GTA Online: Salvage Yard Review
You might be asking, “Is the Salvage Yard worth the money?” in GTA Online. The Salvage Yard is a new property you can own in GTA Online. Some gamers may be asking if this property is worth the money. Let’s explore.
Is the Salvage Yard Worth the Money?
Yusuf is a recurring character in the GTA series. He actually introduces you to one of his kin, Jamal. Jamal is the person who you will interact with if you decide to buy the Salvage Yard. Who actually runs this property is inconsequential, to be honest. It could have been anyone and the outcome of this would be the same.
In answer to the question, let’s explore the kinds of missions you can expect to play from the Salvage Yard.
The primary mission type, which incidentally requires you to become a CEO or VIP (which also costs money to set up separately), requires you access a computer in the Salvage Area. Keep in mind that this is a chop shop. There is no fixing or repairing here. The only thing that happens to cars you bring here is that they get chopped up and/or sold.
When using the computer, you get a choice of 3 car recovery missions. With each of these missions, the ultimate goal is to bring the cars back to the Salvage Yard. Getting that to happen is where these missions are a literal pain in the ass… and I don’t mean just the combat. If it were just combat, I could deal with it.
Mission Board Activities
The computer is how to access the main mission board. These are, like the Auto Shop, structured missions. However, the problem I have with these missions is that they are overkill. You’d think you were preparing for a heist. Instead, you’re literally just jacking a car and driving it back.
For example, one of the missions required 3 separate primary setup objectives, 5 optional objectives and possibly one or two others. The 3 primary objectives of one was 1) scope out the site, 2) recover some vehicle that might or might not be useful during the heist and 3) gather and hide weapons. The 3 primaries on another were 1) scope out the site, 2) destroy gas masks and 3) obtain a large truck.
Optional objectives include obtaining masks, obtaining clothing to wear or obtaining key cards for access.
These mission board activities are, bluntly, useless and pointless. For example, you had to go obtain an 18 wheeler truck, drag it all over Los Santos and then hand it over to Jamal… all for what? To drive it a total of 5 feet, get out of and then enter the Arena? Another objective was to recover a police helicopter. Oh, but instead of being able to grab the police helicopter I’m standing next to on the roof right where I am… nooooo, I have to drive halfway across Los Santos to pick up the exact same model of helicopter, but in a very specific location. *eye roll* All for what? To simply use the helicopter for only a handful of minutes solely to arrive at the site. These fetch quests are highly useless, annoying and exceedingly time consuming.
Intro Missions
The Salvage Yard tricks you into thinking the missions will be free to launch. Nope! Once you’ve completed the intro missions, you’ll find that it costs GTA$20,000 to set up each new mission. Who really knows if Rockstar won’t cause this setup cost to become some random amount between $20k and $100k depending on the rarity of the car in the future. This cost in addition to all of the convoluted prep? It’s stupid.
Tow Truck Missions
Separately from the computer mission board, if you have opted to buy a tow truck (rusty or new), having this vehicle unlocks a second way to make money with the Salvage Yard property. This activity is also what drives how much income shows up in your Salvage Yard safe. Doing more tow truck missions increases the daily take.
You can make two tow truck missions about every 30-48 minutes (I haven’t timed it). Once the two salvage bays are occupied, you must wait until the chop shop finishes chopping up the two cars into parts. You have no control over the speed at which this happens.
The average payout of a single car being chopped up is around GTA$30k plus or minus a little. If you wish to partake in this activity, you must visit the Salvage Yard, hop into the tow truck and start the tow mission. You will exit and then be given a car type and location. You must drive over there, latch onto the car with the tow truck and drag it back to the Salvage Yard. Once you do this, the chop shop activity begins on that car until it finally pays out many IRL minutes later.
Questions and Answers
Can I Keep the Cars I Recover?
No. The long answer is, kinda… but, you can’t do anything with the cars. Once you recover a mission board car, it gets parked in a space in the Salvage Yard. The only interaction you are given with that car is to sell it or scrap it out. You can’t call the Mechanic to drive the car as the Salvage Yard isn’t considered a Garage. There’s no way to use the “prized” cars you’ve spent a lot of time and money retrieving. So, what’s the point here?
Does the Salvage Yard have Garage Space?
No. Even though the Salvage Yard is about obtaining cars, that’s where its usefulness as a garage ends. It has no car storage spaces at all. You can bring one personal car into the Salvage Yard just for kicks, but the car will soon be ejected back outside. Unlike a garage that marks that your car is now living in that location, the Salvage Yard space doesn’t do this.
The Salvage Yard is not an official garage at all and does not show up under the Mechanic properties. Thus, any cars you retrieve for Yusuf and/or Jamal at the Salvage Yard are only good for selling.
If you were hoping for more garage storage spaces, this is not the property to buy. There is zero garage space at the Salvage Yard for personal use.
Are the Salvage Yard Missions Easy?
No. Like Heists and their associated heist excessive prep, this is exactly how the car theft missions are structured. These missions have not only major overkill setup, but most of the required mission objectives don’t serve any purpose in the final carjacking. For example, you might be required to steal an 18 wheeler truck, but the truck won’t be used in the carjacking. Meaning, you’d think you’d load the car onto the truck to drive it back, but no. Instead, you leave that 18 wheeler behind and never see it again. Instead, you’re tasked with driving the actual car back to the Salvage Yard.
More than this, there are many, many stupid and overkill additions to these missions. For example, I was tasked with obtaining an Arena car. When I got into the Arena, not only did I have to kill a major number of combatants, I then had to locate the car with a telescope, sit down and use a drone to disable the car with an EMP, then head down to the arena floor to a whole new set of combatants. Then, go over to the car, jack it and then drive it out of ONLY ONE single very specific exit that was marked.
After that, we come to find that the car is rigged with a bomb setting up a 2 minute timer. Not only is there a huge crew trying to knock you off the road, you have to make it to a quick stop garage to diffuse the bomb (signified by a completely black screen and a bunch of tool sounds dropping on the floor), which then exit back to a driving segment with the combatants back again… only to drop it off at the Salvage Yard.
Convoluted. It’s a friggin’ car.
Rockstar has lost their minds. If GTA had started off with these complex jacking mechanics, that’s one thing. Trying to introduce them now is insane!
Are the Tow Truck missions easy?
Depends. Some might require a light bit of combat, but most don’t. The difficulty is simply dragging the car back to the shop. The tow truck cable is unwieldy and stupid. If the car begins wagging too badly, it will detach and you’ll have to go hook it up again.
It’s not like some of us haven’t already bought the Slamvan flatbed truck which would be ideal for tow truck missions. Nope. They have to give us a crappy chain lift tow truck type for the shop.
Overall
Considering the cost to buy into a Salvage Yard (~GTA$2 million) + about GTA$2 million for the tow truck and other rather useless additions, that totals around GTA$4 million for this property. All for what? To recover a “mission based” car worth about GTA$300k or recover junker chop shop cars that will part out for about GTA$30k.
This is definitely not a property I’d recommend first if you’re wanting quick cash. If you’ve already invested in most other properties like the Nightclub, Arcade, Executive Office, Auto Shop (which is incidentally broken in this update), Facility, Bunker, Casino and various Motorcycle Club businesses, then the Salvage Yard might be worth it. If you’re just starting out in GTA Online, this is not the business to start with first.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 (Rockstar overthinks everything)
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No Man’s Sky: Guide to Galaxy Collecting
There are 255 galaxies in No Man’s Sky as of this article. Hello Games, however, could unlock more galaxies in the future. There are various ways to unlock each of the current 255 galaxies within No Man’s Sky. Let’s explore all of the ways and see which one is best.
Galaxy Center
The primary way that has been designed by Hello Games to unlock new galaxies within No Man’s Sky is to reach the center of each galaxy using a series of quests. Once you reach the center, your ship will be catapulted to the next galaxy in numerical order. From 1 through 255. If you’re in galaxy 1, then the next galaxy unlocked should be galaxy 2, then galaxy 3 and so on.
To unlock each galaxy, you will need to follow a very long, convoluted and involved Atlas quest line along with using black holes to hyperjump ever closer to the galaxy center. Performing this method to reach the galaxy center could take literal months to unlock just one galaxy. Attempting to get through all 255 galaxies in this way could take you years, assuming you follow Hello Games’s designed path.
Once your ship reaches the new galaxy, some of your ship’s technology will be broken and in need of resources to repair along with some of the technology in your Multitool. If you’re planning to use this (as designed) approach to unlock galaxies, it is strongly recommended to pick up a throw-away ship right before reaching the center. It also recommend to equip a throw-away Multitool. Then, when in the new galaxy on the other side, switch ships and then sell that broken ship and free up that slot. Then, switch back to your primary unbroken Multitool. This means you don’t have to worry about repairing any of that broken ship junk or a broken Multitool.
If you know you’re going to be doing this often to unlock many galaxies, then you’ll need to buy a super low priced functional ship each time and also equip that broken Multitool before proceeding to each galaxy center. You just need to make sure the ship you buy has enough hyperdrive distance to get to the center, which might mean buying and equipping distance mods.
However, thankfully there are much easier and faster methods to unlock galaxies that avoid this whole long tail quest and broken technology problem, but these involved using multiplayer.
Friends
After multiplayer was added to the game, Hello Games allowed you to follow your friends or a group out of the Anomaly station and into their system. This allows you to follow a friend into their system and their galaxy.
If you have a friend who has already unlocked a number of galaxies, you can unlock each of those same galaxies by using the Anomaly to follow a friend into them.
This method requires friends who already have galaxies unlocked. If you don’t have any friends like this, there is the another method below.
To use the friend method, you will need to have Internet and, if using a console, access to PlayStation Plus or Xbox Live to connect with your friends using multiplayer. The Nintendo Switch version of No Man’s Sky does not currently offer multiplayer, so this method is presently not available for those playing on the Nintendo Switch.
Anomaly Terminus
This is the fastest and recommended method to unlock galaxies, but again this doesn’t work on the Nintendo Switch. It also doesn’t require broken ships or spending months traveling to the galaxy center. However, it does take time to collect the galaxies in this way. When you do, it’s way faster, easier and doesn’t require having any friends online. In fact, this method doesn’t involve friends at all. It does, however, require multiplayer, so you will need to have multiplayer and crossplay enabled to unlock this method and offer you the best chances at finding galaxies to unlock.
As stated, if you’re playing on the Switch, this method is unavailable. This means when playing on the Switch, you’ll need to rely on the first method (galaxy center) described above to unlock galaxies. It is presently the only method for those playing on the Switch or for others who are playing the game in offline mode. If you are playing on a platform that supports multiplayer, then the Anomaly Terminus method works exceptionally well.
On the second floor of the Anomaly station is a giant Terminus that allows you to warp to your bases, other space stations and even to bases of people who are currently visiting the Anomaly at that moment. It is this latter part that is how you find galaxies to unlock.
Method
- After visiting the Anomaly station, head up to the giant Terminus
- On the Terminus, select ‘Space Anomaly’. This isolates the screen to only bases by other players actively visiting the Anomaly at that moment.
- Click on each base listing to see if the base is in a galaxy other than Euclid (or whatever galaxy you are presently in). Note that bases that don’t list a galaxy in the base information means that it is in the same galaxy where you presently are. If you’re in Euclid, it means that that base is also in Euclid. If you’re in Eissentam, then it means the base is also in Eissentam.
- If the base information doesn’t list a galaxy name, then move onto the next. Keep clicking on each base listing until you find one that contains a galaxy other than the one you’re in. If you don’t see any bases with a new galaxy, jump to step 8.
- Once you find a base that is in a different galaxy, you may be forced to wait while it downloads. If it fails to download, back out and click on the base name again. It sometimes takes 2 or even 3 attempts to load before it allows you to warp to that base.
- When ‘Warp to [Base Name]’ appears, click it and warp to that base.
- Now you’re in that new galaxy. All you need to do is establish a base in that galaxy and you can visit it at any time. If you’re really lazy, you can visit the space station in that system and that will allow you to return to that galaxy through the space station. I don’t recommend the space station collection as a method because space stations have chances of dropping off of the list. Built bases never disappear from your list.
- If you fail to find any galaxies in the Anomaly Terminus list, don’t fret. You have two options: 1) wait for more players to show up (could take a while) or 2) (faster method) Go to your ship, fly out of the Anomaly, turn around and fly back in. Flying out and back in will put you into a brand new lobby with brand new players. At this point, rinse and repeat beginning at step 1. It could take as many as 3 fly-out-and-in attempts to find a player with a base in a new galaxy. If you try more than 5 times without success, take a break and try later.
There are some tricks here. There are times where in step 5 the game simply refuses to download the base. This either means the player has left the game entirely for that session or there’s a connectivity problem. You’ll simply need to skip that base and try to find a different base to that same (or a different) galaxy. I’ve lost several possible galaxy collects as a result of failing to download the base. Don’t be discouraged as there are plenty of players and plenty of chances to find it again or even new galaxies to add to your collection. After all, there are 255 of them.
You’ll also need a relatively good memory to see and recognize galaxies you have already collected. Once you collect about 20 or more, you may not recall all of the galaxies you presently have collected. If you see a base in a galaxy you don’t recognize, warp to that base anyway. It’s better to be there and not need it, than skip and and find that you do. Once you reach the new galaxy, you can spend the time to dig through your own bases in a Terminus to find out if you already have base there. If you already have it, then fly into space and call the Anomaly and start over at Step 1.
Mix and Match [Updated: 5/30/2023]
I’ve decided to add a few more thoughts about galaxy collecting. There’s no need to constrain yourself to one type of collecting. If you like the idea of using the galaxy center at times, then by all means use that. If you like the thought of being able to find galaxies using other player bases, then use that.
One thing I didn’t mention is that you can use glyphs as a shortcut to reach the galaxy center of each universe, assuming that you want to use the galaxy center approach. This will help players on systems without multiplayer, like the Nintendo Switch. If you’re constrained to using the galaxy center approach, then you’ll need to search Google to find shortcut glyphs that will lead you to the galaxy’s center.
You’ll first need to know all of the names of the galaxies to search Google for the galaxy center glyphs. Know that there are a few legacy galaxies that appear to not be collectable using the galaxy center approach. These are galaxies 256 (Odyalutai) and 257 (Yilsrussimil). Once you reach the center of galaxy 255 (Iousongola), you will be taken back to galaxy 1 (Euclid).
If you are using the galaxy center approach and after reaching a brand new galaxy, you’ll further need to find a portal in that new galaxy with which to use glyphs. This will take some time to locate a portal. For this reason, the Anomaly approach can be faster, assuming you have access to multiplayer.
Future Expansion?
Note that there is at least one special numbered galaxy named Hacolulusu. It is numbered both +MAX32INT+1 and -MAX32INT+1 at the same time… or, in number, +2147483648 AND -2147483648 simultaneously. It is likely that Hello Games reserved this galaxy endcap placeholder to prevent accidentally assigning it. The bigger tell with using this 32 bit sized integer is that it suggests that 255 isn’t the maximum number of galaxies possible. In fact, it seems Hello Games may have reserved the possibility of at least 2,147,483,647 (2.1 billion) galaxies (unsigned) or up to 4,294,967,294 (4.2 billion) galaxies (signed), while artificially constraining the number to 255 at this moment.
The fact that the galaxies Odyalutai (256), Yilsrussimil (257) and Hacolulusu (+/-MAX32INT+1) exist strongly suggests the possibility of offering more galaxies than 255. Further, it suggests the game is artificially constraining itself into using an 8 bit integer value when No Man’s Sky is very likely using a 32 bit signed integer to store the galaxy ID values.
What this all means is that Hello Games could open up more galaxies in the future, possibly expanding it to 512 or 1024 or some similarly lower and more manageable value. It’s unlikely Hello Games would open up the full 4.2 billion galaxies, though.
Etiquette Suggestion
If performing the Anomaly Terminus method (using strangers) for collecting galaxies, I recommend leaving the system to finding your own system for setting up your first base in that new galaxy. However, if you find a planet that is so overwhelmingly good in that player’s system that you can’t pass it up, then by all means establish a base there. For example, were I to find a spot on a planet with 20 Mold Balls, I’d have no problem establishing a base around that.
However, as a matter of etiquette and courtesy, I recommend establishing bases in systems that you have unlocked yourself rather than encroaching onto that person’s system that you leeched from the Anomaly.
If you happen to land in a galaxy and system with hundreds of bases already, then it won’t matter if you establish a base there. There are a number of these out there that have been used for both Expeditions and for Weekend events.
Good Luck and Happy Galaxy Hunting!
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Starfield: Can this Game Survive?
Bethesda, a now wholly owned Microsoft game development studio division, stands poised to release its new space role-playing game (RPG) entitled Starfield on September 6, 2023.
Starfield’s release has already been delayed once by nearly a year, when it was formerly slated for release on November 11, 2022. Starfield’s nearly year long delay along with being made exclusively available to the Microsoft’s gaming platforms, coupled with its Game Pass inclusion might not signal great things for this upcoming game release. It might not even signal great things for Bethesda as a company. Microsoft is definitely not doing any favors for Bethesda. Let’s explore.
PlayStation 5’s Banner Launch
According to Kotaku, Sony is now seeing banner sales with its PS5. It can be difficult tell what’s boastful speculation around such sales, but one thing is certain, getting your hands onto a PS5 console can still be difficult nearly 3 years after the PS5’s November 2020 launch. For nearly 2 years, the PS5 was almost impossible to find on store shelves. When they did manage to appear, they were gone within hours. Going into the third year, it’s become somewhat easier to find as the demand has somewhat eased, that or Sony has drastically increased production or both. “Somewhat”, doesn’t imply that the PS5’s sales are in any way slowing, however. For Sony, the bristling sales of the PS5 continue.
Because this sales fact means Sony’s console is shaping up to be the banner console of this decade, one has to question both Bethesda and Microsoft’s decision to keep a game like Starfield exclusive to Microsoft’s platforms alone. One thing is certain, cutting off sales to a massively growing gaming segment is probably not the brightest of ideas. For Microsoft, Starfield may not become an overall major problem for Microsoft on the whole, but why intentionally tank part of your company when you don’t have to? For Bethesda, on the other hand, these mounting problems could end this division.
Exclusivity and Sales
Prior to the digital download explosion, the primary way that video games had always made bank was by selling physical game copies. Physical copies would show up at retailers like Amazon, Best Buy and Gamestop. Once the digital download explosion began, not only could retailers sell boxed copies, they could also sometimes sell digital codes for online digital stores.
Because both the PlayStation and the Xbox are the primary two video game consoles on the market for a game like Starfield, this meant sales from both platforms play fully into both the success and the revenue of that video game title. So as not to exclude the Nintendo Switch from this conversation, know that this console also exists and some “adult” style games do eventually make it to the Nintendo Switch console. Whether Starfield would have been tapped for the Switch is questionable. As of Starfield (and likely many future Bethesda game titles), though, producing availability across all non-Microsoft platforms has halted.
Bethesda (likely at Microsoft’s prompting) has made the dubious decision of making Starfield (and likely most new Bethesda games) available exclusively on the Xbox and on Windows-based PCs (Microsoft’s platforms). You might have thought that Microsoft’s Bethesda would have stopped there and just accepted the loss of half of the video game market in revenue, but no. It gets worse for Bethesda.
According to Forbes, the PS5 has also sold the fastest amount of consoles since its launch that Sony has ever sold in its history. That means that the PS5 appears to be on-track to outsell the PS4. Considering that the number of PS4 consoles exceeds 117 million today combined with the over 38 million PS5’s sold so far, that’s a huge number of potential buyers to exclude from a video game’s sales. I did say it would get worse.
Game Pass
For video game players, an all-inclusive monthly game subscription service like Game Pass is a huge win. For video game developers, not so much. Let’s understand why. Video game buyers can, for a relatively small monthly fee, instantly buy into a massive library of games that can all be downloaded and played immediately. A single game that formerly cost each buyer $60 to purchase new, now costs a game player $9.99/mo for 30 days of play! That $10 doesn’t just cover one game, though. That monthly fee covers hundreds or maybe thousands of games available in the Game Pass library all unlocked the instant the subscription starts. No trips to the store. No game discs to scratch up. No wasted plastic. Quick and easy access over the Internet.
Sony has a similar subscription product called PlayStation Plus Essential. It’s effectively Sony’s burgeoning version of Game Pass, with a similarly growing library of games all accessible at a flat monthly rate.
With these subscription services, the monthly costs can be reduced if you’re willing buy into 24 months of Game Pass service. Unfortunately, this bundled deal is only available if you buy an Xbox console at the same time. Still, not a bad deal. If you already have an Xbox console or are looking to extend your existing subscription past the 24 months, the only option is the $9.99 per month deal.
Game Pass versus PlayStation Plus Essential
This article would be remiss without discussing an important aspect around buying into Game Pass versus Sony’s PlayStation Plus Essential. The $10/mo Game Pass plan DOES NOT include Xbox Live Gold, the service needed to play online multiplayer games. This means that in addition to the $10/mo, you’ll need to buy or have Xbox Live separately. However, with Sony PlayStation Plus Essential, this plan offers both access to the PlayStation Network along with a limited library of games. Essentially, Sony’s lowest tier plan is equivalent to having Xbox Live Gold and Game Pass together at Sony’s lowest monthly price tag. While Sony gives you both services together, Sony only allows limited access to games with the Essential tier. You’ll have to pay up into Sony’s larger PlayStation Plus tiers to gain access to more games from Sony’s game library.
