Random Thoughts – Randocity!

Vault 94 was to be one of the first “group dungeons” (i.e., vault raid) to come to Fallout 76’s Wasteland. Vault 94 is scheduled to close when Wastelanders opens. Let’s explore.

Group Raid Areas

With every online game that Bethesda has produced, at some point during the game’s online lifecycle, Bethesda introduces higher level group dungeons. These dungeons usually entail the need to be at least level 50 or higher and you’ll need pretty decent weapons and armor to survive. So, with that, Bethesda introduced Vault 94 as a group raid area within Fallout 76 sometime around August 20th of 2019. No, it hasn’t been open for every long at all. When something is bad, though… *shrug*

Hodge Podge

After having visited Vault 94 myself, I can conclusively say, “It’s a mess.” Oh, and what a mess it is… in more ways than one. Not only is the plant life overgrowth abundant throughout the vault, finding anything in the disaster of a vault is an absolute chore… and that’s even if there weren’t a single enemy down there. What’s worse is the reward, but we’ll come to that topic soon enough.

Throw on top of the fact that the entire interior is an unmitigated disaster of a design, you have a never ending smorgasbord of enemies thrown at you continually. From Ghouls to Mirelirks to Mirelirk Kings to pretty much you name it and it’s in down there. I’m surprised they didn’t throw a Yao Guai, Mothman and a Scorchbeast in, too.

Lag City

It’s not so much that there shouldn’t be enemies there, it’s that the enemies are so densely packed in that space that, when combined with the overly detailed plant overgrowth 3D environment, the game’s engine simply can’t keep up. It gets so laggy, you can barely even run and shoot. I can’t even imagine taking a team of 4 people down there with miniguns. The entire run would come to a crawl. It would become so laggy, it would be pointless to try. It’s bad enough with two people down there.

Bethesda way overcompensated with this vault and pushed the engine way beyond its limits. It’s also quite clear that Bethesda didn’t even bother to run any performance or gamer tests to determine how badly this challenge ultimately failed. Yes, if you’re really diligent and patient (and can wade through the myriad of problems), you can complete the dungeon and get your ending reward. The problem is, that end reward so very much sucks. It’s honestly one of the worst reward drops I’ve seen from Bethesda.

The point is, this raid is ultimately pointless. It’s overly difficult with the number of enemies thrown at you, but it’s made much more difficult by the fact that the interior frame rate lags so badly that you sometimes have to give up and leave. It’s just that bad.

Reward?

The biggest part of the problem with Vault 94 is actually its final reward. A great reward is the only reason to even consider going into Vault 94. Sadly, the weak reward and laggy play actually gives us no reason to go there. Without a reason to go down there, it’s a pointless exercise. Let’s get to it, then. The rewarded power armor skin is absolutely hideous. It’s not even the slightest bit “cool looking”. It’s so ugly, in fact, that that’s the sole reason no one wants to make this vault run. The armor set looks just like the interior of Vault 94, covered with overgrown plants. It’s not something that most people would want to wear, unless you want to look like an armor covered Poison Ivy from various comic books.

Why spend all of that time and effort fighting with the crap ton of enemies in a badly designed vault under HEAVY lag only to receive a hideously ugly PA skin as a result? It is a crappy skin worth less than 500 Atoms. You’ve spent a crap ton of your ammo and stimpaks to make that run and then you get an ugly worthless skin? Really? Clearly, no gamer wants to spend their time and resources doing this, just as Bethesda’s stats support. Bethesda needs to rethink its reward system. If you can’t make the reward worthy of spending the time, effort, ammo and stimpaks, no one will make the run. That’s exactly what’s happening with Vault 94.

It’s not even like power armor is actually very useful in Fallout 76. Bethesda has nerfed the usefulness and strength of power armor so much that you can actually do better out of power armor than you can in it. It also costs way too much to keep power armor repaired and then there’s the fact that you burn through Fusion Cores every few minutes now… when early in 2019 a Fusion Core could last you several days. Yeah, making the Vault 94 run is so not worth it. Locating 100% topped up Fusion Cores is nearly impossible unless you’re willing to take on the challenge of a possible PVP activity by taking over the Poseidon, Thunder Mountain or Monongah power plant workshops. This on top of Vault 94’s crapfest reward? Yeah, no. Even then, Bethesda could cause these workshops to begin dropping Fusion Cores of random lower charged amounts even from a Fusion Core Processor in the future, thus making Power Armor even more worthless than it already is.

In fact, not only is Bethesda continually nerfing every part of Fallout 76, making it worse and worse and requiring longer and longer grinding efforts, they’re also nerfing quest end rewards giving us less and less value at the end of each new quest. Instead, they choose to put those “great looking” things in the Atomic shop where you have to pay for them… instead of placing the items into the game as reward drops. Come on, Bethesda. You can seriously do better. If you can’t give us a reason to want to make a vault run, we’re not going to run it and you will simply have wasted months worth of programming efforts on nothing. You must make the end reward drop worth our time and effort and worthy of draining us of our ammo, thus giving us solid reasons to make that run!

Closure

From Bethesda’s January 16th’s Inside the Vault:

Through community feedback we’ve received and our own monitoring since that time, we’ve decided that Vault 94 and its Missions are not delivering the quality of experience that we had hoped to provide. As a result, we are currently planning to shut down Vault 94 alongside the release of the Wastelanders update.

It’s no wonder then that Bethesda’s recent stats show that Vault 94 barely has any visitors. Vault 94 is a crapfest extraordinaire. Not only is the reward incredibly bad, the dungeon itself is a horrid laggy mess. Bethesda would actually have to try harder to actually make a worse group dungeon than Vault 94.

Sometimes you just have to say, “Good riddance to bad rubbish” and with Vault 94, it’s far too long in coming. This dungeon needed a redesign the day it arrived. Yet, Bethesda entirely ignored gamer complaints. Unfortunately, we don’t know the exact release date of Wastelanders, so we don’t know the exact date of Vault 94’s closure.

Oh, and Bethesda states they will move that sucky power armor skin reward to some other location so we can get it in some other way after Vault 94 closes. Yeah, like we all want that ugly power armor skin? I don’t think so. Here’s what Bethesda states:

When the Vault is disabled, we are planning to make all of its rewards, including the exclusive Power Armor sets and Vault Steel, achievable through other means.

As if we’re going to be anywhere close to excited for that power armor skin or vault steel when it becomes available “through other means”. Don’t think so.

If you really, really personally love this lagfest of a vault, then you’ll want to make sure to run it a few times before it disappears. Personally, the last time I was in that vault is the last time I’ll ever be in that vault. Yes, it really IS that bad.

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