought it–including people who picked it up on the cheap in a Steam tsale–the average play time was 285 hours.

Whichever metric you want to use, Football Manager’s numbers qualify it as a success–especially given it’s frequently called a glorified spreadsheet by those who fail to understand either the game or the sport it masterfully simulates. But Football Manager’s impact transcends sales figures: This is, let’s face it, a niche title, and a tough one to sell to those not already obsessive over soccer. Yet it arguably has a similar level of cultural relevance to FIFA, which sells many times more copies every year and no doubt has a budget many times larger. Sports Interactive’s long-running series–previously known as Championship Manager before a new partnership with Sega was finalized in 2004–is referenced as much on games forums as it is on the terraces around the world, and even has comedy routines based around stories of players dressing up in suits after taking Wycombe Wanderers to the FA Cup Final.

People have even gotten jobs off the back of their FM prowess: Matt Neil landed a role with Plymouth Argyle’s analyst team after researching the club for years on behalf of Sports Interactive and playing its game religiously. Vugar Huseynzade, meanwhile, was appointed head coach of Azerbaijan Premier League club FC Baku off the back of his successes inside SI’s management sim. Lincoln City’s Cowley brothers, who hit the headlines last year when their National League side beat Premier League Burnley to get to the FA Cup quarter-final, called playing Championship Manager as children their “homework” that helped them train for the real thing. One suspects their collective tongue was planted firmly in cheek, but there are clearly real-world professional coaches out there who got a taste for management from the PC game.

“I find the whole thing absolutely bonkers,” series director and Sports Interactive head Miles Jacobson told me in a recent visit to the company’s London studio. “When someone sends me a tweet saying, ‘Your game helped me through a really, really bad time in my life,’ whether that be someone being in hospital, whether it be depression–which is obviously something that lots of people suffer from now–whether it be someone with anxiety. The fact that it’s helped so many people through that is bonkers.”

It’s not just people that Football Manager helps: the series’ extensive database of real-world players–and 1000-strong army of researchers–goes mostly unmatched in the world of football. For many professional clubs, it pays to simply license SI’s data rather than attempt to build a directory of their own.

“[In some situations a club will] see a video from a player and think, ‘Wow, they’re very good,'” Jacobson says. “But, they live in Bolivia. They’ll call up and ask us, ‘What does your Bolivian researcher think?’ so they can decide to go and watch them or not. Some of them are doing due diligence on players, such as wanting injury histories. Some of them have the complete database and get it regularly updated and use it as part of their scouting system.

“There’s one massive, massive club who are looking to do their own data project, and they licensed our database to be the starting point for their data project. They wanted to know what attributes we look for and have based it pretty much identically on what we’ve done. There are other clubs who have their own data projects who’ve come to us and said, ‘We only look at these four indices. Can you weight it like this and then work that out for us on all the players, and then let us know which five players we can sign to replace this center-back, who has very similar stats, but [rather than being 29 like him] we need to know who’s going to be like them in three years’ time.’ And we do that as well. It works in very different ways with different clubs.”

Football is heading further and further down a data analysis path, and in this respect many professional clubs are playing catch-up to what SI has been doing for years. In an Inception-like move, Football Manager now lets you hire data analysts within the game to research other clubs’ players and analyze your own team’s movement and possession, among other variables.

It’s here that the impact of Football Manager among younger fans can be felt: With such detail in its simulation, the series is educating a generation of soccer supporters to a level even professional coaches couldn’t imagine 30 years ago. Fans now have knowledge of tactics, transfer regulations, and detailed administrative processes in football that they would previously have never known existed. Jacobson says the educated football fan likely owes their knowledge to a number of sources, but there’s no doubt Football Manager is the most detailed game of its kind around. Even if you don’t play FM, you may well have heard a friend boast how their inverted winger 4-2-4 system had helped them win the Champions League with Grimsby Town. Whether the football industry sees this increase in knowledge as a positive is another matter, however.

“There’s certainly some managers who have a problem with the fact that supporters have more knowledge about football now than they did back then–whether that’s from our game, whether it’s from FIFA, or WhoScored, or any of the stat websites out there,” says Jacobson. “There was a point where you had a lot of old-school managers meeting new-school fans and the new-school fans were saying, ‘Why aren’t you looking at this player who plays in the Belarusian second division?’ They’d say, ‘How do you know that player?’ ‘Oh, he becomes brilliant in Football Manager.’ There are some people who see that as a negative.”

Aware of the effect his series can have on people and the football industry, Jacobson says there are two things Sports Interactive deliberately gets wrong in Football Manager. The first, injury frequency, is simply to make the game less frustrating for players. The second, the likelihood that a manager is sacked, is decreased with the knowledge that real-life football coaches face an increasingly hostile culture of being fired as soon as things start to go wrong on the pitch. If Football Manager had a higher rate of sacking than what we see in real life, it potentially wouldn’t be long until the real world followed suit.

I find the whole thing absolutely bonkers

Miles Jacobson

More recently the series has begun to actively use its influence to elicit change in the real world. Football Manager 2017 contained a number of differing scenarios regarding Brexit, and whether the UK would vote to leave or remain in the European Union in the then-upcoming referendum. The different scenarios, which also included a “soft” or “hard” Brexit, affected variables such as the likelihood of gaining work permits for foreign players, as well as simulating the increased controls on immigration the UK is likely to see post-Brexit. “We completely non-politically showed all the different scenarios that could happen around the UK leaving and how it would affect football, and it opened up a lot of people’s eyes,” Jacobson says.

The following year, some Football Manager 2018 saves contained computer-generated players who could, in some instances, come out as gay–a move no active professional football player has yet made. In 2014, German international Thomas Hitzlsperger became the first player to have played in the Premier League to come out, while United States midfielder Robbie Rogers announced he was gay a year earlier. Both men only felt they could come out after they had retired, though Rogers later returned to soccer with LA Galaxy.

“It was trying to show the football world that it’s completely normal,” Jacobson says of Sports Interactive’s decision to include the feature. “We took influence and encouragement from other sports, by people that have come out. You’ve had people come out in rugby. There’s a small merchandise boost and then everyone forgot about it.”

And if anyone disagrees with Sports Interactive changing the game in an attempt to change the footballing world for good? “Honestly, if anyone has a problem with players coming out in a game, I don’t want them playing the game,” Jacobson declares.

“We’ve worked with [anti-discrimination organisation] Kick It Out for 22 years, kicking racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and antisemitism out of football. We’ve worked with them because there’s no place for that rubbish in society. We are a multicultural dev team, we are a multi-gender dev team, and we are a multi-sexuality dev team. Everyone is exactly the same. We’re all humans. I don’t see why the football world has to be different to that.”