To get Xbox Live combined with Game Pass for your Xbox, you’ll need to buy into the Game Pass Ultimate edition, which is priced at $15 a month ($5 more than the base Game Pass edition without Xbox Live). However, that’s still a savings of $5 a month when paying for Xbox Live Gold monthly, which is priced at $10 a month separately.
Why is having access to Xbox Live and PSN important? These services are required to allow you to play online multiplayer games. Because many games these days require Xbox Live and PSN to function, buying into the lowest edition of Game Pass alone won’t allow you to play games that require Xbox Live. You’d need to pay up to the $15/mo edition to buy Game Pass Ultimate to enable play of online multiplayer games along with gaining access to the Game Pass library of games.
Having Xbox Live is not required when buying into the Game Pass $10/mo edition. However, without Xbox Live, you will be limited to playing only Game Pass library games that do not require Xbox Live, which consist of offline single player games. There are fewer and fewer of these games released every year.
Subscription Services vs Profits
The one thing that hasn’t been discussed much with these gaming subscription services is exactly how developers will make money. Right now, $9.99 a month is great for a gamer who immediately gains access to perhaps thousands of games, including many day-one releases.
For the game developer, Microsoft cannot afford to hand that game developer $60 for each downloaded game from Game Pass. Same for Sony. This means that developers see drastically reduced revenue from games on Game Pass.
What this means is that for each download from Game Pass, the developer will receive a tiny fraction of money in a monthly payment tallied up for each gamer who downloads a specific game title. No download = No money. Simply because a game has been listed in Game Pass doesn’t mean the developer gets money. Developers are only likely to get paid IF a player downloads and plays the game. Even then, once a player deletes the game after installing it, the monthly revenues stop.
Let’s do the Math
Console Physical Disc Model
If there are 117 million PS4 consoles and if just 10% of those console owners buy a game at $60, that’s 60 * 11.7 million = $702 million in total revenue from that game’s sales. Of course, that’s what the retailers get. The wholesale price for a video game is around $50 paid by the retailer to the game studio. That’s 50 * 11.7 million = $585 million in sales that went directly to the game studio. Clearly, other fees will need to be paid out of that revenue by the developer who might net $200-300 million or so. This revenue windfall occurs within a month of two of a video game’s launch.
Game Pass Model
There is no revenue windfall, at least not for the developer. As stated above, a video game placed into the Game Pass library means drastically lower income. Instead of the $200-300 million windfall in physical disc sales nearly all at once, now developers must live on a much lower fraction of revenue that gets spread out over many months.
If 11.7 million players subscribe to Game Pass, in one month that equates to $10 * 11.7 million subscribers = $117 million per month (assuming that the number remains steady). This next part assumes that ALL 11.7 million decide to download the Starfield game. We know that’s not likely, but let’s assume this anyway.
If a game developer drops a brand new day-one game onto Game Pass, like Starfield, the game’s revenue will be a tiny, tiny fraction of that $117 million per month. Where a game developer receives 100% of the wholesale revenue from physical box sales, subscription based sales might receive 1% (probably way less) in total revenue from the revenues brought in by Game Pass’s monthly subscription fees. Why $1 million? That’s ~1% of $117 million. Keep in mind that $117 million is already fractionally less than the $585 million the developer could have received by selling boxed copies.
Instead of the $200-300 million for boxed sales for a single game, the game’s developer might now receive $1 million in that first 30 days after release, possibly not even that much. Keep in mind that the monthly revenue collected by Microsoft for the monthly Game Pass subscriptions must be shared amongst ALL video games that are being played and downloaded that month. The more games being played, the more developers must share in that revenue. That means that the more wide diversity of games that are being downloaded and played, the less revenue there is to go around to all of these developers. That $1 million mentioned might actually become $100k because of the revenue sharing and the wide diversity of games being played at any given month.
Revenue paid to developers who place games into Game Pass library is only for actively played games. Once gamers play the game fully, then each deletes the game from their console, the revenue stops the instant the game is deleted from the console. The game developer will only be paid as long as the player keeps the game installed and likely only if the game is launched and used periodically. If the game can be beaten in under 30 days, then the developer will be paid for only the days the player has actively played the game. If many players beat the game in 10 days, that’s only 10 days of revenue paid out for each specific player.
What all of this means is that it offers Microsoft ways of reducing payments to developers based on how often and how long a player plays a game. In other words, instead of the pay-$60 model where the revenue is locked in as long as a sale is made, developers are now under a much stricter, lower revenue model. It is also a model that can see Microsoft reduce payments because of revenue sharing and lower use. If two games were the only games played on Game Pass in a month, that means that Microsoft would only need to pay out revenue to 2 developers from that $117.5 million pool of income. If 100 games from 100 different developers suddenly become active, Microsoft must now share revenue amongst those 100 developers from that same $117.5 million pool of income.
Microsoft must also determine which of the Game Pass games deserves a larger portion of revenue than the others so that the most often played games get the most revenue. Meaning, of those 100 game developers some might only see .01% of the sales while some might see as much as 1% or 2% of total revenues from monthly subscribers. As stated, the point here is that $117.5 million in subscriber fees is a mere fraction of money that could have been had using the $60 per disc price.
It only gets worse from here. Microsoft itself also instantly skims revenue off the top of the Game Pass subscriber fees to cover its own service management costs (hosting, managing listings, paying out revenue, etc). Only after Microsoft skims its own Game Pass revenue is any remaining money left over to cover developer game use payments.
Assuming there’s $117.5 million in total Game Pass revenue (as exampled above), there might only be $20-50 million left (after Microsoft skims its expenses) to pay developers for their games. This ultimately means there’s fractionally less than you might think to pay off developers for the inclusion of their games on Game Pass.
For Starfield, this game’s revenue may fare even worse. Because Microsoft wholly owns Bethesda, Microsoft may have chosen Starfield to become a loss leader. In the sales world, that ultimately means that the product is intended to be a “giveaway”. In other words, Microsoft may require Bethesda to forgo receiving any payments from Game Pass. Thus, Starfield may not make ANY revenue from its day one release on Game Pass. Under this loss leader strategy, the only money Bethesda may make would be from the tiny amount of boxed copy sales from stores like Amazon and Best Buy. Considering the price of Game Pass and its current popularity, not many players are likely to opt to pay $60 for boxed copies.
Digital Sales
While you might be thinking that some people might opt to buy the game digitally, like boxed copy sales, a few will opt for this approach. Some don’t want to invest in Game Pass and be saddled with a monthly expense to keep track of. This means that some digital sales will occur. However, the benefit of gaining access to thousands of game titles usually wins when it comes to these types of sales. Like physical boxed copies, digital sales are also likely to be limited and few. I fully expect the vast majority of Starfield players to play via Game Pass (both on the Xbox and on the PC).
Sleazy Game Pass Sales Strategy
One sleazy strategy which Microsoft has used with Game Pass and which attempts to force gamers to buy a game outright is when Microsoft removes a game title from Game Pass library 30 days after its release. This limited time release followed by speedy removal is solely an attempt to prey on the consumer’s wallet. Many gamers do fall for this tactic and opt to buy a digital copy over a boxed copy. Digital purchases offer instant access and allows the gamer to continue playing once the game is downloaded. No trips to the store looking for a physical copy.
This Game Pass sales strategy is extremely sleazy and is also worth noting because Microsoft could pull this stunt with Starfield; tease players with a 30 day Game Pass limited availability, then pull the plug and force all players to purchase the game full price to continue playing. Because of the purported scale and size of the questing within Starfield, a player likely cannot fully complete Starfield within 30 days. Be wary of this sleazy sales tactic when buying into Game Pass. Personally, I’d consider this tactic as a form of bait and switch, which is illegal in the United States under federal law.
If you’re concerned that this could happen with Starfield in Game Pass (it has a reasonably high chance), you should opt to buy the game outright either a physical boxed copy or a digital copy at full price and forgo using Game Pass to play Starfield. This will allow you to continue playing the game should Game Pass decided to pull the game quickly. Of course, you can opt to play under Game Pass until the game is pulled from the library at which point you’ll need to decide whether you want to buy it to continue. If the game is as potentially buggy as I expect it to be, many Game Pass players may choose not to buy it after only a few days of play. This sleazy sales tactic has a high probability of backfiring on Bethesda and Microsoft if the game launches with as many problems as Fallout 76.
Starfield Sales Cannibalized?
Why spend $60 for a single game when you can pay $10 and gain access to perhaps thousands of games, along with day-one releases like Starfield? While a few physical disc sales might be forthcoming, the vast majority of players are savvy enough to realize the usefulness of buying into a large library of games under Game Pass all for $10.
For Starfield, the revenue handwriting is on the wall… and it’s doesn’t paint a rosy picture. Voluntarily cutting revenues by less than half via excluding the Sony PlayStation – fractional amounts of revenue by placing Starfield on Game Pass day one = drastically reduced income for Bethesda. Instead of the potential for nearly a billion in sales by tapping the overall video game market (Xbox + PS + PC + Switch) by forcing boxed sales only, Microsoft has made the dubious decision to reduce Starfield’s potential revenue down to perhaps at most $100 million in Day One Game Pass downloads. That number is if Bethesda is very, very lucky. If Starfield is considered a “loss leader” on release then it will receive zero in revenue from Game Pass.
You might be saying, “But what about physical disc sales?” What about them? With the Starfield game being released onto Game Pass day one, what incentive is there to run out and buy a physical disc copy at $60 when you can save $50 and instantly sign up for Game Pass at $10, download and play the game on release day sans disc? For that matter, what incentive is there to buy a digital copy at $60? Sure, Starfield may see a smattering of physical box and digital sales, but the total revenue for these sales might not even exceed $10 million. Game Pass is most definitely cannibalizing boxed and digital video game sales. This Game Pass idea is actually one of the strategies that Microsoft wanted prior to the introduction of the Xbox One; basically, an all digital universe of games. Microsoft is moving in this direction rapidly, clearly at the expense of the developers.
Keep in mind that subscriptions can be cancelled at any time. This means that a player can pay $10, play and beat the game in 30 days and then cancel their Game Pass subscription. Instead of paying $60 to own the game, they’ve now paid only $10 to play the game. That’s a whopping $50 savings for the gamer and a massive amount of lost revenue for both the game developer and Microsoft.
While the release of Starfield might see a temporary boost in Game Pass subscribers and in Xbox hardware sales (this is the hope Microsoft has for Starfield), that boost still won’t be any where near enough for Microsoft to cough up the nearly $1 billion in revenue that Bethesda could have had by including all consoles and by releasing only boxed copies day one. Instead, Microsoft has relegated Bethesda’s Starfield to becoming one of the least profitable AAA game titles to be released by a major developer.
Revenue over Time
Subscription models gain revenue slowly over time. You might be thinking that maybe Bethesda can reach the $1 billion revenue mark in 12 months. Video game sales don’t work like that. Video games see a surge in play until many players play the game out. One the game has been played out, it’s dropped and forgotten. The only games which can see continued revenue models are massively multiplayer online (MMO) style games like Call of Duty, Fallout 76, Fortnite and even Destiny. Even then, these MMO style games see dwindling subscribers over time until eventually there aren’t enough playing to support the game financially. When that happens, the MMO game shuts down.
Starfield as an MMO?
We don’t yet know enough about Starfield to know if it even contains an MMO component. Only when the game is released will we know if Starfield is designed like Fallout 4, a completely offline single player experience… OR if it is similar to Fallout 76, a completely online MMO. Maybe it’s like Grand Theft Auto and offers both an offline gaming experience and has a separate online MMO map. Until the game releases, there’s also no way to know if Starfield has been built to support an ongoing revenue model.
It’s clear, the sales revenue for Starfield (as a game) will not be had by day-one game sales. That means that Bethesda must make up for the severely cannibalized day-one game sales by compensating for that major loss in revenue in some other way. With Fallout 76, that’s done by using the Fallout 1st subscription and the sale of Atomic Shop “Atoms.”
For Starfield, I’d expect Bethesda’s team to make up for that loss in day one game sales by forcing an in-game monthly subscription plan. This separate in-game monthly subscription will likely unlock downloadable content (DLC) and other required add-ons. With Fallout 76, Fallout 1st is not required to play the game. However for Starfield, Bethesda may be forced to make this change. Starfield might offer up a very basic and limited gaming experience included in the base price, then require paying into a monthly subscription plan to unlock the entirety of the game. At least, this is one avenue that could be taken. Even the $60 full disc buyers might be forced to pony up for these extras to continue playing.
This avenue may end up the primary means that Bethesda utilizes to make back the amount of lost revenue required to cover its multi-year game development expenses when producing Starfield. As described above, Game Pass revenue alone will not be enough to cover these incurred expenses. Keep in mind that Starfield had been in development before Microsoft bought Bethesda. After Bethesda was purchased, Microsoft has seemingly tied Bethesda’s hands by forcing exclusivity to the Xbox and PC and by also forcing Bethesda to release the Starfield game through Game Pass on day one. It’s possible that Microsoft might rollback the decision of a day one Game Pass release for Starfield. It’s also entirely possible that to play the game via Game Pass, a separate second subscription might be required.
For Bethesda, that means that once each player enters the Starfield game world, revenue will need to be found separately by Bethesda inside the game… and that likely means a separate monthly subscription for Starfield itself. It may also mean paying for a separate currency, like Atoms, to unlock in-game features, spaceships, outfits, consumables and so on. If you buy into Starfield, expect to be hit in the wallet at every turn within the game’s universe.
Can’t progress? Pay up. Can’t fly into a new solar system? Pay up. Need a special outfit to complete a mission? Pay up. Even though Microsoft has seemingly tied Bethesda’s hands for how the game gets sold initially, Microsoft likely can’t tie Bethesda’s hands once the gamer enters the game’s universe.
Inside of a game’s universe, Bethesda has seemingly complete control. It can force subscriptions, microtransactions and a whole slew of other for-pay options to draw in more revenue. As a direct result of Game Pass’s near non-existent revenue, expect Starfield’s game world to be chock full of microtransactions using your credit card almost incessantly. It’s honestly the only way Bethesda can recoup the money it took to develop this game over several years, even if Bethesda can’t control how the game gets into the consumer’s hands.
PlayStation Plus Essential
For all of the reasons as Game Pass above, all of the revenue and low developer payment arguments will apply to the PlayStation Plus Essential service. With that said, let’s hope that Sony will change the PlayStation Plus Essential service name, though. This current naming is completely clumsy and does not in any way state what it is. Even re-using the PlayStation Now brand would have been a better choice in naming for this game library service, as the “Now” indicates instant access.
Bugs, Bugs and more Bugs
One thing Bethesda has not been good at is writing solid, bug free games. It doesn’t matter what game it is, the affectionate moniker of Bugthesda has been given and it is more than just for humor’s sake. This moniker is at once both truthful and problematic. It says that bugs are inevitable with any game released by Bethesda. Bethesda’s Todd Howard chooses to laugh this off as not a problem at all, as if Bethesda’s products are truly bug free. Sorry to disappoint you, Todd. Every Bethesda game I’ve ever experienced has had myriads of bugs and still contain many bugs to this day. Fallout 76 STILL contains day-one release bugs nearly 6 years later!
Starfield won’t fare any better. Starfield will release day-one with a massive number of bugs. That’s not a prediction. That’s a fact. If you go into Starfield on day-one, expect it to be chock full of bugs. Some of the bugs might be minor and cosmetic (lights don’t work right, 3D characters standing and moving in T-poses, weapons don’t render properly, etc). However, there will also be at least one showstopper bug where mission progress cannot move forward. Oblivion had them, Skyrim had them, Fallout 3 had them, Fallout 4 had them and, yes, even Fallout 76 STILL has them.
There has not been a single Bethesda game released that has not had showstoppers. I expect Starfield to have at least one, but probably more than that. I also expect Starfield to have crashing bugs; bugs that see you play for an hour, then the entire game crashes back to the OS… possibly losing progress.
Why mention bugs at all here? Bugs have become the bane of the video game industry. In the 1990s, video game developers took pride in shaking out nearly every single bug before placing their games onto cartridges. When the Internet wasn’t the “thing” that it is today, game developers had to make their games function 100% before sending it out to the consumer. Unfortunately, using the Internet as a crutch, revisionism has allowed video game developers to become extremely lazy. This allows developers to release horrible, bug-laden experiences, then begin shaking out the bugs along the way with one, two or even hundreds of releases… all while using paying players as beta testers.
Unfortunately, games like 2020’s Cyberpunk 2077 initially released to incredibly bad reviews over its horrible bugs. While Cyberpunk’s developer, CD Projekt RED, has ironed out many of the bugs since its 2020 release, that doesn’t make the game’s overall reviews better. Once those reviews are there, they’re there for the life of the game. Those low reviews will remain and taint the review system regardless of whether the developer shores up the game. If you release a bad buggy game initially, your initial reviews stay there to impact the game’s rating long into the future. Those bad reviews, thus, impact that game’s sales forever.
Was Cyberpunk 2077 able to recoup from its initially bad launch? In some small way, perhaps. Maybe through word of mouth, but definitely not via its Metacritic scores.
For Starfield, the first 3 months after its launch will become crucial to its success or failure. Starfield’s release date is set for September 6, 2023. Bethesda’s developers are now all working at a feverish pace to complete this game in time for that September launch date. Yet, we know it won’t be complete even after a year’s delay. If it was delayed a year, that means its bugs were major and the game was as yet unfinished. It is doubtful a year will buy them enough time to fix all of that.
What this means for Starfield is that its initial reviews will make or break it. It also means that game players are becoming intolerant of being taken advantage of by game developers. Game players are not beta testers, yet more and more game studios are treating game players as tertiary beta testers. Instead of hiring actual beta testers, game developers forgo those expenses and expect paying players to report the bugs. Worse, they do. More than ever, this is the wrong choice and it is a choice that can doom a game. We pay to PLAY the game, not BETA TEST it.
Overall
Considering the massive loss in revenue due to Game Pass, the high probability for the inclusion of pay-for-play micro-transaction features, the probable need for a separate subscription, Starfield seems poised to become one of the worst games ever released by Bethesda. Unfortunately, Bethesda has too many “fanboys”; “fanboys” who are willing to buy anything released by Bethesda regardless of its useful state. For the purposes of this article, “fanboy” is used in a gender neutral capacity, encapsulating both males and females alike. For the same reason, Apple has too many of these same “fanboys” type buyers willing to buy anything Apple releases, good or bad. Bethesda’s “fanboys” are just as avid and ravenous and, for whatever misguided reason, believe Bethesda can do no wrong. To them I say, enjoy being exploited.
The purpose of this article is to call out all of the problems that Bethesda faces with the release of Starfield. Because Microsoft has strongly tied Bethesda’s hands in very specific ways, that leaves Bethesda employing other not-so-favorable options to gain that lost revenue back. As a result, I fully expect Starfield to be a poor gaming experience overall, mostly because of the compromises required for Bethesda to make back the revenue it ultimately lost as a result of Microsoft’s exclusivity and Game Pass release decisions. That and Microsoft isn’t likely to allow Bethesda to delay Starfield any longer. Whatever state Starfield is in come September is how it will launch.
How does this make a difference to me as a gamer?
Good question. For you as a gamer, you might not care much overall. That is, unless you’re really looking for a new high quality gaming experience. Though, while the incessant micro-transactions designed to bilk you for money exist at every turn, the rest of the game might seem still like a benefit to you. Game Pass itself was designed to be a huge benefit to gamers, giving them access to a huge library of games. If you don’t like Starfield, you move on and try another. In the hundreds or thousands of games out there, there may be some that work for you. If Starfield bombs, it will simply be relegated to a game on Game Pass that no one plays.
For Starfield, it doesn’t mean good things. For Bethesda, it means even worse things. For Microsoft, it means great things. Well, maybe not great, but definitely something Microsoft can ignore. If Bethesda is forced to continue down this path by Microsoft, as a developer it may cease to exist inside of Microsoft… ultimately being folded into other game studios. Microsoft doesn’t care about exactly who does what as long as someone does it. Does that mean Fallout or Starfield or other Bethesda franchises disappear? No.
Like Halo before it, Microsoft will hand Bethesda’s intellectual property to another developer to continue building new games under those franchises (or not). Microsoft doesn’t actually care who develops any given franchise as long as they’re willing to do it and what they create sells more of Microsoft’s goods and services. Once a franchise runs its course and it’s done, Microsoft is also willing to shelve the franchise indefinitely, like it did with Fable. If Bethesda as a developer fades into oblivion, Bethesda’s IP may or may not live on depending entirely on Microsoft.
That’s why all of this might (or might not) matter to you.
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Fallout 76 Rant: The Impact of Legacy Removal
While Pipe might be life in Fallout 76, the Legacy removal might actually mean the death of Fallout 76. While some gamers are praising the removal of Legacy weapons from Fallout 76, those who are impacted by this change might actually have the power to sink the Fallout series, and possibly even Bethesda itself. Let’s explore.
Misguided Maneuver
It’s clear that Bethesda is horribly misguided internally. On the one hand, I get Bethesda’s rationale behind the removal of these “illegal” mods from Legacy weapons. On the other hand, Bethesda’s rationale is entirely misguided and fails to take into account the real damage that has now been inflicted on the game and, ultimately, the game’s player base. The real question now is not whether the game is better, but whether Fallout 76, ironically a survival game, can survive this change.
One thing is certain, some players are reeling from this change and rightly so. Bethesda itself also doesn’t seem to fundamentally understand the player base which has been born out of these legacy weapons having been included in the game for literal years.
What is a Legacy Weapon? A Legacy weapon is any weapon that was formerly in the game and could be obtained through loot drops, but was removed from the loot drop list by Bethesda Fallout 76 devs in the game’s early years (loot drops removed around 2018-2019). This meant there was no way to obtain these weapons after the loot drops stopped… until Legendary Modules were introduced when Nuclear Winter began in 2019. Once these legendary modules were added, for a short time it may have been possible to craft such weapons on a crafting bench until the crafting of these weapons was also patched. Since then, these weapons have been unavailable.
Which Weapons were Removed?
The “Legacy” weapons to which this article refers are any legendary energy or plasma weapon with an explosive attachment. These explosive attachments have now been deemed “illegal” by Bethesda even though they were perfectly legal when they originally dropped. Such weapons could be obtained earlier in the game’s life legitimately, but today are no longer obtainable and are now marked as “illegal” by Bethesda’s Fallout 76 team. Weapons which have now been removed include:
- Explosive Gatling Plasma
- Explosive Laser Pistol
- Explosive Laser Rifle
- Explosive Gatling Laser
- Explosive Flamer
- Explosive Gauss Rifle
- Explosive Gauss Shotgun
- Explosive Gauss Minigun
- Explosive Gauss Pistol
- Explosive Tesla Rifle
All of the above weapons have had their explosive attachment removed by the Fallout 76 devs, turning many 3 star Legendary weapons into 2 star weapons.
Note, I won’t even get into the severe bugs introduced as a result of the removal of these Legacy weapons… bugs which have heavily impacted many rogues in addition to the Legacy removals. It’s not pretty for Bethesda or Fallout 76 right now.
Righting Wrongs
Once Bethesda knew these weapons shouldn’t have been included in the game back in 2018-2019, a patch should have been swiftly crafted and implemented then to remove these “illegal” weapons. This would have saved Bethesda this headache today. Instead, Bethesda waited and let this situation fester for going on nearly 5 years now. Not only did it fester, it actually born a whole new type of gamer in Fallout 76… a type of gamer willing to spend real cash money to not only obtain and own these “illegal” weapons, but who were also willing to pay Bethesda for Fallout 1st and pay Bethesda for Atoms to buy the Atomic Shop’s literal valueless junk.
Yes, this new type of gamer is the one who is literally propping up Bethesda’s Fallout 76 game. These are the gamers who are paying Bethesda’s bills, keeping Bethesda’s lights on and ensuring their staff remain employed.
Removing these weapons is literally a situation of “biting the hand that feeds you!”
Fallout 76 Gamer Types
When Fallout 4 began and also when Fallout 76 began, the primary type of gamers that Bethesda had hoped for were those interested in playing the game firmly on their “golden path”. In programming, a “golden path” is the path that most users will take when using any piece of software. This path is the path the engineers design the game for users to find and use. I dub these types of users the “golden” users. The vast majority of software users fall into “golden” users. Video game software users take a different route.
Gamers are somewhat different for this “golden path” approach for a number of reasons. The primary reason gamers are different is that video games entice children to play. By the very nature of this product being a video game, children are naturally one of the video game industry’s primary demographics… regardless of the game’s rating.
Let’s define children. Children include ages 8-17, with the primary age of most children playing ranging from 12-14. Because children don’t have a lot of life experience, their minds aren’t constrained by “adult” thinking. Children play games in ways that suit their fancy, which means children do not always remain on the golden path. In fact, in most cases, children stray from the golden path frequently in video games. Children actively try to poke holes in, find problems with and generally do things that an adult gamer might never think to try.
Children aren’t the only players doing this, however. Many adults can maintain this childlike poke and prod thought process well into their 30s. This leads to the next type of gamer I dub the “rogue” gamer.
Rogues vs Golden
Rogue gamers don’t follow the golden path laid out by the developers. These gamers intentionally and actively seek to find bugs, exploit holes and obtain “rare” objects in a game, including weapons. Almost every “rogue” gamer seeks to one-up their fellow player by finding something that their friend doesn’t have, whether that be a way to build under the map, go out of bounds or obtain a weapon that few other players have.
Rogue players don’t play the game as intended and are unwilling to follow EULA rules. They’re so flippant in the way they play the game, they actually don’t really care if their account gets banned or if Sony shuts their PlayStation down by disabling their PSN account, for example. In the gaming world, Rogues don’t care about the rules or abiding by them. With that said, they do care about finding the latest rare thing to have in the game.
The thing is, many of these rogue gamers come from well-to-do, dare I say wealthy families. This means they are willing to pay and pay and pay. They will pay for Fallout 1st. They will pay for Atoms in the atomic shop. They will even pay other players real cash money on places like eBay to buy rare in-game items.
In short, many rogue gamers keep Bethesda’s (and by extension, Microsoft’s) bills paid and the lights on. That’s not to say that every rogue gamer is wealthy enough to do this, but many are. At this point, I think you might understand where this is heading.
One thing that rogues typically don’t care about is the game itself or even the game’s story. They’re not playing the game because it’s Fallout and they’re not playing it because it has interesting lore or interesting quest lines, they’re playing the game because it’s an MMO, because it has multiplayer, because it has combat and because they can find and exploit heavy guns that no one else has. Rogues will only follow down a quest line because it unlocks their character to have or use something unique or better than someone else, not because of interest in the RPG aspect or the story.
Golden players, on the other hand, play the game by the rules using weapons considered legal within the game. These are also players who typically respect the Fallout canon, who are genuinely interested in the story being told, who play by the rules, who choose to play using guns the game provides and who don’t stray outside of the bounds simply because they find a loophole. These are dedicated Fallout players who’ve likely played many previous Fallout games, if not all of them.
Mixing The Two
These player types are not hard walled into two groups. Some players remain mostly golden, but go occasionally rogue when they deem appropriate. For example, some of Bethesda’s rigid game rules go too far. Some players become rogue when it’s necessary to bypass some of these Bethesda rigid rules, simply to save time, to cut weight down or for other reasons that help them play the game better.
Bethesda doesn’t get its player base
One thing is certain, Bethesda does NOT fundamentally understand who’s actually playing Fallout 76 and who is actually paying their bills. It goes even deeper than this.
Because there was a whole separate black market for these high powered “illegal” weapons, Bethesda completely overlooked this aspect of its game. Instead of taking advantage of these payers and bilking them for money, they decided to remove the weapons from the game.
It’s clear, you can either benefit from these players by making real money off of them or you can alienate them… and alienation is exactly where we are now.
Black Tuesday
On Tuesday January 24th, 2023, rogue players had to say goodbye to their “illegal” weapons. Bethesda removed weapon modules from the game, which during the 2018-2019 years were perfectly legal to own and use. This change sends not only a mixed message to players, it sends an exceedingly bad message.
It says that Bethesda really doesn’t give one crap about a huge segment of its very player base who are paying its bills, keeping its staff employed and keeping the game from going under.
This change is likely to be the beginning of the end for Fallout 76. Why?
Perplexed
Rogues are as perplexed and mystified by this late change now as anyone. For years these weapons were in the game and remained so. However, it’s just now that Bethesda decides to rid the game of these weapons?
Because these rogue players comprise a substantial portion of the revenue given to Bethesda for Fallout 1st and other pay-for-play features, it’s surprising Bethesda was so willing to risk losing that revenue and possibly even the entire game over this silly change.
Rogue players must now make a choice. They can either stay and play a hobbled version of the game using no special weapons or they can go find a new game where they can, once again, feel special and own special weapons. This is the actual real danger to Fallout 76. Rogues are fickle players. They only stay and play where they can find their “specialness”. If they can’t find and remain special, then the game is done and they leave it.
That’s exactly the crossroads at which Bethesda now finds itself. The question is, are there enough newbie players to keep the lights on and the staff employed? The answer to this question comes in how Bethesda chooses to respond.
High Levels and Endgame
After playing any game, not only have you amassed levels for your character, you have unlocked perks and skills. The problem is, once the quests have ended, what do you do with these skills? That’s fundamentally the problem with most games. You spend your time playing through the quest lines leveling up your player only to find that when you reach the end, all of that leveling up and those perks were for nothing… as there’s no endgame content.
Many gamers find little to no endgame content to utilize that high level skill. That means, you reach the end and you go find a new game to play.
Fallout 76 is only different in its endgame because it offers Events (and Legacy weapons). After the quests are done and there’s no more quest lines to follow, the Events and Daily quests are what’s left. These are repetitive activities that offer a slight chance for rare loot rewards. It also offers the chance to try out a new overpowered weapon.
Leveling up in Fallout 76, unfortunately, is mostly worthless. Because guns cap out at level 45 or 50, that essentially means your player is capped out at level 45 or 50, regardless of the level number your player may actually achieve. The only benefit to leveling up is to max out the Legendary perk cards, an addition that gives higher level players a tiny bit of an incentive to stay with the game.
Once a player reaches level 650-700, that player can easily have maxed out the Legendary Perk cards. Max leveling these Legendary Perk cards sees a tiny bit more damage out of weapons, if utilized correctly. So then, what’s left after this? Not much, other than going Rogue and trying to find unobtainable, but overpowered weapons which formerly existed in the game.
While these weapons were once in the game circa 2019, they have since stopped dropping as loot long, long ago. That means that new players can’t easily obtain these overpowered weapons unless they monetarily buy them from another player. Hence, a player economy is born.
Initially, caps were the answer to this economy. Unfortunately, caps became mostly pointless as a currency in the game when Bethesda moved to bullion, scrip and stamps offering up the newest, most rare items. This is when players moved to selling these highly prized and overpowered weapons for real cash money, as in USD. Internet forums and trading boards came to exist to list and sell these weapons for real money.
In one fell swoop, Bethesda shut all of this down… the trading, the sales, the weapons, all of it. Without these weapons in the game, there are no more sales of them. You can’t sell what’s no longer in the game.
It goes way deeper than that. Not only did it kill third party sales of in-game weapons, it is poised to see a massive number of high level players abandon Fallout 76 and cancel their Fallout 1st subscriptions. Why play a game when there’s nothing special left?
Endgame content is firmly limited to Events. Unfortunately, in retaliation for these high powered weapons being in the game, Bethesda ramped up these events to be likewise overpowered. Without these weapons in the game, the events are STILL way overpowered…. to the point where these events are likely to FAIL the vast majority of the time when using standard weapons. Bethesda retaliated against the players by removing the weapons, but failed to reduce the overpowered nature of the events back to a level where standard weapons can be successful. Right now, these “golden” level 45 and 50 level weapons are not enough against these highly overpowered event enemies.
It gets worse, as players dwindle from the game due to natural attrition and now because Legacies have been removed, new players will be hard pressed to find enough higher level players on a server to take on the Scorchbeast Queen, the Titan or even Earle. These events are now so overpowered because Bethesda souped them up against Legacies, it’s near impossible to win these events with non-Legacy weapons, especially if a server has maybe 10 players on it.
Bethesda is definitely at a cross roads.
Microsoft
Now that Microsoft owns Bethesda, Bethesda is most definitely playing with fire. In fact, Bethesda’s choices surrounding Fallout 76 have always been questionable. Legacy removal is probably one of THE most questionable changes Bethesda has ever made for Fallout 76, considering when the problem actually started. Why does Microsoft matter? We’ll come to that answer in a bit.
For now, Fallout 76 is on the cusp. We don’t yet know the fallout (ha) from Bethesda’s meddling with Legacies. The point is, we cannot know how the rogue players will respond or how much financial damage these players who abandon the game can literally do to Bethesda.
It’s clear, without these Legacy weapons in the game, rogues who were playing Fallout 76 solely because these weapons existed will evaporate… and along with that, so will the income from Fallout 1st and all other income that keeps Fallout 76 afloat. Are the rogues a big enough population to make a dent in Bethesda’s income stream? My personal guess is, yes… at least for the longevity of Fallout 76. Without the rogues, Fallout 76 may be hard pressed to remain a viable entity, let alone Fallout as a franchise.
Does Fallout keep Bethesda afloat? It most certainly isn’t the only game that Bethesda publishes. However, Fallout 76 is currently the only Fallout franchise title available. In short, probably not.
Obsidian, another developer, was purchased by Microsoft in 2018, the same year that Fallout 76 released. Obsidian contains the remnants of Black Isle Studios, the original studio who developed the Fallout franchise. Because Microsoft now owns both Bethesda and Obsidian, it’s possible that someone at Microsoft could easily mandate the transition of the Fallout IP and franchise from Bethesda back over to Obsidian to handle.
Bethesda is clearly out of their depths with Fallout and they clearly don’t understand the franchise. Worse, they don’t even understand multiplayer systems in relation to Fallout. This first multiplayer Fallout game is probably the worst implementation that could have possibly been imagined. Partly this is due to its design goals, but partly it’s due to the inept team who couldn’t actually build a workable product… and here we are today. Because the Fallout 76 team failed to build a workable product, they’re now forced to remove a feature from the game that shouldn’t have been in it in the first place. Yet, that feature remained for nearly 5 years, solidifying them as legitimate in the game.
What Bethesda has done is tantamount to yanking a baby bottle from a baby after that baby has already begun to drink. If you didn’t want to give the baby bottle to the baby, it’s simpler not to do it up front than yanking it away after you’ve already given it to the baby. Heartless.
Can Fallout 76 tank Bethesda?
At this point, maybe not. What the loss of Fallout 76 will do is sour future gamers towards Bethesda games.
“Once bitten, twice shy.”
Few will step up to the plate again knowing the disaster that befell Fallout 76, especially once it disappears. Believe me, Fallout 76 WILL end. The question isn’t if, it’s when. After this Legacy removal, I believe Fallout 76’s end days are here. It’s just a matter of time before the remaining high level players (many of whom are now rogues) walk away and find a new game.
Gamers are fickle and these kinds of stupid maneuvers are ripe for rage quitting. Some die hard gamers will remain and play, but only for a short time until they become frustrated with the crappy standard weapons and find a new game to play. At a minimum, I’d certainly expect to see a rash of Fallout 1st subscriptions cancelled in the next 30 days.
The answer is that, alone, Fallout 76 likely can’t tank Bethesda. However, Fallout 76’s demise can most certainly make a big enough dent that someone at Microsoft (Phil Spencer?) retaliates against Bethesda through layoffs (Buh Bye Todd Howard), closures and by handing over various game IP to better equipped and better managed studios.
It’s clear, the current developers are ill equipped to understand what Fallout 76 should be. Let’s understand why…
Rogues, Games and Marketing
Rogues, whether a game studio likes them or not, are a market force. These are players who have money and are willing to spend it. A game studio can either embrace this fact, or go bankrupt trying to eliminate these gamers from the game. As they say, “Get woke, Go Broke!”
Bethesda is firmly in this latter camp. I don’t know what impetus is driving Bethesda’s management team and devs to take this “woke” approach, but clearly it’s not about trying to make money. Clearly, rogues represent real money sales. If a single player is willing to pay $20 or $50 or $150 real cash money for a single over powered weapon in the game, then Bethesda clearly isn’t actually trying make money. Who leaves money on the table?
Leaving an untapped market on the table is not only stupid, it’s probably one of the stupidest things I’ve seen Bethesda (or in general, a game developer) do.
Pay for Play
As much as gamers harp on the pay for play scheme, it’s a real thing, it exists and it needs to exist. Yes, buying an in-game weapon for real cash money is considered pay for play. You can’t deny that. Whether pay for play is good or bad thing is entirely debatable. One thing is certain. Pay for play makes money… and that’s exactly why game developers are in business, to make money.
In fact, pay for play already exists in Fallout 76 with Fallout 1st and Scrap Kits and Repair Kits and the list goes on. Even foodstuffs like Perfect Bubblegum and Lunch Boxes are forms of pay for play. Selling overpowered rifles for real cash money is just the next logical step.
At this point, Fallout 76 is almost 5 years old. When a game is brand new, perhaps pay for play isn’t something that’s needed. However, 5 years later with 95% of players at endgame, then pay for play is perfectly fine and, dare I say, necessary. It extends the life of a game. Anything that extends the life of a game I consider a good thing. It allows new players to step in and know their time won’t be wasted because the game must close down due to lack of players. It allows rogues and endgame players a means of keeping the game interesting and keep them coming back for more play. Anything that keeps players playing is a good thing. That alone continues to make money for Bethesda. I’d say that’s win-win-win all around. Everyone wins.
High Level Players, Veterans and a New Map
One thing that Bethesda has failed to take into account, in among Fallout 76’s many failures, is the failure of planning for high level players reaching the endgame. In The Elder Scrolls Online, this game’s devs seemed to properly plan for endgame high level players. In fact, ESO devs went so far as to convert level 100+ players into then new “Veteran” levels. For example, for every 100 levels, you got 1 Veteran level. A level 300 player would convert into Veteran level 3. These new Veteran levels were denoted by a Veteran symbol next to the player’s new rank, just above their head. This distinguishes Veteran players from low level players of a similar number.
In addition to being converted into Veteran levels, this change also unlocked the game to be played from the beginning using a new harder Veteran challenge level. Eventually, the devs even opened up a new Veteran level territory that required teaming up with other Veterans to handle this new difficult area. This area was so challenging, in fact, there was simply no way to solo it. The hordes were so difficult, you were forced to go in with a team even as a high Veteran level. While the lower level territories remained trivially easy for a Veteran, the Veteran territories were intensely challenging. Even group dungeons were incredibly challenging.
Likening this to Fallout 76, there is no way to liken this. While Fallout 76 devs are busy introducing silly and bugged out territories like Nuka World and slapping high level players on the wrist by removing legacies, the ESO devs (at about this same time in ESO’s lifecycle) were treating high level players like valued players and giving them more challenges. Effectively, the Fallout 76 devs are treating high level players like a nuisance when they should be celebrating players who’ve made it to level 600 or 800 or 1200 or 2000. This celebration should include rewarding these players, not chastising them.
If a player has given up a year or two of their life to play Bethesda’s Fallout 76 game and reached level 1000 (and who continues to actively play it), that’s a celebratory moment. Bethesda devs should be celebrating long standing players who continue to play the game instead of slapping these players on the wrist and saying, “Bad”.
ESO celebrated high level players the right way. Fallout 76 devs treat high level players like nothing more than a mere annoyance.
Here you have one team at Bethesda who fully understands and embraces their entire player base. On the other hand, you have an inept team who hasn’t the faintest clue of who their player base even is. I shake my head at this incredible disparity within the same corporation. It simply makes no sense.
Inept Developers
You’d think that if anything, The Elder Scrolls Online would have taught the Fallout 76 team some valuable lessons. Unfortunately, you thought wrong. It seems that these two MMO system teams do not at all communicate their valuable lessons from one team to the other.
The reality, which has become incredibly apparent, is that the Fallout 76 development team is wholly and completely inept; not just from a development perspective, but from a money making perspective. They don’t seem to understand the value of keeping ALL of the players happy and, most importantly, paying.
A game studio makes money by keeping people playing the game WHILE spending money. You don’t make money when you chase away your paying players. It’s pretty simple. Removing legacies from the game is a seminal chase-away-players moment. It’s also quite clear that the Fallout 76 developers and even the management team don’t get the real danger here.
Instead of embracing the legacies and the whole real money economy that’s grown up around these weapons’ accidental existence, Bethesda turns its back on the players by removing the weapons from the game. Not only has this shut down that entire real world economic situation (which Bethesda could have tapped), players who wanted these items have no reason to stay, pay and play the game any longer.
This means some walk away from Fallout 76 immediately and others leave slowly over time as they lose interest, “because it’s boring”. Some players, specifically rogues, must make their own fun in a game. Legacies were the rogue’s way of making that fun and cutting the boredom. Without the legacies, there’s honestly no reason for these players to remain playing the game… let alone spend any more money on it.
Business Lessons
While I hadn’t intended this article to become a business lesson, it’s moving quickly in this direction. Let me take this section to discuss this aspect of business operations.
Every college student should be required to take at least one or two business classes. What I mean here is that it’s vitally important for students learning software development to understand how their work impacts the bottom line of the company. Not all software features are good for business. There is no more clear illustration of that here than the removal of the Legacy weapons from Fallout 76. Adding new features can help out users. Removing features can easily cause people to walk away from your product.
This is where business classes come into play. Business classes teach students to have the smarts enough to realize that, “Hey, this feature that I’m being tasked to implement has a high chance of losing 70% of our PAYING clients!” Businesses must empower all employees to speak up when they see problems like this.
While software architects come up with ideas, they may not be privy to exactly how many people might actually be using a given feature. Before implementation of any feature that impacts the userbase, someone needs to put on the brakes and say, “Let’s pull the numbers of how many people are actually using this feature before rolling it out!” Sanity must always prevail in any software business. You can’t simply roll out a feature without understanding exactly how it might impact your existing bottom line.
This is why business classes, and more importantly, business intelligence and reporting is important. Blindly making changes without understanding the business impact can easily tank a business. Case in point, Musk’s incredibly poor handling of Twitter. Now we have yet another poor business case, Bethesda’s shitty handling of Legacy removals in Fallout 76.
Too Late
This article is written after-the-fact. Unfortunately, removing these weapons is more or less a done deal. What I mean here is that knowing the way that Fallout 76’s code is written, there’s no way to undo this change. Meaning, it’s easier to stop a code rollout before it happens than it is to undo a change already made. In many cases, it’s actually impossible to undo code changes due to the nature of the way it was rolled out.
At this point, Bethesda is stuck with this change, for better or worse. At this point, unfortunately, we’re probably at the “or worse” point. As I said above, we’re nearly 5 years into this game’s lifecycle. Instead of Bethesda celebrating high level player achievements, these players are being chastised and chased off by removing weapons these players relied on.
The point in becoming a high level player is to take the benefits that go along with that high level, which includes high damage weapons. That’s an expected staple of any game that supports having high level players. If level 1000 players are reduced to using weapons at the same level as a level 50 player, what’s the point in playing Fallout 76? In fact, what’s the point in leveling up beyond level 50?
Not only does this Legacy removal impact high level players, it impacts low level players because they know they can’t get these weapons in the future. That means that players who might have hung around to level their character up to level 1000 for the chance of getting one of these weapons might now get to level 100, quit and go buy something else. That drastically reduces the income of Bethesda… and by extension Microsoft.
When the Fallout 76 team could have embraced these weapons and monetarily leveraged the external market by retooling them to be legitimate and finding legitimate ways to sell and use them, the Fallout 76 team’s lack of business intelligence and foresight prevailed.
It’s anyone’s guess if Fallout 76 can recover from this change. My guess is that this Legacy removal will be the last major thing the Fallout 76 team does before the plug gets pulled on Fallout 76 by Microsoft. Bethesda, prove me wrong.
Compensating Controls
This final thought is yet another failure of business intelligence on the part of Bethesda management regarding the legacy removals. One idea that many game developers employ to soften the blow of any negative change is introduce a compensating positive change. For example, when something gets removed from a player’s inventory because of a policy change, the developer will offer up some kind of freebie for all of those players who are impacted. This can include free currency, a free new weapon, a freebie in the game store or something similar. This freebie offsets that player’s item loss in compensation.
Unfortunately, with this Legacy removal, Bethesda offered players no form of any kind of compensation for the loss of their weapon. They still had their weapon, yes, but severely altered. Bethesda might as well have removed the weapon as the weapon that remained is pretty much worthless. It’s surprising that Bethesda has offered up no compensation at all, but here we are.
For all of the above reasons, the rogues are likely to abandon this game entirely… perhaps even the franchise itself… said as if rogues even care about Fallout as a franchise. That leaves the golden players left to carry the weight, but unfortunately there are likely not enough of these golden players willing to shell out for Fallout 1st in the numbers needed to keep the game afloat. Thus, this change is likely to be Fallout 76’s death knell.
Way to go, Todd! Phil, if you’re reading this, you probably need to have a sit down with Todd to figure out what the hell is going on with the Fallout 76 development team.
Update: 1/29/2023 — Positive Changes vs Balance
While I didn’t discuss this above, there was really no need to state the positive changes by removing legacy weapons. We all know that exactly what taking overpowered weapons from the game means. For those who need this spelled out, it means less powerful weapons now exist in the game. That means shooting more, making more ammo and grinding more to keep your guns working. It also means the need for finding more ways to buff your weapons using Magazines, Bobbleheads and other consumables. It also means reworking perk cards to max out the damage done with these weapons.
In short, it means spending more time reworking your character to find the highest damage build based around the game’s crappy level 45 and 50 weapons. Ultimately, it’s an exercise in futility.
Does the game have balance after legacies? No, it does not! Fallout 76 is actually quite unbalanced. It is entirely because Bethesda has now given enemies many questionable unbalanced buffs. Removing legacies from the game doesn’t in any way negate these problematic introductions around enemies. Let’s list these enemy problems…
- Enemies are allowed to instantly and silently teleport right behind you and instantly damage or kill you. Not balanced.
- Enemies are still given perfect aim with every single shot, where players are given VATs that misses more frequently than it manages to hit. Not balanced.
- Enemies have perfect accuracy with every single shot and are given 100% anti-armor per shot while players must live with weapons that afford drastically reduced accuracy and are given zero anti-armor per shot unless using perk cards and/or Anti-Armor legendary weapons. Even then, anti-armor afforded to the player is never 100% even though enemies are given 100% anti-armor shots. Not balanced.
- Enemies have majorly enhanced perception, which can instantly negate Sneak cards. For example, if one enemy “sees” you, the horde around them all instantly see you. It’s not enemy by enemy, but by the horde. Not balanced.
- Daily Ops is worthless due to actual enhanced perception given to enemies. Players spend major amounts of time building their character’s method of combat. If the player has chosen a sneaky sniper build, for example, Daily Ops entirely negates that. This means Bethesda expects us to completely retool our build strictly around Daily Ops? Not balanced.
- Daily Ops, once again, is worthless due to stealth fields given to all enemies. Stealth invisibility fields negate using VATs. If you’ve built your character around using VATS criticals, once again Bethesda has negated that. Not balanced.
- HP bar above an enemy lies. If an enemy’s bar says level 50, yet it takes hundreds of shots to kill it, that’s not level 50. A level 50 enemy should take a similar number of shots to kill it no matter what type of enemy it is. Not balanced.
- Weapons show a high level of accuracy in the UI, but do not provide that high level of accuracy when shooting. Not balanced.
- Weapons show specific damage numbers, but never actually provide that level of damage when shooting. For example, an Instigating Fat Man purports around 1500 damage in sneak, but never actually shows more than about 100-200 damage when landing a direct hit while sneaking. Not balanced.
As you can see, the vast majority of Fallout 76 has no balance at all. Unless you consider enemy tactics and damage stacked against the player as balance, there is very little balance about the game. The legacies were, in fact, the only way to negate Bethesda’s entirely unbalanced game. In fact, the legacies gave balance back to a game against Bethesda’s unfair and unbalanced enemies.
Unfortunately, we’re now right back to a completely unbalanced and unfair game, where enemies can cheat against the player using tactics like teleportation where the player been given no such ability or defense.
Balance in Fallout 76? Hardly.
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No Man’s Sky: Benefits of Organic Frigates
As a follow-on to Randocity’s How to Get the Living Ship in No Man’s Sky article, you may be wondering what the difference is between an organic frigate and a technology frigate in No Man’s Sky. Yes, it ties into the Living Starship. Let’s explore.
How To Get an Organic Frigate
If you haven’t played through the Leviathan community expedition and received The Leviathan frigate, you may be wondering how to get more organic frigates if you’re starting a fresh game. Yes, you can get more organic frigates (and better ones too). To obtain an organic frigate, you’ll need to obtain certain key items:
- Dream Aerial
- Anomaly Detectors
To be complete, we’ll need to step back further. You’re also going to need to grind No Man’s Sky until your character has picked up enough items and unlocks to allow for use of the above items. These additional items and unlocks include:
- Have a ship outfitted with a Hyperdrive (and fuel) and Pulse Drive
- Enough Tritium to refill the Pulse Drive
- Enough Fuel to fill the Hyperdrive (you’ll hyperdrive jump to find each organic frigate)
- Obtain a Freighter
- At least 100-500 million units on hand. The more you have, the better. You need this to buy the organic frigates.
Getting a Freighter
Obtaining a freighter is relatively easy. You’ll simply need to jump into enough systems to find one in distress. After the ensuing space battle is completed by you, the captain will allow you to purchase that freighter. Note, the first freighter you come upon will be free, at least as of this writing.
Meaning, it’s worth waiting until you find at least an A-class or S-class freighter before accepting it. An S-class freighter is well worth waiting for because your frigate expeditions gain a HUGE bonus every time you send your frigates on expeditions. Picking up a free S-class freighter is the best option here. However, any freighter will work with organic frigates.
S-Class Freighters
I’ll be honest here. S-class freighters are relatively rare to find, but if you’re diligent enough by jumping into many different systems, you’ll eventually happen upon one. If you’ve already picked up your free freighter earlier, you’ll be required to buy an S-class freighter… and they’re typically exceedingly costly. Some S-class freighters can cost around 330 million units. Some even more than that. On one of my sessions, I found an S-class freighter that cost 13 million units, but it had very few slots and technology open. That meant I had to grind for many, many Salvaged Frigate Modules and Cargo Bulkheads to unlock everything on that freighter. Though, it was well worth it.
It doesn’t matter the number of slots opened or the amount of technology unlocked on an S-class freighter. It matters that it is simply an S-class freighter. If you find an S-class as cheaply as I found mine, buy it instantly. Don’t hesitate. The frigate expedition bonus is well worth the amount of grinding required to unlock the rest of the freighter. In fact, that bonus will help you do that via your frigate expeditions.
Dream Aerial and Technology Frigates
Circling back around, to get the Dream Aerial you’ll need to buy a number of “standard” technology frigates. In fact, you’ll need to buy enough technology frigates to be able to run 3 star missions from your freighter’s expedition board. Once you can run 3 star missions, there’s a chance a Dream Aerial will be found by your technology frigate expeditions. You can always dismiss frigates later. Once you have the plan to build a Dream Aerial, you can then locate your first organic frigate (or second, if you’ve run the Leviathan expedition), which then unlocks the ability to find more via Anomaly Detectors.
Once you have a Dream Aerial built, activate it, then use the pulse drive to obtain your first (or second) organic frigate. One down, ~29 more to go.
Anomaly Detectors
After you have your first organic frigate from the Dream Aerial, you can delete the Dream Aerial device. The Dream Aerial is only useful once to obtain your first organic frigate. From here, you’ll have to rely on Anomaly Detectors to obtain the rest of your organic frigates for your fleet.
To obtain Anomaly Detectors, you’ll need to perform a bit of grinding in the game. First, find a dense asteroid field. Second, begin destroying the asteroids non-stop, avoiding the random ships also roaming the field. Once you’ve destroyed enough asteroids, the game will award you an Anomaly Detector. Rinse and repeat until you have as many Anomaly Detectors as you need.
You’ll use up one Anomaly Detector to locate each organic frigate you wish to find. If you want all 30 frigates to be organic, then you’ll need 29 Anomaly Detectors if you didn’t play Leviathan, 28 if you did. That means grinding through an asteroid field until you have enough detectors.
How to use Anomaly Detectors
To use Anomaly Detectors, it’s nearly identical to the Dream Aerial. Activate it, then zip into pulse drive and wait. From here, you’ll see many “Rare” deep space objects appear. Ignore them and do not drop out of pulse. Instead, in 15 seconds they’ll timeout and disappear, then another will appear. Eventually, you’ll see a Whalesong. This is the one you want.
Drop out of pulse at the first sign of Whalesong and pick up your organic frigate. Organic frigates come in classes C through S, but most are likely to appear as C-class (the least costly). Typically, a C-class organic frigate might cost ~8 million units. However, an S-class organic frigate might set you back 53 million units. Be sure to have enough units on hand before performing this step. You don’t want to see Whalesong only to find you don’t have enough units on hand to buy the frigate.
Note, you may occasionally find an organic frigate that you’ve bought does not appear back at your freighter. This is a known bug. Ignore that system and don’t try to pick that frigate up again. Some organic frigates are bugged and won’t appear at your freighter even after you’ve paid for them.
One Organic Frigate Per Star System
You can only obtain one organic frigate per star system via Anomaly Detectors. This means you’ll need to hyperdrive jump to an unexplored system and use your Anomaly Detector again there. This means you’ll need a hyperdrive on your starship or freighter so you can jump into various new systems to pick up another organic frigate.
Abandoned systems may not produce organic frigates. I’d suggest caution when attempting to locate an organic frigate in an abandoned system.
30 Slot Limit
No Man’s Sky offers a maximum of 30 frigate slots. Once you reach your 30th frigate, you can’t buy anymore. If you locate an organic frigate, but find the game won’t give you the option to buy it, you have reached the maximum number of frigates you can own. You can check the number of frigate slots consumed on your freighter’s bridge at the fleet management console.
You can also check how many frigates you own by number using the Multi-tool scanner when inside of your freighter. Simply activate the Multi-tool scanner (pointing it at your freighter) and it will quickly show you your fleet number at a glance. This also means you don’t have to visit your management console to manually count your fleet size.
Always make sure that you are under the 30 slot limit and that you have enough units before venturing out with your Anomaly Detectors. Anomaly Detectors are hard enough to find without wasting them because you didn’t have enough frigate slots or units.
Benefits of Organic Frigates
You might be wondering what the difference is between an organic frigate and a technology frigate since they appear to do the same thing. Yes, both are very, very similar in what they do. However, organic frigates offer two very important differences over technology frigates, at least as of this writing:
- Organic frigates don’t break that I’ve found. Meaning, you’ll never have to venture over onto them to repair them (as of Waypoint). I’m assuming an organic could die, but I’ve never had one do that.
- Organic frigates offer benefits that can’t be found with technology frigates. Organic frigates can discover organic items such as Spawning Sacs and Psychonic Eggs. These items are not located by technology frigates! If you own a Living Ship, these extras are very important.
Spawning Sacs and Psychonic Eggs
These items are quite useful to the Living Ship. Spawning Sacs add inventory slots to the Living Ship in the same way as Storage Augmentations add slots to technology starships. Spawning Sacs are rare to find and can only be found by using S-class organic frigates on frigate expeditions. Psychonic Eggs extract into useful technology additions for the Living Ship, much like buying Starship modules from vendors at space stations.
Psychonic Eggs are not the only way to obtain Living Ship modules. You can also obtain them through random, but occasional pulse drive travels between worlds in a star system. You don’t need to consume anomaly detectors to find these. They’ll randomly appear while in pulse drive. Psychonic Eggs, however, give you the ability to unlock these at will rather than waiting on random encounters.
Unfortunately, you first need open slots in your Living Ship before Psychonic Eggs can become useful. That requires Spawning Sacs. In rarity, Spawning Sacs are probably the rarest items you’ll encounter, with maybe the exception of the white and gold guppy Exotic ship. Sending out 20-30 frigate missions, you might see 2 Spawning Sacs.
Note that you must send out S-class organic frigates to even have a chance of them finding Spawning Sacs. That means leveling up your organic frigate fleet to S-class before you’ll have any chance at receiving Spawning Sacs.
I didn’t begin seeing Spawning Sacs as a frigate expedition rewards until I began sending out S-class organic frigates. Even then, these Sacs are relatively rare spawn rewards.
Technology Frigates vs Organic Frigates
Because of all of the above, I strongly suggest filling out your frigate fleet with organic frigates. It’s a little more time consuming, but if you have a Living Ship and want to outfit it fully, you’ll need organic frigates to do this. Because organic frigates find all of the same stuff as technology frigates, but even more, it’s worth replacing your technology frigates with organic frigates in the long run.
Feeding Organic Frigates
One additional thing that’s been added is the ability to feed your organic frigates. However, you don’t need to feed them constantly. Instead, this feature adds a feeding slot that allows you to modify the stats of your organic frigate depending on what you “feed” them. By feeding the organic frigate with certain foodstuffs, you can modify the stats of each organic frigate.
This is something that cannot be done at all with technology frigates. Whatever stats a technology frigate has, that’s what it remains. If you want something better, you buy it. With organic frigates, you can spend time crafting unusual foods and feed them to each organic frigate to see how the stats change.
Note that some foods reset stats and some foods boost stats. Because it’s random, you won’t know what a food does what until you feed it to the frigate. After that, you’ll know. Also, what works with one organic frigate won’t work with another. Meaning, if you feed one frigate bread and it gains 20 to exploration, that doesn’t mean all frigates will respond this same way. You’ll need to trial-and-error your way to find the best foodstuffs to see the stats you’re wanting for each individual frigate.
For example, if you want to boost Combat stats on a specific frigate, you’ll need feed it a variety of foods until you find the right combination. I will say, though, that you should limit feeding your organic to basic foods. Don’t go overboard producing the rarest of cakes as it is typically overkill. Simply feeding the frigate Cake Batter might afford the same response as feeding it the cake itself.
I always recommend trying basic food components before spending time building expensive and time consuming cakes and pies. Organic frigates don’t yet have picky palettes and stats can be boosted with simpler crafted food items, like sugar, batter, pie crust and so on.
Leveling Up Organic Frigates
One question that has surfaced is how to level up less than S-Class organic frigates to S-Class. Don’t worry. They do this all on their own. All you need to do is send them out on expeditions. It doesn’t take long to see a fleet of S-Class organic frigates. It takes maybe 10-20 expeditions to see a C-Class level up to S-Class. This leveling up system works with both technology frigates and organic frigates. Admittedly, organic frigates seem to level up at a faster rate than technology frigates.
This ultimately means it will take a little bit of time to get your organics up to S-Class to begin seeing those ever elusive Spawning Sacs. Though, you may see Psychonic Eggs appear as rewards long before your organics reach S-Class.
Subject To Change
Because No Man’s Sky is an ever evolving game, due mostly to Hello Games continual meddling of it, the rules defined in this article may change with a major update in the future. For example, even though organic frigates don’t seem to become damaged or die on missions now, a future update could make this change possible. This might mean that your organic frigates could potentially die or become injured in a future update. Right now, it’s not possible. Please keep this in mind if you’re reading this article a year or two from when this article was written.
Organic Frigate Gallery
To end out this article, here’s a small gallery of images from my fleet:
Oh, and Happy New Year to everyone reading. Please feel free to leave a comment or question below.
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PS4: How to repair extended storage that won’t repair
Occasionally, you may find the need to unplug your PS4 because, well, it’s hung. Or maybe, the whole system just crashed hard. It happens. When rebooting from these conditions, it causes all hard drives to need a filesystem repair upon reboot. If you have an extended storage hard drive plugged in via USB, sometimes the PS4 will attempt to repair the extended storage, but then refuse to complete the repair. Fret not. If your hard drive was working fine prior to the crash, it’s likely still working just fine. Let’s explore.
PlayStation 4 (and PS5?)
Note that while this repair tutorial was written to address the PS4’s external storage, it likely also works with the PS5. With that in mind, let’s understand what goes wrong under these circumstances.
After rebooting from a crash, the PS4 system naturally takes a longer amount of time to boot up than is otherwise normal. This is expected. The internal boot drive filesystem needs to be repaired. I’ve never encountered a problem with the system repairing the internal drive unless the internal hard drive has failed. If your system won’t boot after a hang, you’ve got a lot bigger problems than the extended storage hard drive.
Swapping the PS4’s Internal Hard Drive
Here’s another scenario where this HowTo article may apply. If you’ve had to rebuild your PS4 with a new boot drive or you simply wanted to upgrade to a bigger drive, you’ll need to boot into safe mode and reinstall the latest boot system and operating system to get the system bootable once again. Once you’ve done that, you’ve got a whole lot of work ahead before your system will be back to the same state before replacing that internal drive.
That setup process is not within the scope of this article, however. This article also applies to the situation when your PS4 is fully once again bootable after a reinstall, but your external hard drive refuses to repair.
Extended Hard Drive after PS4 Crash
If you’ve encountered any issue where the PS4 refuses to repair the extended storage media connected via USB, then you’re not alone. It’s a relatively common problem and usually has a very easy fix, one that’s also not obvious.
Note that the operating system on the PS4, under this failure-to-repair scenario, is likely misleading you when that it suggests that the extended hard needs to be reformatted. Don’t listen to this advice. It very likely doesn’t need reformatting. Raise your hand if you enjoy having to download gigs and gigs of games again from the Internet! No one? Alright then, let’s continue.
Because of a crash or a hang, the operating system might have lost some critical data stored on the primary internal hard drive that prevents the repair and misleads you into an action that’s actually not needed.
Licenses
Every game that operates on the PS4 requires a license to operate. If you’ve purchased digital copies from the PlayStation store, these licenses are stored on your console’s internal boot drive. For physical disk copies, the license is the physical disk. This is why the PS4 requires insertion of the media into the drive before it allows the game to operate.
If your PS4 (or PS5) has had a crash or a hang, a hard boot may occasionally corrupt that licensing data, specifically about the game that was operating at the time. It only takes one corrupt license to prevent the external hard drive from repairing properly.
Don’t fret here. Game licenses are easily recovered, but may require two different steps.
Extended Storage and Licenses
Why do corrupt licenses cause this problem? When the operating system needs to repair an external hard drive, it seems to validate every license for every game stored on that extended storage before attempting a repair the external volume. If the licenses are invalid or cannot be found, the PS4’s operating system will refuse to repair the extended storage and suggest reformatting the hard drive… which, in turn, seems to suggest there’s a physical problem with the hard drive itself. Under this condition, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the the external hard drive.
In fact, all of the data is still completely intact. You just need to recover the licenses. So let’s do that now.
License Recovery
To allow your external volume to repair, ‘Restoring Licenses’ is the operation that needs to be performed. This action is done through the PS4’s settings area. This is located under:
Settings => Account Management => Restore Licenses
When you activate this function, the PS4 will clear all old licenses and then download all authorized game licenses anew from the PlayStation store. Then, write those licenses to your PS4’s boot drive. Once this action is complete, the game licenses for all of your digital game versions will be restored.
A second action may also be required called ‘Rebuilding the Database’. This isn’t done from within settings. It is performed from the PS4’s safe mode menu. To get into Safe Mode, you’ll need to use the following:
- Shutdown your PS4 fully (not Rest Mode) until it powers off.
- Press and hold the power button your PS4. You’ll hear one beep upon pressing and ~7 seconds later, you’ll hear a second beep.
- Once you hear the second beep, stop pressing the button.
- The system will boot into Safe Mode and show you a menu of options.
- Choose the option ‘Rebuild Database’ and activate
- Once this function is complete, choose ‘Restart PS4’ to boot the console into normal mode.
Repairing the External Hard Drive
Now that you have restored the licenses and rebuilt the database, your console has been prepped for your external hard drive to be repaired. At this point, plug the drive into a USB port. The system should automatically detect the drive needs to be repaired and prompt you to repair it.
This time, your hard drive should fully repair without any problems. If so, you’re good to go and enjoy your fixed up console.
Failure Continues?
If your external hard drive fails to repair after all of these steps, then clearly there’s something amiss with your hard drive that is likely not related to licensing. From here, you can try to reformat the drive and see if that works. However, if the PS4’s operating system cannot properly format the drive, attempting a reformat may not fix this problem. In fact, this problem may indicate your hard drive has gone bad or is in the process of failing.
Because you’re going to need to reformat the drive, I might suggest connecting the drive to a Windows or Mac system and attempt to have the drive perform a full long format on the drive. This might take several hours. This process allows the operating system to check every sector of the drive and explicitly mark bad sectors while formatting.
Unfortunately, the PS4 doesn’t offer this deep level of formatting. Thankfully, Windows does, but Macs don’t do it easily. As long as you format the drive as exFAT, you will be able to use it on the PS4 later. However, you may not be able to use it as an extended drive on the PS4 as that may require the PS4 to reformat the drive, which may release all of the bad sectors that Windows was able to find and mark as bad. Though, it’s worth a shot to try.
If you convert that drive to an extended drive and find that the PS4 can’t repair the drive again later, then you may want to repurpose that drive strictly for your Windows or Mac use and go buy a new drive for your PS4.
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10 Best Ways to Make Money in GTA Online
Unlike Grand Theft Auto V, where lots of money is thrown the player’s way all the way to the end of the game, Grand Theft Auto Online isn’t at all like this. Let’s explore the top ways to make money in GTA Online. Before we get started, let’s clarify several issues.
Daily versus In-Game Day
There is some confusion with GTAO using the word, “daily”. The game world has a day that lasts around an hour of real world play time. Then, there’s an actual in-real-life (IRL) day.
The use of the word ‘Daily’ below in the Type area means 24 real world hours must pass before that challenge or event resets in the game world. The challenges do not reset based on the in-game day, but instead reset based on waiting a full 24 clock-on-the-wall hours from the last time you played it.
You can specifically see this timer when you visit the Lucky Wheel at the Casino. However, other events which also require a 24 hour waiting period do not have visible timers. Instead, you must remember the last time you completed that specific event to know when you can play it again.
Costly Purchases
Unfortunately, too many activities in Grand Theft Auto Online require spending significant amounts of GTA$ to unlock access to those missions and areas (i.e., Cayo Perico Island). Once unlocked, you can then run those missions and make whatever money is given. However, the game is severely lopsided with too many of these missions and areas, such as Heists, falling into this category. What this all means? It means that Rockstar requires that you spend millions in GTA$ to gain back only a fraction of that money after completing the missions. This article intends to focus on the easiest ways to make money including ways that are entirely free (no costs involved), which don’t cost too much and/or ways that return a significant or passive amount of GTA$ for any money spent.
Any mission or activity which requires you to become a VIP, CEO or Motorcycle Club President (MCP) means you’ll need to purchase at least one of a VIP organization, an Executive Office (CEO) or a Motorcycle Clubhouse (MCP). All of these require at least GTA$1,000,000, with the VIP option being the worst deal in the game as you get no property out of the deal. If you’re going to pay at least GTA$1 million, you might as well get property out of the deal.
For activities in GTAO which primarily seek to take your GTA$, these are mentioned at the bottom of this article. Though, these activities aren’t worth playing simply to make money and should be avoided for that purpose. These up-front cost missions should only be played for their entertainment value… and only if you have the spare millions of GTA$ needed to unlock them. However, you don’t need to pay to unlock these expensive missions. There are plenty of activities which will yield GTA$ without paying anything.
Update for June 2022
Rockstar has permanently upped the ante for the Nightclub daily payout. Instead of the pittance of GTA$10,000 per in-game day, the game is now paying a whopping GTA$50,000 per day with a maximum safe capacity now at GTA$210,000. Normally, we would only see this kind of bonus as a short term weekly promotion. It seems that Rockstar has upped this payout permanently (or at least as permanently as Rockstar’s payouts can be… which probably means that it was a mistake and once Rockstar notices it, it will go back to GTA$10,000 per day). For now, gain from this while it lasts. So far, it’s lasted quite a while.
Is this update worth buying a Nightclub? Yes. In fact, I definitely recommend this purchase as the first property after purchasing an MC, VIP or CEO property. At GTA$50,000 per in-game day, you could see your Nightclub purchase refunded in around 30 in-game days assuming the Nightclub costs around GTA$1.5 million. In real world time and at 48 minutes IRL per in-game day, that would mean ~24 real life hours to see a GTA$1.5 million payout. If you play 4 hours a day, that’s around 6 days to recoup the cost of the Nightclub. After that, all money is bonus.
Tuners Update — Reduced Payouts
After the Tuners update rolled on July 20th, 2021, many payouts (including the nightclub missions) seem to have been reduced. This article is intended as reference, but know that with every update that Rockstar rolls, Rockstar can reduce payouts on any of what’s documented below without warning, as is the case with Simeon’s request and Nightclub missions. Simeon’s car request formerly offered up GTA$20,000 per car prior to Tuners, but has since been reduced on some cars to GTA$15,000 after this update. Rockstar just can’t seem to get enough of continually screwing us over.
Legend
The legend includes a Difficulty Level that ranges from 1 (Easy) to 5 (Medium) to 10 (Hard). The rest that appear in the legend are self-explanatory.
With these problems clarified, let’s start making some entirely free GTA$ starting with the best first …
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1. Spin the Lucky Wheel
The first way to earn money in GTA online is by spinning the Lucky Wheel every day in the Diamond Casino. This activity costs nothing.
Landing on the GTA$50,000 spot each day for 7 days will net you a cool GTA$350,000 a week. Performing this activity for a full 31 days will net you GTA$1,550,000. How do you land this spot every day? The simplest way is to close the application before the wheel stops spinning. Once you know the wheel is not landing on GTA$50,000 (easy to see), close out, then reload into the game and try spinning again. There are also other money spots on the wheel such as 25,000 casino chips (which can be converted to GTA$), GTA$30,000, GTA$40,000 and others. While the highest is GTA$50,000, landing on any of these money spots is free money. Take advantage.
The best thing about this activity is that you don’t have to spend any money or perform any silly activities to get this free money, but you do have to sometimes restart the app several times before you can land on the exact spot, which takes a bit of time.
Cost: Free
Type: Free Money, Daily, Recurring
Reward: up to GTA$50,000 max depending on which space you land
Difficulty Level: 1 (Easy)
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2. Simeon
This free activity appears once per day. Simeon will send you a text to locate one of several cars from his list. It can take about 30-45 minutes real play time before Simeon’s text pops up. If you’ve waited that long without a text, this likely means it hasn’t been a full 24 hours since the last time you performed this activity. These cars range in cost and only one of those listed cars will reward a maximum of ~GTA$20,000 (some cars reduced to $15k after Tuners update July 20th, 2021). Locate the highest cost car in the list, lose the 2 wanted stars, take it to Los Santos Customs and paint it for free. Then, drop it off at Simeon’s dock warehouse garage to pick up your free ~GTA$20,000 (or whatever you find your car is worth). This one only appears every 24 hours, like spinning the wheel.
If you do Simeon’s text mission every day, in 31 days you’ll have made GTA$620,000. The challenge with this mission is in finding the car Simeon wants. The biggest hint I can give is try looking at the Diamond Casino parking lot. At least 2 times out of 5, you’ll find his highest priced car parked there, just waiting to steal.
Note, this one can be tricky. The game’s car spawning mechanic doesn’t sync up with this quest and won’t always spawn the cars Simeon wants. This means you can literally spend hours waiting on specific cars to spawn. Sometimes, the cars are readily available at a parking lot, sometimes you can drive around for hours looking. If after driving around for about 5-10 minutes without success, I recommend logging out and logging into a new server and waiting for Simeon to text you his newest list again. Moving to a new server can sometimes make this quest easier and faster. It’s worth noting that whatever it costs to repair the car at Los Santos Customs, after being chased by the cops, will be reimbursed to you upon turning the vehicle in. You don’t need to treat the car with kid gloves when heading over to Los Santos Customs. Once you’ve repaired and painted the car, then yes, you’ll want to be careful when driving over to Simeon’s warehouse at the docks.
Cost: Free
Type: Active Income, Daily, Recurring
Reward: Max GTA$20,000 + repair costs reimbursed per day, depends on which car you drop off.
Difficulty Level: 3 (Medium… depends on whether cars spawn + must get rid of a 2 star wanted status + must drive car safely to the docks without damage)
Correction: I have since found that even though some cars have had their take reduced to GTA$15,000, some have not. The maximum is still GTA$20,000 + repair costs if you choose the correct car.
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3. Stealing Cars
This is a free activity that can be had once per day. As in the game’s name as Grand Theft Auto, stealing random cars off of the street and driving them to Los Santos Customs can net you between GTA$3,000 to GTA$9,000 per car, depending on the car model you sell. You can only sell one car per day. While this isn’t a whole lot of money each time, it’s still enough that it’s worth doing for some quick cash.
Cost: Free
Type: Active Income, Daily, Recurring
Reward: Up to GTA$9,000 per day depending on which car you drop off
Difficulty Level: 1 (Easy)
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4. Robbing Convenience Marts
This is a free activity. While this activity can be a bit more on the fun side, it isn’t without its downsides. The difficulty isn’t so much with holding up the store, but that the maximum money you’ll get from each store is maxed at around GTA$1,000. That amount of money almost seems not worth the hassle, except there are 19 stores that you can hit up around the map to net somewhere close to GTA$19,000 per day. Not the best haul in this list, but it’s decent.
Cost: Free
Type: Active Income, Daily, Recurring
Reward: Up to GTA$1,000 per store with 19 stores
Difficulty Level: 3 (Mostly easy, but will need a decent getaway car)
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5. Gang Attacks
Gang attacks appear as a large red circular area on the mini map and full sized map. These activities have you take down a bunch of thugs in that area. Upon successful gang attack completion, you receive 500 RP. Where you make your payout here is looting all of the gang bodies and the weapon crates. Gang members may drop between GTA$20-50 each. Each weapon crate drops GTA$500. Most areas have around 5 crates or more. The crates can total at least GTA$2,500 + whatever money you can loot off of the gang members.
Cost: Free
Type: Active, Daily, Recurring, Multiple map areas, Time Suck
Reward: ~GTA$2,500 + loot + 500 RP * ~36 Gang areas on the map >= GTA$90,000 per day
Difficulty Level: 6-8 (Medium hard, requires ammo, decent shooting skills and persistence)
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6. Visit the Casino Cashier
This one offers free money every day. Visiting the casino cashier allows you to pick up 1000 visitor bonus casino chips every single day. You can cash these chips out to GTA$ at any time. This one is down the list because it doesn’t offer a lot per day, but it is free money with no catch. Like the Lucky Wheel, this one also takes a full 24 hours before it resets. If you do this one just after spinning the wheel, the Lucky Wheel timer can be used to cover both activities.
Cost: Free
Type: Recurring, Daily
Reward: 1000 chips daily or GTA$70,000 every 7 days or GTA$300,000 every 30 days
Difficulty Level: 1 (Easy)
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7. Freemode Events
To participate in Freemode events, you’ll need to play in public servers. Private servers of any type do not spawn Freemode events. These events are random in type and require specific things, like opening a parachute closest to the ground. Whomever does this the best gets first place and the highest prize.
Cost: Free
Type: Multiplayer, Recurring, Random throughout the day
Reward: GTA$18,000+ to a little more than GTA$20,000
Difficulty Level: Depends on the event and how many participate
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8. Hidden Caches
Here’s another treasure hunt that was introduced as part of Cayo Perico. This is similar to the treasure hunt that’s also available on Cayo Perico Island (see below), except this hunt is much, much better for GTA$ and doesn’t require purchasing the expensive Kosatka Submarine. In this case, there are 10 hidden caches to find and because there are so many and because these caches can be found daily, it’s makes the list at spot 8. However, there are 100 locations from which those 10 caches can spawn, making it a medium difficulty event. This means you’ll need to check a lot of different locations to find all 10. The caches can be picked up inside or outside of a vehicle. This means you can use an underwater vehicle, like the Toreador, if you have one or you can use a scuba diving suit, your choice. If your vehicle has a sonar (i.e., you have bought the Kosatka), the sonar will make it somewhat faster to find all 10.
This one rewards GTA$7,500 and 500 RP for each cache found. Finding all 10, you will net GTA$75,000 and 5,000 RP. The caches reset daily, allowing you to pick up that GTA$75,000 each day. In 7 days, that’s GTA$525,000. In 28 days, that’s GTA$2.1 million. That’s a lot of GTA$ to get if you do it every day for a month. In fact this one is far easier than doing the Daily Objectives and awards more GTA$ in 28 days, though less RP at 140,000.
Cost: Free
Type: Daily, Recurring
Difficulty Level: 5 (Medium — must be tenacious)
Reward: GTA$7,500 + 500 RP per cache (10x = $75,000 + 5,000 RP per day)
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Income which requires a purchase….
Here are the final two of our top 10, but these require buying properties to gain a daily income. These final two are included in this top 10 list because these are the only properties you can own in GTA Online that produce truly passive income.
Update: There has been one new property added that also adds passive income, although very little per day at around $500. This new property is the Agency. This is the Franklin Clinton and Partner property. It isn’t included in the top 10 because these two below are still the highest paying for passive income in the game. The Agency’s passive income is too low to be of any real value. The game claims that if you do Security missions that the daily income increases. Unfortunately, I’ve not found that to be the case. I’ve done at least 20-30 of the Security missions and the daily income remains at a low $500 per day.
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9. Nightclub Promotion
As of June 2022, the daily nightclub payout has been increased to GTA$50,000 per day. The safe capacity has also been increased to GTA$210,000. Nightclub ownership activities have now moved into the top spot for residual income from a property purchase.
Because this activity still requires investment, it has moved up one place to 9. However, because of the GTA$50,000 per day income, owning a nightclub is now the #1 activity to do once you can afford this property purchase. In other words, this is the recommended first property to purchase (after buying an executive suite to be CEO) and to milk for cash once you have grinded enough GTA$ from the top free list above. With this new increased in-game daily payout, in 4 hours of play, you can earn GTA$200,000 for mostly doing nothing.
Owning a nightclub is a property type that you must purchase before you can reap the passive monetary rewards. However, this property comes with a catch. To make the maximum money per day (GTA$10,000 now raised to GTA$50,000), you’ll need to complete various Nightclub management missions. These activities promote the nightclub and keep the club full. So long as the nightclub remains full of people and the popularity progress-bar is filled, the nightclub will earn you GTA$50,000 per day doing next to nothing. As the club popularity decreases and the popularity bar dips, so does the income. However, you will also need to invest in the nightclub security to drastically slow down the loss of income each in-game day.
Like arcades, nightclubs cost around GTA$1.5 million depending on the property. However, once you own it, it is guaranteed to generate some amount of passive income. If you do nothing and choose not to promote the club, the club still produces a minimum amount of passive daily income, maybe GTA$1,000 per day or possibly higher.
You’ll also net various amounts of GTA$ from 2,500 to 5,000 for each successful promotion activity completed, such as putting up posters yields GTA$5,000 and a small amount of RP on completion.
Note that to run nightclub missions, you need to become CEO, which also costs GTA$. To become CEO, you’ll need to buy an Executive Office or pick one up in the Criminal Enterprise Starter Pack. Becoming VIP or MC might also work, but these also cost GTA$ to buy into.
Cost: GTA$1-2 million depending on property + GTA$1-2 million for Executive Office to be CEO
Type: Active or Passive Income, Daily, Recurring
Passive Income: GTA$50,000 per day down to GTA$1,000 per day depending on popularity.
Mission Reward: GTA$2,500 to GTA$5,000 + RP depending on promotional activity
Safe Capacity: GTA$210,000
Difficulty Level: 1 (Easy) to 3 (Medium) depending on activity
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10. Arcade
Owning an arcade requires buying it with GTA$. The cost to buy an Arcade is around GTA$1,300,000. However, Rockstar regularly puts properties on heavy discount throughout the game. At a 40-50% discount, you might spend as little as GTA$500,000 to get a property.
Sometimes you can even get some properties included in a bundle or possibly free from Rockstar promotions. Bundles such as in the Criminal Enterprise Starter Pack (CESP), which costs somewhere between USD$10-$20, includes a bunch of properties, weapons, vehicles, outfits and tattoos… including a bonus of GTA$1,000,000. This bundle might also be included with the purchase of certain game versions. Take advantage of freebies included with such bundles if you can afford them.
For example, the CESP bundle includes the following properties:
- Maze Bank West Executive Office — No Garage w/o GTA$
- Paleto Forest Gunrunning Bunker — 1 Car Garage
- Senora Desert Counterfeit Cash Factory (must be a motorclub president)
- Great Chaparral Biker Clubhouse — 17 Bike Garage (10 for you, 1 each for 7 members)
- 1561 San Vitas Street Apartment — 2 Car Garage
- 1337 Exceptionalists Way — 10 Car Garage
However, CESP doesn’t include an Arcade property. Take advantage of the property discounts when they roll around each week, which may include discounts for an Arcade, a Hangar and Nightclub properties.
Keep in mind that owning properties isn’t without cost. Every property you buy has a daily payment that is subtracted at the end of each game world day from your GTA$ (about every hour of play). This means that you won’t make exactly GTA$5,000 per day… it’ll be more like GTA$4,500 after daily expenses are subtracted for that specific property. You will see the full GTA$5,000 deposited into the safe and the daily expenses are subtracted separately.
However, you don’t have to do anything to get that income. It rolls in without even being there and I’m not even sure you have to buy arcade machines either. Just be sure to stop by and pick the money up before the safe fills up. Yes, you must stop by the arcade to pick it up. You also have to remain online for a full in-game day for the money to show up.
Finally, it’s worth noting that unlike GTA V, you cannot own multiple businesses like arcades or nightclubs as you might expect. In GTA Online, you can own one of each type of business property including the executive office, arcade, nightclub, hangar and motorcycle clubhouse. Garages and apartments are the exception which you are allowed to own up to 6, excluding garages attached to businesses like the executive office, casino penthouse, arcades, nightclubs, bunkers and facilities. For completion’s sake, you can also only own one each of these vehicles including the Super Yacht, Kosatka, Mobile Operations Center, Terrorbyte and Avenger.
If you attempt to buy a second “one-only” property or you’ve used up your 6 slots, the game will apply credit from your old property towards your new purchase so that you only pay the diffence in price between the first and second. If the new property is less costly than the old one, you’ll get money back. Note that freebie properties might not offer a trade-in allowance towards a new property.
Cost: Minimum GTA$1,300,000 for Arcade (may be able to get one free)
Type: Passive Income, Daily, Recurring
Passive Income: GTA$5,000 per day
Active Income: None
Difficulty Level: 1 (Easy)
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Runners Up
Here are some other runner up events and activities that didn’t make the top 10 but are well worth considering. Note, the Payphone hit payouts have been reduced from GTA$85,000 per hit to GTA$50,000 per hit after the 2022 Summer update. Rockstar has seen the error of their ways and reinstated the GTA$85,000 per hit reward.
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Franklin’s Quests (First Runner Up)
[Updated 7/26/2022] After the 2022 summer update (July), Rockstar has lowered payouts for Payphone hits to GTA$50,000. The GTA$85,000 reward recently reinstated for payphone hits. This means payphone hits are back to being an excellent money making opportunity in the GTA Online.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this recent addition and I’ve come to the conclusion that this Agency addition is way better than I had originally thought and is pretty much better than any other update for money making purposes. In fact, it’s so great, I would bump The Agency update into the number 10 position if not for one thing (well, a couple). It costs a LOT of cash to buy an Agency plus it costs to buy an Executive Suite and it offers very little passive income in return per day. The passive income isn’t where you make money.
It’s the Payphone Hits which can definitely net a crap ton of GTA$ in very little time. In fact, Payphone Hits can make you so much money so rapidly, that it will pay for the cost of the Agency property in ~30 Payphone Hits (less when they boost the return). After that payback time, it’s all profit. With Payphone Hits, you can make around 6 hits per hour. Meaning, in about 5 hours of doing nothing but Payphone hits all returning $85,000 per pop, these will completely pay for the Agency.
[Updated: 3/11/2022] I’ve been remiss in updating this article, but here’s the 2022 update including Franklin’s new quests. Franklin’s quests cost around GTA$2.2 million because you have to buy into the new Agency property. Like the Auto Shop addition just before this one, you must pay to unlock the Franklin quests by buying a property. For that money and property, however, you will also unlock 20 new garage spaces. If you’re like me, forever running out of new car spaces, getting a new 20 car garage is a pretty sweet deal. However, it also means shelling out around GTA$2 million… a lot of grinding.
The biggest deal unlocked with Franklin’s quests, besides the property, is Dr. Dre’s quests. Though, Dre’s quests aren’t the best way to make money from this update. No, it’s the Payphone Hits!
Dr. Dre
I’m including the Dr. Dre quests here because it’s technically part of Franklin’s quests. Dr. Dre’s quests only unlock after you run at least one Security mission, which requires being a CEO, MC or VIP.
However, know that Dr. Dre’s quest line is like the Heists… effectively one time, but restartable. Yes, you can do them over again, but must start from the beginning. The haul for these quests is decent, but I don’t at all recommend these for ongoing money making opportunities due to the complexities of Dre’s quests. For each mission, you’ll earn GTA$100k. For completing the entire Dr. Dre quests, you’ll earn GTA$1 million. It’s a decent haul, but the missions are not simple and may require trying multiple times if you’re doing it alone. These quests are also easy to fail.
Cost: GTA$2.2 million to buy an Agency PLUS Buying a VIP, CEO or MC property
Type: Not Free, Restartable One-Off
Reward: GTA$100,000 per mission + GTA$1,000,000 for completing them all
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Agency Security Quests
These missions require that you to become a CEO, VIP or MC to complete them. This means you will need to purchase a VIP pass, a Motorcycle Club (MC) or an Executive Suite (CEO) before you can run these. One of these costs around GTA$1 million to GTA$1.5 million depending, but you only need one. This is in addition to cost of purchasing the Agency to get access to Franklin.
Franklin offers your character multiple types of agency Security Missions from protecting supplies, to stealing items, to protecting a person, to stealing vehicles. Each of these missions earns you a random amount of GTA$ decided by the computer system on your Agency desk. Whatever the computer says the mission will earn, that’s what it earns. It typically ranges from about GTA$33k to GTA$64k. It depends on the mission and what the game decides that mission is worth.
The Agency Security Missions are decent hauls, but the missions can sometimes go south easily. If you fail a mission, that mission disappears from the computer and cannot be repeated. It will be replaced with a new mission, usually offering a much smaller haul. Because of the randomness with these agency quests, the complexity of them combined with the ease for which they can fail, I don’t recommend these for ongoing cash grabs in the game. There’s also a cooldown timer between each quest.
You can do them, but know that they aren’t always worth the time and effort for the money return involved. Do them for fun, not for profit.
Cost: GTA$2.2 million to buy an Agency PLUS Buying a VIP, CEO or MC property
Type: Not Free, Recurring
Reward: GTA$33k to GTA$64k
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Payphone Hits
These quests are where the GTA$ are. Not only do Payphone hits not require being a CEO, MC or VIP to run them, when you complete the Bonus, you will get an extra GTA$70,000 for a total of GTA$85,000 for each successful hit completed. You can even run these in Invite Only Sessions to avoid interaction with other players. Because there’s no limit in how many you can do of these in a day, doing 10 will net you GTA$850,000. Doing 12 will earn you, GTA$1,020,000. Keep in mind that it takes a minimum of about 10 minutes per hit, that means it will take you about 120 minutes (2 hours) to earn GTA$1 million. There is a cooldown timer on these hits, but this can be avoided if you save immediately after receiving your cash by changing your outfit, then killing and restarting the game. However, doing this means you have to wait through the very long game restart process (around 4 minutes to load and another 2 minutes to get online). After that, it takes another 4 minutes to complete a hit. That totals right around 10 minutes per restart and Payphone Hit. This means you can complete about 6 per hour netting you $510,000 per hour of play.
Occasionally, Rockstar increases this bonus by 50% earning you GTA$105,000 as Bonus and GTA$22,500 for base fee, for a total of GTA$127,500 per successful hit. This will net you GTA$1 million a whole lot faster (in about an hour).
Hits consists of 5 types:
- The Cofounder — This type of hit requires you visit a motel, wait for him to check out, then perform the action required to take him out such as a sticky bomb on the car or using a scoped weapon to blow the engine.
- The Tech Entrepreneur — This type of hit requires a taxi cab. You pick up a cab at the designated location, then drive the Tech Entrepreneur to the location required and do the deed by drowning or the scrapyard.
- The Judge — This type of hit requires visiting the golf course. You will do away with her by golf club, running her over with a cart or blowing her up with a sticky bomb.
- The Popstar — This type of hit requires you to chase the popstar in the car and take them out with a specific method, like chasing them in a cop car to intimidate them, taking them out Vagos style with a driveby or using a truck cab to ram them into submission.
- The Trolls — The Trolls are 4 hits. You must visit all 4 locations and take out the trolls with various criteria, such as in 7 minutes, using headshots or running them over in a vehicle.
- The CEO — This mission requires taking out a CEO playing construction worker. The mission will require you to use various construction equipment to take him out, like blowing up a gas tank, dropping a container on him or triggering a dozer to run him over.
Two additional missions exists, but only if you are logged in as a CEO or MC and have two people. All of these missions are most easily launched by calling Franklin from the contact on your phone. Though, you can also wait until Franklin randomly launches one. Using the phone makes these missions the fastest to get started, because you don’t need to visit the Agency computer at the office.
Note, for missions that require you to pick up a taxi or police cruiser, you don’t need to wait for the message. Go to the taxi location near the Casino or to the Chili restaurant or similar. For the police cruisers, they will spawn sometimes at a location closest to the Popstar’s car. Though, not always. Once you locate a cruiser, you may find yourself driving all over Los Santos go get to where the Popstar is.
Bugs exist here. If you are using a Deluxo, any Trolls Bonus will fail if you accidentally run them over in that specific car. Meaning, if you are given the criteria to run the Trolls over in a Vehicle, don’t do it in a Deluxo. Choose another car. However, even if you’re running a different Bonus requirement and accidentally run a Troll over in the Deluxo, that bonus will also fail even if unrelated. This bug has been reported. Note, this issue may affect all types of special weapons vehicles like the Toreador and the Stromberg.
Bugs in the GPS leading to the Scrapyard (The Tech Entrepreneur) and the door of the Von Crastenberg Richman (also The Tech Entrepreneur) is inaccurate. If you follow the GPS, it will lead you incorrectly. You will need to find these two locations on your own and remember how to get there when these mission requirements appear.
A bug exists with The Judge missions. All of The Judge missions occur at the golf course. If you fail to change into the Golf Outfit and Golf Club, the mission bonus will automatically fail even if you successfully do what the bonus requires.
A bug exists with The CEO. If you accidentally wander too close to the construction site, this will disrupt The CEO’s walking path. Once this occurs, there’s no way to recover to receive the bonus. He simply won’t resume his walking path once disrupted. In fact, any targets that follow a walking path will fail to recover that walking path if they are disrupted. However, some targets that lose their walking path can still see a successful bonus, it’ll just be a whole lot more difficult. However, The CEO will fail the bonus because he won’t line up with the requirements.
One last thing about these Payphone Hits is that they’re not all equal in time and effort. Some hits are way more complex than others. For example, one of the Popstar hits requires taking him out in drive-by style using a Vagos wagon. Shooting while driving in this game is, at best, a miss affair. While it is possible to do it, it’s not easy nor is it accurate. Another more complicated hit is The Judge hit that requires taking her out with a sticky bomb planted somewhere close to her on the golf course. That’s next to impossible to do. Anytime you get close to her and take out any kind of weapon, her goons start firing on you. That spooks her and she runs away, failing the “sticky bomb” Bonus. If she runs away with either of the other requirements, it is possible to get the bonus. When these overly complex missions appear, I kill the game instantly and try again. There’s no reason to do these complex missions when most of the rest of the missions are straightforward and relatively easy.
Complicated Hit Example
As an example of a complicated and time consuming hit, one of the The Judge hits requires you do it with a sticky bomb at a specific hole on the golf course. This one is so specific about where and how you must do it, you are required to know the golf course like the back of your hand. The one thing Rockstar forgets is that even if you play the golf course through, the game takes control over which hole you’re on and automatically transports you to the next one after completion.
You don’t get the benefit of actually walking from hole to hole yourself. This means that even if you play the golf course, you still don’t get to know the course. You get to know the holes specifically, but not where they are located on the property. To run this specific sticky bomb mission, that means you’ll need to spend time at the golf course learning exactly where each of the holes are, how they are laid out and how to get to each one of them. That’s something you must do on your own, wasting a lot of time in the process. Oh, and once you get onto the property, knowing which hole is which is not terribly easy to determine. As I said above, some hits are way more complicated and time consume than others. I don’t even get why Rockstar would think people could actually perform this hit. Yet, it’s included in the batch of hits. I always drop from this one when it appears. I don’t have the time to scour the golf course to find exactly where hole 3 is or hole 6 or any other hole.
Cost: GTA$2.2 million to buy an Agency (may require VIP, MC or CEO first time to unlock)
Type: Not Free, Recurring
Reward: GTA$22,500 to GTA$85,000 each hit depending on bonus success
The best of all of the above are most definitely the Payphone hits. However, I can’t remember if the game requires completion of at least one Security contract and/or Dr. Dre’s missions to unlock the Payphone Hits. If so, that means you will need to invest in CEO, MC or VIP to unlock these Payphone Hit missions. I’m assuming it does. These expensive investments is why the Franklin missions failed to make the top 10, even though the Payphone Hits net a lot of GTA$ quickly.
For the Payphone Hits alone, however, this is the reason the Franklin section has been placed immediately below #10 as the first runner up.
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Auto Repair Shop + Los Santos Car Meetup
This brand new addition arrived as of July 20th, 2021. Two new features have been introduced into GTAO. The first is the Los Santos Car Meetup. This is a large warehouse building where players can meet and show off their cars, but unfortunately only one car at a time. As you show off and mod your car, your Meetup reputation points will increase. These reputation points are separate from standard RP. There are 32 parking spaces in the warehouse where cars can be parked. There’s also an indoor track that can be raced. The second is the Auto Repair shop, which you have to buy.
To begin this whole deal, once you get inside of the meetup building, you’ll meet with Mimi (the organizer) who introduces you to Sessanta and KDJ. Sessanta and KDJ want to open an auto repair and modification shop with you. However, Rockstar leaves it up to you to buy this new business location in the game. To buy an auto repair shop, you’ll need to visit Maze Bank Foreclosures. Here, you’ll find several locations which you can purchase. As of now and with Prime Gaming, one of the locations (Strawberry) is free to obtain, the rest cost around GTA$1.5 to 1.9 million. If you have Prime Gaming, grab the freebie now before Rockstar kills the promotion. Without Prime Gaming, you’ll have to pay.
Once you own an auto repair shop, like most other Heist operations, there’s a contract job board. To access it, you’ll need to become a CEO. Here’s the expensive catch.
To become CEO, you’ll need to own an Executive Office Suite (~GTA$1,000,000, see below OR ~USD$20 to buy the Criminal Enterprise Starter Pack, see Arcade above). See, I told you that Rockstar gets you to spend massive amounts of GTA$ all over the place in this game.
The first job given by Sessanta is to rescue Sessanta’s car from the impound lot at the police station, the same car you first saw her in at the meetup. This is a fairly difficult mission because you have to mow down a bunch of cops at the impound lot. However, as soon as you arrive there, you get a 3 star wanted rating causing even more cops to swarm. Suffice it to say, you’ll need to grab the car as fast as possible and attempt to lose the wanted status quickly. Once you do this, bring it back to the auto repair shop and the actual jobs begin on the job board.
There are three ways to make money with the auto repair shop. The first is to perform the job board contract jobs. The second is to wait for customers to arrive to have their cars repaired and modded. The third way is to complete one contract to unlock specific wanted cars to jack and return for GTA$, like Simeon’s request above. Here’s where the second way gets convoluted.
Repairing and modding cars forces you to pay out some amount of GTA$ from your own pocket which will get reimbursed by the customer plus their service fee on top. I’ve done two of these. The first one was -GTA$50,000 to repair and +GTA$30,000 as the car repair payment, for a total of +GTA$80,000 once the car is delivered. The second car was -GTA$20,000 to repair and +GTA$20,000 as payment, for a total of +GTA$40,000 once delivered. If the car is delivered damaged, the game reduces the amount you get paid. You’ll need to have at least GTA$100,000 in your account if you intend to run these repair jobs.
However, Rockstar failed us with this new feature because I’d like to have an Open sign that I can turn on and off. If I don’t want the jobs to appear at all, I’d like to turn off the Open sign and prevent Sessanta from calling me with new jobs.
As for the contract jobs, KDJ takes a 10% cut of whatever payment amount is offered. Note that all of the contract jobs are reasonably complicated and difficult to complete when playing solo. However, they can be completed solo, but you’ll have to play them multiple times learning strategies via trial and error. The three jobs that appear for me are as high as GTA$185,000 and as low as GTA$170,000. I have personally confirmed that KDJ’s cut is, in fact, 10%. You definitely will not get the amount listed on the job board. For a GTA$178,000 job, I got GTA$160,200 + another $75,000 about one minute later for some odd reason. Maybe Rockstar is offering up a bonus for the first contract completed? *shrug*
For car repairs and mods, you do get the full amount listed on the job order. You just have to be sure to follow the instructions on the bottom of the screen to do exactly what the customer requests. If you choose to place random mods on the car, the customer likely won’t pay you for them. Also, if you choose not to hire a tech, you’ll have to deliver the cars yourself. If you hire a tech, you’re going to see a higher daily fee to pay the staff at the auto repair garage. These jobs appear several times in the same day. These are not limited to one repair per 24 IRL hours… yet. If you buy a second lift (GTA$650,000), you can repair two cars at the same time and double your income.
Note that the auto repair shop doubles as a new 10 car garage. Getting a new 10 car garage for free (with Prime Gaming) is a pretty sweet deal. Also note that if you buy any add-on decorations for the auto repair shop, they will not show up until you complete Sessanta’s first mission to rescue Sessanta’s ride from the impound lot (assuming everyone gets this same mission as the first mission).
There’s also one more way to make additional GTA$ from the auto repair shop:
Once you have completed at least one contract from the board, the game unlocks a list of wanted vehicles that can be searched for, jacked and sold in similar form to Simeon. I’m not yet certain what the payouts for these are, but since you’re delivering to the docks, it is likely the same payout (max GTA$20,000 per car) as it is for Simeon… and this is probably the reason Simeon’s payout dropped. In fact, it is the same payout amount (GTA$20,000) as you get from Simeon’s car request. It does say you get a bonus if you deliver all on the board, but this is almost impossible to do. This also illustrates why it’s important to read the loading screens.
Difficulty
Attempting to locate each of the 10 cars each day is about as easy as completing the Daily Objectives for 31 days. Some cars are highlighted with a blue dot on the minimap. Cars that are “standard spawn” must be found and jacked in the normal way. Because of this harem-scarem means to locate the cars, you can’t rely on any one specific method. It also means you have to be super great a spotting specific cars by make, which is tricky enough in itself. Waiting for the blue dots for the ‘special’ cars to show up is near impossible. In fact, because other blue dots show up which aren’t related to this, you can literally spin your wheels doing unrelated tasks. Rockstar has made this task as difficult as possible and only 24 hours in which to complete it.
It’s great that this chalkboard car search is daily in that you the chance to get up to GTA$200,000 (plus bonus if you get all 10) per day doing this, but you can spend many, many hours looking for those 10 cars. Worse, the chalkboard can change out from under you when those 24 hours are up without you knowing… all while searching for a car that’s no longer on the board.
Note also that Simeon’s car quest and the Auto Shop car quest can conflict, requesting the same vehicle. This means you’ll need to make a choice to whom you intend to deliver. It also means that you’ll need to find that same car a second time for whichever one you didn’t fulfill. This is frustrating. Sometimes you find cars for both Simeon and the Auto Shop at the same lot. Again, you’ll have to choose which car to jack and deliver. The problem is, when you come back, the game will have despawned those other cars and respawned something else. That means you’ll have to go looking again. Also frustrating.
Tricks
One trick that sometimes works in finding one of the 10 cars is going in and out of the garage at the casino. When you enter the garage and then exit, the parking lot will respawn with all new cars. Occasionally, a blue dot will spawn there in the parking lot. The blue dot sometimes spawns in a space to the right of the the exit across from Downtown Cab, Co. This is probably the fastest way to get the parking lot to respawn with new cars. That doesn’t mean you’ll get a blue dot, but occasionally you might.
Bugs
There are a number of bugs with the auto repair shop. If you drive a car into the garage, you will be unable to repair a waiting car or even repair your own cars. The controller option never appears. You’ll need to exit the shop by walking out, then reenter to fix this problem. Another bug has just surfaced today, July 24th, 2021. If you attempt to deliver a car and enter the yellow ring, the ending does not complete. With this one, I thought that killing and restarting the game might help. It doesn’t. When I did that, the car was back at the repair shop awaiting delivery again. I tried delivery for a second time that took me to a new location, but the car still wouldn’t deliver. It seems that the game progress gets stuck when you can’t deliver the car.
Not getting jobs? Don’t stay inside of your Auto Repair shop or Sessanta can’t text you to give you car repair jobs. The game seems intent on avoiding refreshing the Auto Repair shop (required to put a car on the lift) with you in it. If you’ve been wondering why you haven’t been called for repair jobs and you’ve been working in the repair shop, that’s why. Also, you can’t cancel contract jobs while inside of the Auto Repair shop. To cancel a contract job, you need exit to call Sessanta. You can only call her outside of the repair shop. If you try to call Sessanta inside of the shop, you’ll get a busy signal.
There’s also some dumb logic when performing repairs… for example, the customer might request Secondary color bumpers or Secondary hood options, yet there’s no way to paint the car with a secondary paint job. All cars currently paint all surfaces the same color even if the car supports primary and secondary paint colors. What’s the point in requesting ‘secondary’ anything if you can’t paint the car with a secondary paint?
Blue dots and chalkboard cars bug. I’ve had this bug happen to me almost every single time I’ve played. I’ve found up to 6 cars on the chalkboard, but as few as one. Yet, after traversing the entire map from top to bottom, the game will not reveal any further cars via blue dots from the board. Even if the remaining cars are specialty cars that require a blue dot, no blue dot ever spawns anywhere on the map. This bug makes it impossible to complete collecting all 10 of the cars on the chalkboard.
Cost: Property is Free (with Prime Gaming) + cost of whatever decorations added to Repair Shop
Type: Mission Based + Intraday Recurring car repair jobs,
Passive Income: None
Active Income: Job based (around GTA$100,000 or so), Car repair (GTA$20,000 to GTA$30,000) per car
Difficulty Level: 3 (Somewhat difficult)
Daily Cost: Minimum GTA$250, more with staff
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Rockstar Newswire and Loading Screens
Each week beginning on Thursday, a new Rockstar Newswire is released offering all of that week’s newest promotions and activities. Many of these activities also appear as messages on the loading screen.
Be sure to read each of these loading screens carefully. For example, the week this article is written, Rockstar is offering 2X GTA$ and RP on new survival map challenges. Participating in these new survival events during this week will earn you 2X GTA$ and RP plus a bonus of GTA$100,000 simply for participating in a Survival. Reading these screens closely can help you nab $100,000 or more simply by doing whatever Rockstar is requesting. Usually, it’s not hard to do what they’re asking you to do.
However, sometimes Rockstar might require the purchase of a Mobile Operations Center, a Terrorbyte or an Avenger, which can negate the GTA$ bonus. If you know you don’t have the vehicles needed to get the bonus, then skip it. By simply being required to participate, such as the Survival Challenge above, its easy to nab that GTA$100,000.
Type: Free
Difficulty Level: Depends, usually easy
Reward: Depends
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Daily Objectives
This free activity is just barely a runner up because while the payout is big, it is incredibly difficult and you need to be level 15 or higher. However, you can make some serious bank if you’re tenacious. This one requires performing 3 Daily Objectives for 28 consecutive days. Some of the objectives can be extremely obscure, difficult to do, take a lot of time, dependent on challenges that may not appear and/or require loads of cash to complete (like Complete a Heist Setup). For these complicated reasons, it’s not included in the top 10. If you’re tenacious and willing to attempt the objectives each day, you can earn some serious bank after 28 days. If you miss a day or cannot perform one of the objectives, you lose the streak and must start over. To perform each daily objective, you’ll need to read the objectives closely.
Note that you can effectively change two of your three daily objectives by launching into GTAO, then immediately checking your current objectives in the character menu. The bottom two are not set in stone if it’s a new day. If you don’t like the bottom two objectives, kill the game and restart.
Keep restarting the game until you get two objectives you can perform, like Visit the Casino OR Relax in a hot tub OR Mod a car. Once you’ve got two objectives you like, modify your character’s appearance by wearing glasses. This will force a cloud save and lock the objectives in. Make sure to read the Daily Objectives closely, otherwise you might be stuck with objectives you cannot complete. Don’t hesitate long. You’ll only get a few minutes before the game automatically performs a cloud save and then those objectives are locked in for that day.
The topmost objective is always set in stone for the day by Rockstar. You’ll have to perform this one whether you want to or not. Examples. If you don’t own a hangar, you can’t perform an objective like Modify an aircraft at your hangar. Rockstar might also set the objective as Complete a Heist Setup. If you’re already past all of your setups, the only way to complete that objective is to join another player who hasn’t yet done it.
Progressive Rewards
- 1 day of objectives will earn you GTA$30,000 and 5,000 RP (28x = GTA$840,000 + 140,000 RP)
- 7 days (week) worth will earn you GTA$150,000 and 20,000 RP (4x = GTA$600,000 + 80,000 RP)
- 28 days (month) worth will earn you GTA$500,000 and 50,000 RP
In 28 days, you earn (D) GTA$840,000 + (W) GTA$600,000 + (M) GTA$500,000 = GTA$1.94 million + 270,000 RP
As implied above, some objectives can appear that are impossible to complete either because you can’t afford to buy something or because you’re past that part of the heist. This can cause failure when attempting to do this for 28 days, thus making this challenge quite difficult.
Cost: Free
Reward: GTA$30,000 to GTA$1.94 million depending on how many you perform daily + 5000+ RP
Difficulty Level: 10 (Hard) — requires performing challenges for 28 days straight, though you can still get the daily challenge reward even if you miss a day in between.
Level to Complete: Rank 15 or higher
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Cayo Perico Treasure Hunt Challenge
This is a runner up because it requires significant cash outlay and is not super easy to do. However, it offers okay payout. This means that even though it will cost you a lot to unlock, you can keep doing these treasure hunts daily until you’ve recovered whatever it’s worth to you. Before I get into the hunt, let me explain the costs.
To unlock Cayo Perico Island, you’ll need to buy the Kosatka submarine from Warstock Cache and Carry to launch the mission to take you to this new island. This sub costs GTA$2,200,000 base price. If you wait for Rockstar to slash the price, you can get it for around GTA$1 million, which is what I paid when I bought it on sale. Because of the daily treasure hunt, it’s worth the GTA$1 million (on sale) investment to buy the Kosatka. Buying it for the Heist? Not so much.
Now, onto the treasure hunt. There are 10 possible treasure chest locations across Cayo Perico Island. There are 5 locations on land and 5 underwater, all dotted around the island. You’ll need to check many of the locations until you find the two available treasure chests. You can only open two per day. Opening up both treasure chests yields GTA$15,000 per chest for a maximum of GTA$30,000 per day. That’s a reasonable amount of GTA$ income, which is why it is included here.
Rockstar has even been known to 2X these daily challenges, doubling the GTA$ to 60,000 per day for up to 7 days.
Cost: Kosatka costs around GTA$2.2 million
Type: Active Income, Daily, Recurring, Time Suck Activity
Reward: Up to GTA$30,000 per day or GTA$210,000 every 7 days or GTA$900,000 every 30 days
Difficulty Level: 5 (Medium — must scout many locations to find two) … must be tenacious
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Character Bounties
These are separate from the Bounty Missions described below. This activity costs nothing to the player and is somewhat easy to get. A character bounty is had when you steal a car and someone unknown puts a bounty on you. These are easy money and may be worth trying to get, but they don’t pay much and can be slightly difficult to find…. which is the reason it didn’t make the top 10. A bounty reward can range from GTA$1,000 to GTA$3,000. If you end up with a bounty and want that money, you’ll need to move to a private server so other players don’t try to collect on it. Then wait out one full in-game day on that private server (about an hour of play time). At the end of that day, you’ll be paid the amount of the bounty. You’ll need to play on a private server or with trusted friends until the bounty pays out.
Typically, these bounties will appear when you steal expensive cars parked on the side of a road. One vehicle that always gives up a bounty is the Sprunk Extreme van, which you can’t keep or own. This van is a trap and always issues a bounty. If you see this van, steal it, get the bounty and hide out on a private server for one full in-game day to collect the bounty. Though, there are plenty of other expensive cars which can also turn a bounty. The more expensive the vehicle is, the more likely the owner will put a high bounty on you.
Note that bounties hang around on your character until either another player collects on it in a public server or one full in-game day passes and you get the money. Also note that only one bounty can be active at a time. Can’t get greedy with this one.
Cost: Free
Type: Active, Recurring
Reward: GTA$1,000 to GTA$3,000
Difficulty Level: 1 (Easy, so long as you hang out on a private server until you get paid)
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Good Sport
Here’s another runner up that didn’t make the grade, but is worth realizing that it exists. This one is a periodic GTA$2,000 that is given to the player for keeping up Good Behavior. I’m not completely certain what all triggers ‘bad behavior’ and prevents this award, but I believe it is related to the character’s mental state. If you start mowing down civilians on the sidewalk with your car, for example, this raises the character’s mental state and may forfeit the Good Behavior award. This one doesn’t seem to award once per day. It seems to award the player this money at random times while playing.
Cost: Free
Type: Active, Recurring, Unpredictable
Reward: GTA$2,000
Difficulty Level: depends on how you play GTAO
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Sleeping Bums
This runner up is one that likely only shows up after you have visited Cayo Perico island. This, in turn, means you will need to own the Kosatka Submarine (see above).
How it works. Occasionally, the game will tell you that you have found a small key which is useful on Cayo Perico island. When you see this message, that means there’s a blue dot somewhere near you. Once you find the blue dot on the minimap, go to it and there will be a sleeping drunk bum. Loot the bum and you’ll get some GTA$. I’ve gotten up to GTA$7007 from looting, but the amount varies.
Cost: Requires Kosatka and visiting Cayo Perico island
Type: Random, Recurring
Reward: Varies, but can be up to GTA$8000 or possibly higher
Difficulty Level: 1 (Easy)
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Amazon Prime Gaming
Owning this type of membership offers freebies each and every month. However, to gain this freebie, you’ll need to subscribe to Amazon Prime. If you own this membership, you’ll link your Rockstar account to your Amazon Prime Gaming account once and each month Rockstar will offer various freebies and discounts for this linkage.
For a while, Rockstar was offering up GTA$1,000,000 each month at GTA$200,000 each week with the fourth week culminating in a payment of GTA$400,000. Recently, this has been reduced to GTA$100,000 a week for a total of GTA$400,000 each month. I don’t know if the last week culminates in an extra $100,000 as there has been no mention of this by Rockstar. In fact, there was no mention of the reduction of this Prime Gaming benefit.
Cost: Amazon Prime membership (USD$12.99 a month or USD$119 a year)
Type: Passive only
Reward: Up to GTA$400,000 a month
Difficulty level: N/A
Caveat: This benefit can be discontinued or altered at any time by Rockstar without warning
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Additional ways…
These didn’t make the cut for reasons listed below. However, they are still valid for making at least some money in the game. These events are free to participate, but may require the use of weapons, armor or the purchase of expensive cars (racing), specific ammo or expensive weapons to win.
Survival Events
I hesitate to include these events because they require crap tons of ammo (which you have to buy) and, in the end, net very little in the way of cash. In other words, you may spend more on ammo to win the event than you’ll get back from surviving it. However, I’ve included it because these jobs are open and available all of the time. You can join a survival job at any time. The longer you last, the more money you’ll make, but only to a point. Keep in mind that surviving a long time doesn’t necessarily net you more GTA$ in the way you might think. You’ll get whatever you get from the survival event, which includes both RP and limited GTA$, maybe around GTA$3,500 or so max.
Cost: Free
Type: Multiplayer Active, Recurring, Available all of the time
Reward: Depends on many factors, but usually no more than GTA$3,500 on average.
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Racing
Racing events can net you some GTA$, but typically you’ll need a decently fast car if you hope to win and win max bank. This means either buying an expensive Supercar from Legendary Motorsports or being lucky enough to win one from the Lucky Wheel podium. Racing is included because occasionally Rockstar will introduce a new racing type into the game and to promote it, they will award GTA$100,000 or more simply by participating.
Cost: Dependent on car needed
Reward: Limited GTA$ depending on placing, but probably no more than GTA$5,000
Notes: Sometimes newly introduced events will offer a large award for participating.
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PlayStation 4 Promotion
While Rockstar readies GTA Online for play on the PS5, they are giving GTA$1,000,000 each month to PS4 members who also have PlayStation Plus. In order to play GTA Online, you need PlayStation Plus for the network access. The way to obtain this money changed in April, now requiring each player to head to the PlayStation store to claim the GTA$1,000,000 on the first of each month until the PS5 version of GTAO becomes available.
GTAO on the PS5 may release as soon as August or September 2021, so this promotion may end very soon. This one is only included here now because it’s still active for a limited time. Note, if you’re logged into GTAO when you head to the store and claim it, you’ll have to log out and back in to see your GTA$ update.
Cost: Requires PlayStation Plus subscription and a PS4
Reward: GTA$1,000,000 monthly
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Gambling at the Casino
This one is not included in the top 10 because casino gambling is too risky for several reasons. I didn’t include this one in the ‘avoid’ area below because it is possible to win. It also takes GTA$ converted to Chips to make a bet and you can easily lose it all.
The problem with winning in the casino is that Rockstar monitors large wins coming out of the casino. If Rockstar determines you cheated to win, they can take all of your money away or outright ban you from the game. Be careful when attempting to win large bets in the casino. For this reason, I don’t recommend trying to gamble at the casino other than with the smallest bets (i.e., less than 100 chips). Even then, play only a little, win only a little and walk away. If you press your luck and win a large pot, Rockstar may flag your account for cheating.
Cost: Chips to bet
Type: Recurring
Reward: Whatever you win
Risks: Can be suspected of cheating and lose all money or be banned from the game
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One Off Activities
Rockstar includes a few one-off activities which are worth doing because you can net a decent amount of cash from each of them. These are not included in the top 10 above because they cannot be performed more than once.
Bounty Missions
A random NPC named Maude will ask you to help her with some bounties. As a result, you will receive GTA$300,000 and the Stone Hatchet for returning the bounties to Maude alive. Returning them dead yields less. There are 5 bounties to be had.
Cost: Free
Type: One off
Reward: GTA$300,000 + Stone Hatchet
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Rampage
This next activity requires using the Stone Hatchet that you got from Maude’s quests. Once you kill 25 NPCs while in Rampage mode using the Stone Hatchet, you will receive GTA$250,000. You must do this rampage specifically with the Stone Hatchet. There are other hatchets in the game, but only the Stone Hatchet unlocks this reward. Make sure you have the correct hatchet equipped.
Cost: Free
Type: One off
Reward: GTA$250,000
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Golden Revolver
This is a cross promotion for Red Dead Online. To receive the Golden Revolver, you’ll need to start with a treasure hunt email. This will lead you to 4 different clues which, if correctly decoded, will reveal a chest containing the Golden Revolver.
Once obtained, you can then jump right into the Golden Revolver headshot kills challenge. Once you have killed 25 NPCs with headshots using the Golden Revolver, you’ll receive GTA$250,000.
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Cost: Free
Type: One off
Reward: Golden Revolver + GTA$250,000
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Radio Signal Jammer
There are 50 radio jammers placed on various tall radio towers and buildings. This is part of the Casino Heist. These look like small black boxes with a red light and an antenna on top. These also beep so you can hear them at a distance. Once you destroy all 50 radio jammers, the game unlocks a person useful to the Casino Heist. That’s not really the money reason to do this challenge. By destroying all jammers you’ll net GTA$150,000 and 50,000 RP.
Cost: Free
Type: One off
Reward: GTA$150,000 + 50,000 RP
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Avoid these activities….
Most of what’s listed below are one-time and/or overly-complex activities. This means that once you complete those specific missions, you either can’t do them again or you must start over from the very beginning and do all steps again. You can also participate as a team member in a friend’s unfinished heist or mission if you need to do a specific step quickly. This top 10 list was designed to include easy and quick money making opportunities that can be repeated every day, which these below most certainly are not. This section isn’t meant to imply that you can’t enjoy these activities for the entertainment value, just don’t do them in hopes of making money in the game.
Heists
Heists are some of the most expensive and complex ways to make income in the game. Why? Because Rockstar requires that you buy very, very expensive real estate, boats, equipment, personnel and trucks to support the heist. All told, you’ll end up spending GTA$3-5 million (or more) in buying random in-game junk, just to net GTA$300,000 – GTA$500,000 back from the heist. You won’t make back even a fraction of what you spent to buy that boat, truck, warehouse, safecracker tools AND bunker. However, you can do it all again, but you’ll likely have to spend for at least tools, people and random junk running the heist for a second or third time.
Heists, while they may be fun when played in groups, are the worst ways to make money in the game.
Cost: Depends on Heist, but no less than GTA$3-5 million
Passive Income: None
Heist Reward: A paltry GTA$300,000 to GTA$500,000 max.
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Galaxy Super Yacht
The Super Yacht is a waste of money. Sure, the captain of the yacht offers up some missions, but like Heists above, you must sink at least GTA$6,000,000 into the thing to get a couple hundred thousand out of it. Don’t buy this thing for the mission reward money. However, there are six missions which can be performed only once.
Cost: The Super Yacht begins at GTA$6,000,000 and is rarely ever discounted more than 10%
Passive Income: None
Active Income: Around GTA$30,000 per mission
Reward: Captain’s Outfit after completing all 6 missions
Daily Cost: GTA$1,000
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Bunker Missions
Like Heists, you have to first invest in a bunker property, which is costly. Once you do this, you have to keep resupplying the bunker with more and more materials until you max out the products storage area. Then, you can take those products, load them into a crap vehicle and drive them across the map to the delivery location.
The problem is, bunker missions can only be performed in public servers. This means you’ll need to endure other players who are told you are moving goods and basically where you are on the map. Other players can come screw with you and those goods.
Once sold, you’ll get a fraction of the value because, in typical Rockstar fashion, they always skim GTA$ right off the top to keep you from getting as much as it says the goods are worth. Honestly, this one is too much of a hassle and costs too much money simply to net GTA$100,000 (or less). There are easier ways to get that amount of GTA$… see above.
Cost: Bunker cost begins at GTA$2 million, but you may be able to get it included in some bundles
Type: Recurring
Passive Income: None
Active Income: Requires carrying good across the map on a public server.
Reward: Some percentage of the value of the goods, if successful
Daily Cost: GTA$7,800
Note, the maintenance cost for owning a bunker is whopping GTA$7,800 per in-game day, but only if you’re actively CEO. Make sure to ‘retire’ as CEO before the day ends to avoid paying this stupid fee. This is the only maintenance fee you can avoid paying in this way. Also note, moving Bunker goods across the map requires at least two people to drive two separate delivery cars… it cannot be done solo.
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Nightclub Goods
For the same reason as Bunker Missions, moving these goods has the same problem… public server, public announcement and players can screw with you. On top of that, your nightclub manager takes a cut leaving you with 10% less than what the goods are worth.
Cost: Nightclub costs around GTA$2,000,000 to own, plus maintenance costs.
Type: Active, Recurring
Passive Club Income: GTA$10,000 down to GTA$1,000 depending on whether the club is promoted
Reward: Depends on amount of goods sold, less 10% to Tony
Daily Cost: GTA$800 to GTA$2,250
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Simeon Premium Deluxe Repo Cars
These missions are entirely multiplayer missions. If you can get a team of only your friends, it might be fun. If you are matched with randoms, likely there will be one who will torpedo the whole mission.
Cost: Requires multiplayer session with randoms. I’ve tried playing several times and each time the mission fails due to some random torpedoing it.
Type: Multiplayer, Recurring
Reward: Depends, but not as much as you’d hope.
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Casino Penthouse
To own the Casino Penthouse, it costs GTA$1.5 million to GTA$6.5 million depending on which features you choose to buy. However, along with owning the casino penthouse, you’ll unlock missions from Agatha Baker, the casino manager. There are 6 casino missions that, when completed, will reward you with $GTA100,000 and the Enus Paragon R Armored version, which you pick up at the docks.
Cost: GTA$1.5 million to GTA$6.5 million
Type: Once Only
Reward: GTA$100,000 and Enus Paragon R Armored
Daily Cost: GTA$500 to GTA$1,350
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Executive Suite Cargo Missions
Like most money making activities in the GTA Online world, for these you’ll need to invest in an Executive Office Suite, a cargo storage warehouse and probably several other things. All told, you’ll spend at least GTA$3-5 million (probably more) to net maybe GTA$100,000 every week or so. For example, the high value car cargo missions allow you to steal expensive cars, then store in them in the cargo warehouse. You can sell them immediately. The thing is, even though the car may be worth GTA$1.5 million, the maximum you’ll get by selling the best of them is GTA$80,000. In fact, it’s so little money and because it’s a real hassle, it’s not really worth the effort.
Cost: Executive Office (~GTA$1,000,000 or USD$20 for CESP) and Cargo and Crate Warehouse … ~GTA$5-7 million total
Passive Income: None
Active Income: Limited by Rockstar’s stupidity
Daily Cost: GTA$800 to GTA$950
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50 Stunt Jumps
Don’t bother with this activity if you’re looking for GTA$. The only reason to do this one is if you’re trying for the Collectibles trophy. There are 50 stunt jumps all over the map. However, completing each jump only earns a tiny amount of RP. At 1, 5 and 25 jumps, these will unlock paint jobs at Los Santos Customs. This activity rewards no GTA$ at all.
Type: Free
Cost: None
Rewards: Only RP and Unlocked paint jobs
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Stretching your GTA$ farther
As has been hinted all throughout this article, it’s better to wait for Rockstar to put vehicles, properties, weapons, armor and even outfits on sale. Each week, Rockstar chooses various items to discount. Some discounts are given straight up to all players. Extra discounts are given by linking your Amazon Prime account to Rockstar. These discounts never overlap, but do run concurrently with one another. For example, Rockstar typically puts properties or property features on sale regularly and then simultaneously discounts vehicles via the Prime Gaming benefits. However, when Rockstar puts properties on sale, they typically do not discount a property’s sub-features, which is a little frustrating.
For example, when Executive Offices are discounted, the Executive Office garages and the Cargo Warehouses are not discounted. This means, you’ll need to wait for the garages and warehouses to go on sale separately. This means you’ll need to wait until Rockstar puts those specific properties and features on sale, which might occur months apart.
For vehicles such as the Kosatka, Avenger, Terrorbyte and Mobile Operations Center, you’ll also find only one of these on sale at a time. Typically when a vehicle is discounted, its renovation features are not, though rarely they might discount both. You have to check.
When you find one of these vehicles heavily discounted, such as the Kosatka priced around $GTA1 million, you gotta jump on the deal quickly because it won’t come around again for at least 6-12 months.
Reviewing this article, you might notice I have a lot of these very expensive items in the game. I didn’t pay full price for any of them. I’ve been buying all of these items slowly on discount when the discounts occur. Some of the vehicles, I’ve won off of the podium, such as the Toreador, though I paid for the Stromberg, but on sale. However, I have been waiting for some vehicles to go on sale for several years, such as the Vigilante and the Oppressor. This is the only downside to waiting. However, waiting for discounts means you can stretch your GTA$ much, much farther and you get way more for less money.
That’s also how I afforded the Penthouse suite at the Casino. I first waited for the property to go on sale and spent about GTA$1 million. Then, I waited for each of the renovation features to discount and purchased those while also discounted. All told, I spent just over GTA$3 million to unlock all Penthouse features.
I’ve also specifically waited for many of the Super Cars to show up on the Lucky Wheel podium to win rather than spending GTA$2-4 million on each vehicle. Though, when I have occasionally purchased Super Cars, they have also been close to 50% off.
I know it can be difficult to wait, but waiting is far better than spending twice as much for in-game stuff that may never even be used. For example, the Avenger, Terrorbyte and Mobile Operation Center and even the Kosatka vehicles are a major waste of money. It’s a good thing I bought all of them when heavily discounted. In fact, I’ve never even used the Avenger, Terrorbyte or Mobile Operations Center. I also have a lot of vehicles I rarely ever use. My most used vehicle is the Deluxo, which I also won off of the podium.
Winning cars and using Rockstar’s discounts is the best way to stretch your GTA$ much farther. Also, take full advantage of any freebies Rockstar gives, particularly money giveaways for event participation.
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Overall
There are other activities not mentioned above which can yield various amounts of GTA$, like the impossibly stupid flying missions at Los Santos Airport flying school, which yield insulting amounts of GTA$ once each impossibly hard and useless test is completed. Unfortunately, the rest in the game are not really worth mentioning, like RC car races.
One thing Rockstar needed to add to GTAO was way more passive income features from purchasing and owning properties. For example, every owned property should offer some level of passive income… at least enough to cover the daily expenses.
Overall, Rockstar pretty much failed us with Grand Theft Auto Online. While GTA V’s in-game money balance was decent, all of that was removed from GTA Online. What’s left is a basic shell that teases the player by handing out a pittance of money each day here and there. Even the Heists in GTA V offered up a decent sized reward. In GTAO, the Heist rewards are entirely insulting after spending millions buying all of the garbage needed to complete it. The best use of money in GTA Online is buying the cars. However, if you wait long enough you can win most of them off of the Lucky Wheel at the Casino, not pay anything for them… the best way to get most expensive cars in this game.
What you can’t win off of the Lucky Wheel podium are vehicles like the Kosatka, the Mobile Operations Center, the Super Yacht, the Avenger and the Terrorbyte. What’s worse is that the MOC, the Avenger and the Terrorbyte are all effectively the same vehicle, each in a different class. It’s such a waste of GTA$ buying the same thing multiple times.
Worse, these mobile weapon-and-vehicle workshops only work on weaponized vehicles. Even though these mobile workshops allow similar customization features as Los Santos Customs, these mobile workshops can’t modify regular vehicles… thus rendering the convenience of paying for these mobile workshops pointless. Rockstar just doesn’t seem to get that the usefulness of these mobile ‘Los Santos Customs’ workshops is the fact that you can modify your cars anywhere you choose rather than spending time driving the car over to an LSC. As expensive as these mobile workshops are, why wouldn’t you allow us to modify any vehicle in that mobile vehicle workshop?
What difference does it make if we modify our car in our Avenger or at Los Santos Customs? We’re still going to pay the price for each mod.
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Game Review: Days Gone
This former Sony PS4 exclusive game (now also available on Windows), while sporting only the rare fun game mechanic, is hands-down one of the worst single-player games I have ever played. It’s not bad in the same exact way as Fallout 76, but it is definitely the absolute worst game of its kind. Days Gone needs to begone. Let’s explore.
What’s wrong with Days Gone?
That’s a good question. Let’s dive deep into this Sony Interactive / Bend Studio disaster. It’s funny. You would think that Sony could put together good games… especially considering that they seem to keep hiring large ghost developers behind the scenes to put these games together. Well, you’d be wrong. Let’s take a look at Ghost of Tsushima to understand where Day’s Gone goes so horribly astray. Even though Ghost of Tsushima would be released not quite one year after Days Gone, they both share similar problems. Both games must have also been in development during the same time frame.
While Ghost of Tsushima could have been a good game, it copied way too much of Assassin’s Creed for its own good and didn’t do it very well. Though, both Days Gone and Ghost of Tsushima are very pretty games, looking beautiful can only take a game so far. The blowing reeds and flower petal particles in Ghost of Tsushima are wondrous to behold, same for the Oregon mountainous landscape in Days Gone. It’s the game’s mechanics which undermine all of that beauty. Why would I want to play Assassin’s Creed set in feudal Japan when it’s not even written by Ubisoft? Yeah, so there’s that. Regardless, the problems that plague Ghost of Tsushima are the same problems that also plague Days Gone, except Days Gone is even worse than Ghost of Tsushima by an order of magnitude.
With Days Gone, the problems start right from the beginning. First, the game steals the hero’s bike away from him. An unnecessary start to this disaster. If that were the only problem, I could live with it. Second, the sole point to stealing the motorcycle is in giving the player a way to spend time rebuilding the bike… a completely unnecessary included mechanic. That’s the least of the problems with the bike in this game, however. It’s perfectly fine to allow us to rebuild the bike to our own whims and on our own time, but the stolen bike storyline was entirely unnecessary.
Even More Bike Problems
The motorcycle given in concession to the stolen bike is crap by comparison. This crap bike requires the game player to grind, grind, grind for money to repair and enhance the bike. That means heading out to do all of the missions in the game. Except we then run afoul of all of the insipid bike mechanics.
Gasoline Usage — Stupid Mechanic #1
That this bike mechanic exists is entirely insipid. Real world motorcycles get between 35-40 miles per gallon on average. That means a full 6 gallon tank of gas should see a motorcycle go around 240 miles. In Days Gone, a full tank of gas lasts about 5 minutes of driving, or maybe 3-5 miles. The game literally forces you to stop and gas up about every 5-10 minutes of play. It’s an incredibly time wasting game mechanic. I get that the game wanted to add some measure of realism around requiring gasoline, but this mechanic is overkill and overly burdensome on the player.
If you’re planning on adding this level of burden to the player, then at least have the decency to allow us to disable requiring gasoline as a game option. Grand Theft Auto isn’t that stupid. Why not follow GTA’s formula which doesn’t require gas at all? Gassing up the motorcycle constantly is not only repetitive, it’s insanely stupid. If you’re going to include a gassing up mechanic, at least make it realistic enough that you can drive from one side of the map to the other and back on a single tank. This problem is the first in the tip of this game’s cracking iceberg. Oh yes, it does get worse.
Paying for Gas — Stupid Mechanic #2
When you’re out and about running around, gassing up every few minutes, you can find gas canisters and gas pumps which offer infinite free gas. You just pump and go. However, when you finally meet up with the various factions, these factions require that you pay for gas. Why would you ever do that? Just drive a little bit up the road and find a gas can in the back of a truck that will completely fill the tank. It’s the complete opposite of how this mechanic should have been designed. You should be required to pay for gas at pumps and get free gas with the factions.
Repairs — Stupid Mechanic #3
Motorcycles don’t just randomly fall apart as you ride them. Yet, in this game, they do. Hopping over the most insignificant little ramp immediately causes damage to the bike. Meaning, by the time you land, the bike already needs 15-30% repair work for each and every little bump. See, I told you that it gets worse.
Further, as you get clothes-lined or snipered by road side ambushes, the bike’s damage level immediately goes from 100% to 0%. There’s no chance of seeing less damage from an ambush. The bike’s repair level is always at 0% after an ambush of any kind. It’s like the bike is some kind of child’s toy made of plastic or something. This tiresome repair mechanic combined with the constant tank refilling makes the bike more of a hassle than a help.
Worse, it takes at least 10 pieces of scrap, probably more, to repair the bike from 0% to 100%. Looking for scrap in this game is also pain in the ass… finding two pieces here, one piece there, cracking open hoods of cars in among a bunch of ghouls. Anyway, you can drive around when the bike is 20% repaired, but that means one tiny little bump and you’re back at 0% again. Both the gas refilling mechanic and the repair mechanic combine to make the entire bike worthless and clinch the disaster that is this game. You could probably walk to locations faster than riding a bike, were it not for the ghouls.
Ghouls and Apocalypse
Here’s where we finally get into the Days Gone story, such that it isn’t. Basically, the world has undergone an apocalypse. A virus has been released that has turned many people into zombies, not unlike the ghouls in Fallout 76. The ghouls are pretty much ripped straight out of Fallout, lunging attacks, screaming and all. It’s like the developers said, “Fuck it, let’s just steal the Feral Ghouls right from Fallout”. So, that’s what they did. While Fallout 76 has modified the Ghouls to be able to run like the Bionic Man at supersonic speeds, the Ghouls in Days Gone remain at least a bit less superhuman than that. That doesn’t make them any better.
The point is, it’s basically an apocalyptic world pretty much like Fallout. Instead of radiation being the culprit, it’s a virus. Regardless, the power plants don’t work, towns are abandoned, ghouls roam the land and the story attempts to unfold what went on and why the ghouls act as they do. It’s a very weak story designed only to give the hero character motivation to find his girlfriend after they get separated.
He also has a brother who loses an arm to burn damage because of other threats across the land. Of course, the world wouldn’t be complete without some deranged faction with loony toons followers, which seems to indicate the first stage of the virus. The second stage of the virus is the ghouls who have no mental capacity other than instinct to kill only. The third stage of the virus is when the ghoul turns into an albino version and gains significant strength. There is a fourth stage of the virus when it turns a ghoul into a hulking brute beast. Not sure how that happens, but the hero encounters one as a boss. If there are further stages, and there probably are, I’ve not yet played far enough in to encounter them.
The ghoul mechanic works okay as an enemy, but it’s also way too much like the ghouls in Fallout. Couldn’t they come up with something new? The ghouls are only a small part of this game’s problems.
Quests and Map Markers
Here’s where the rubber meets the road, literally. The game has you traipse all over the map using that weak ass bike for each and every quest. Noooo, the quests can’t possibly unfold close in proximity. The game literally has you go to one side of the map, perform a quest, then drive all the way across to the other side for the next one. This constant and incessant yo-yo movement is tiresome and highly annoying, particularly when you’re constantly required to refill and repair the bike halfway across the map each and every time.
There is no efficiency in layout of the quests on the map. It’s super annoying and yet becomes completely predictable. This means you’ll need to drive by a refill station at the halfway point before completing the trip to the quest marker… every single time.
There’s no fun to be had with this mechanic. It’s simply becomes tiresome after the third time doing it. Repetitive? Oh, yes. Fun? No way. This game is certainly on its way to being one of the worst games ever.
Ghoul Hordes
Here’s another game mechanic that seems to have been added just to see if it could be done technically. Sure, there’s a story element that weakly ties into the hordes. Additionally, the hordes seem mostly to have been included to also inconvenience the player. There are literal times where the horde goes right over your bike which is parked somewhere away from you. When you want to go back to your bike, you can’t because the horde is right there.
Let me also state that, in general, hordes are basically unkillable under most circumstances. What I mean is that for a player to attempt to attack a horde means certain death. There are so many ghouls in a horde, you simply don’t have enough bullets or melee damage to kill every single one. The only thing you can do is hide in the bushes and wait for them to walk by… slowly… which is like watching paint dry. You can’t do anything else while waiting on a horde. Yet another insipid game mechanic.
That isn’t to say there isn’t a way to defeat a horde as I’ve done it. You must do it at a location where the horde can’t get to you, like on top of a small cliff where only your bike can reach. So long as the ghouls can’t climb up, you’re safe. You can stand on the edge, craft and rain molotovs down onto them. Molotovs are actually the best way to handle ghoul hordes in this game… and these are the easiest grenade-style weapons to make. Unfortunately, ghouls are very agile and can amass in very large numbers quickly and silently. Don’t take a horde on unless you know they can’t get to you.
With that said, hordes are an unnecessary inclusion. I get why they were added, but they’re mostly a nuisance since there’s no general means of taking them out. Taking out a horde requires a very specific set of circumstances which don’t occur often… unless you explicitly know how to plan for it.
Motorcycle Chases
Inevitably, you’ll run into one of the many poorly designed motorcycle chase routines in the game. In fact, these seem to happen about every 5th quest. You’ll arrive at a quest marker and a random motorcycle will speed by requiring you to chase and “subdue” them. Oh no, you can’t kill the biker. You must keep them alive.
Worse, though, is that your gun holds perhaps 10 shots and you’re limited to which guns you can use while on a bike. Oh, but you’re not just chasing one bike, you’re chasing 3 bikers: a primary biker you need to subdue and two random bullet sponge bikers riding just behind. These bullet sponge bikers were included simply to waste bullets. By the time you get those two gone, you’ve already wasted half of the ammo in your gun. This means you have maybe 3-5 bullets left to attempt to stop the fleeing primary biker… not enough to actually do the job.
If the game mechanic only had you chase ONE biker, you would have well enough ammo to do the job. Instead, the game forces you to waste ammo on unnecessary random bullet sponge bikers that honestly make no sense being there.
This chase routine wouldn’t be so bad if there were ways to carry more ammo with you on the bike, but you can’t. All the ammo you carry on your character is all of the ammo you have for that gun. Because there are limited guns you can use while on a motorcycle, once you are out of ammo, the whole thing is done. Without ammo, you cannot subdue the biker without trying to ram him off the road, which is next to impossible on the crap bike they’ve given you. If you could swing your melee bat at him or his bike, you could easily subdue him. The game doesn’t let you use this weapon while on a bike.
Here’s where the game gets its crap reputation and why Days Gone is one of the worst games I have ever played. If, as a developer, you’re requiring us to use a bike, then damn well let us carry as much ammo as we please. Why 10 pieces only? Ammo doesn’t weigh much and even if it does, you could store it on the bike somewhere. You might have to stop to reload, but you could then continue. Unfortunately, the game offers the player no such mechanic. Once you’re out of ammo, you’re pretty effectively forced to abandon the chase and try to buy ammo, find some in a cop car or attempt to locate ammo at some other place. This means you simply can’t finish that quest. It also means you’re going to be redoing that quest over and over and over until you can find just the right set of circumstances to get that dumbass on the bike to stop. Why the game developers didn’t allow us to use all of our weapons, including the melee weapons (which can be used one handed), I have no idea.
One last thing about this chase is that the game refuses to let you go faster than the bike ahead. The game always keeps the biker ahead of your bike regardless of how fast you are traveling. This makes it almost impossible to straddle along side the biker to knock him off. Oh, and guns? Yeah, the primary biker gets to carry not only pistols, but shotguns and molotovs… something the game doesn’t allow the player to do.
Again, nothing fun about these chase scenarios… at all. Simply tedium and frustration only.
Factions
Here’s where the game takes a U turn. There are three factions which you can “join”. By “join”, I mean become a mercenary for. Ultimately, you’re only in it to take quests, fetch things and kill intruders. These quests earn you reputation points and money with each of the factions. Though, why you’d want to be friends with these factions, I’ve no idea. All three of them are run by stupid, insensitive schmucks. None of them understand the gravity of what’s going on out in the world, nor do they really care to know. As long as they have the fence that blocks out the ghouls, they’re happy. All three of the factions really make no sense being there in the way that they are.
It’s actually one of the dumbest game mechanics I’ve seen in an apocalyptic game… especially considering that all three factions are nearly identically configured. Other than in a video game, how could that ever happen?
Ultimately, the factions are only there to dole out quests for the player and offer up money to buy crap.
Disappearing Quests
Here’s another mechanic that always makes me angry every time I see it in a game. You’ll be playing along and something randomly comes along and kills the player’s character. With this game, not only is there an incredibly LONG reload time waiting for the entire game to almost completely reload, once it does reload the quest you were on has completely disappeared along with any enemies who were there.
Worse, these are apparently one-time quests which appear once, but don’t appear again… so you can’t retry. This is true of the roadside ambushes. When they appear, you have one chance to subdue the attackers. If they kill the player, that mini-quest is long gone and won’t appear again… so no vengeance in this game. This situation is entirely frustrating to the point where I want to break the game disk in half. Thankfully, it’s a digital copy and that’s not possible. Though, I most certainly have considered deleting the game from my console several times. For whatever reason, I keep coming back to it in hopes that it might get better. It never does.
Fun in the Game
There are a few places in this game where I have had at least a minimal amount of fun. Though, it has nothing to do with that crap ass bike, the rail quests or any other story progression. The one and only one fun element is taking out the ghoul nests. These are side quests that are solely designed to enable fast travel to points beyond the nest site. However, these activities are probably the most fun thing to do in this game world. The reason is, there are no artificial constraints forced onto the player, like the bike chase artificial weapon constraints that sap all of the fun out of what could have been great fun.
Because clearing out the nests is entirely an open world side quest, you can use whatever weapons you want, choose whatever tactics you like and do it as you see fit. The developers don’t stand in your way by having you do it in some very artificial and unusual way. With all of the primary quests, it’s all so rail based. Each of those primary quests are so artificially constrained, so in-your-face and so unnecessarily burdensome, the player must fully play by the developer’s rail-based rules to complete it. You can’t venture off of your bike and choose to do it your own way, otherwise the game will detect that and fail the quest.
With many of the side quests, there are few, if any constraints on how you to achieve your goal. If you wish to be sneaky, that’s your choice. If you want to lure the ghouls into a specific spot and take them all out with a bomb, go for it. It’s all left entirely up to the player. It’s these open world tactics that make this game fun. It’s also the artificially constrained main quests that make the game repetitive and tedious.
Game developers need to learn that open world games without any play constraints are way more fun than rail-based quests. Such quests, in the case of this game, force the gamer into artificially constrained play methods to complete that quest… such as being forced to craft and throw a molotov, but you cannot use any other weapons. While molotovs have a place and a use, they are not always useful for every situation. Let the player determine the best strategy to employ for quest closure. Don’t force the use of a strategy onto the player as it makes no sense and saps the fun out of allowing the player to choose their play style.
Enforcing a specific play strategy onto a player is best left up to a game’s tutorials. Tutorials are designed to show the player how to use a molotov or a pistol or a sniper rifle. This is the one and only one place where artificial constraints can be used. Players understand that tutorials are designed to teach how to use a specific game mechanic. However, once in a open game world, those constraints need to disappear. When they reappear as part of a primary quest, the quest becomes more about fighting the constraints and less about actually completing the quest.
Open world games need to remain open world 100% of the time, not whenever is convenient for the developer. That developers seem to think we want to play under super-artificial constraints is both stupid and asinine. We don’t.
Side Quests vs Main Quests
If side quests can offer fully open play, thus allowing the gamer to choose his or her strategy, then why are the main quests so constrained? It’s a valid question… one that game developers need to pose internally to their team. If the game can offer fully unconstrained questing with side quests, then it can also offer fully unconstrained questing with the main story quests.
For example, the NERO quests require eavesdropping only. You can’t engage the enemy at all and you cannot be spotted. Why? This is insipid. There is absolutely no reason why I can’t choose to engage this enemy and take out those who get in my way. If I can take out random ghouls all over the place, I can take out the NERO guards as I see fit. Again, insipid.
Yet, when you go to burn the nests (side quest), you can choose exactly how you want to do this quest, though you will have to use molotovs to burn the nests. But, if you choose to take out every single ghoul, that’s your choice. How you choose to take them out is also your choice. You can sneaky-sneak up behind them and use your boot knife or you can pull out your favorite pistol and gun them down. You can even stand on a ridge and sniper them. Again, your choice.
With NERO agents, you’re given some weak story context about them wearing Kevlar. Hello, Kevlar doesn’t cover every exposed portion of their body. This is a virus laden apocalypse, their Kevlar is probably damaged. Yet, no. The game prevents pulling out the weapon to even try. Kevlar also can’t stop damage from grenade or fire based weapons.
If side quests can offer the flexibility of choice for how to complete them, then the main quests need to also offer this same level of flexibility. As I said, these main quests are too artificially constrained to specific tasks and objectives, deciding for the gamer in advance how to complete it. For the main quests, there is only one correct path, all other paths lead to failure.
Repetitive
With all of the above stated, the game is highly repetitive, main or side quests. Once you do about 10 quests of any form, you’ll find yourself repeating them over and over… such as burning nests. This activity is always the same, the only thing that varies is where the nests are located, which locating them can sometimes be the only challenge. Being an errand-boy is also one that becomes repetitive. Indeed, you’ll even find yourself performing similar quests in the same town multiple times. Yes, it gets old.
Most games which offer quests do have a repetitive nature, but Days Gone is overly repetitive. Not only do all of the enemies look identical, they are identical, particularly the ghouls. To make money in this game, for example, you have to hunt ghouls or animals and collect meat or souvenirs. These items can be sold to faction merchants for credit in that particular faction.
This money can be then used to buy weapons, supplies and bike parts depending on which of the 3 factions you visit. Once you embark on the chore of hunting ghouls, it’s very, very repetitive and not much in the way of fun. The ghouls themselves have specific attack types which are easily avoided once you understand their inane strategy. The same can be said of most enemies in the game, not just ghouls.
The one type of attack that you cannot avoid is being clothes-lined or sniper ambushed. By the time you see either, they’ve already pulled the bike out from under you and sent it to 0% repair land. Again, these ambushes are both predictable and identical each and every time. The part that isn’t predictable is where the ambush is located. The game randomly spawns them in trees or in places you can’t see. Because there’s no warning system, it can be almost impossible to avoid being ambushed. Yes, there are flashing question marks on the map (?), but these sometimes appear without any warning.
Gas and Missions
This game is also, unfortunately, terribly inconsistent with gas usage while in missions. Some missions don’t use any gas at all. Some rely on the gas that’s in your tank and will run it out. You have no idea which mission uses gas and which doesn’t… that is until after the mission starts. This is probably one of the most ridiculous inconsistencies in this game.
Either all missions need to use gas or none need to use it. Having some require it and some not and not knowing which is which makes me again want to break the game disk in half.
This inconsistency is probably one of the more egregious problems in this game and is a serious enough problem that has made me want to rage quit this turd of a game several times. Gas isn’t something you can find easily or quickly. If you’re going to toss me into a bike chase to take down some random NPC, then you damned well better make sure gas isn’t consumed during the chase.
If gas were readily available all over the place in this game or if you could carry extra gas in a can on your bike, I wouldn’t rail so hard against this problem. However, gas is very difficult to quickly find in this game. It’s even more ridiculous that you also can’t carry spare gas on your bike. It’s worse that you can’t drive more than about 2-5 minutes before the tank is empty… that’s just overly stupid.
Again, if you’re setting me up for a chase, then the gas consumption needs to halt for the duration of the chase. There’s simply no time to take a detour to stop and fill the bike up in the middle of the chase. That just doesn’t work. Attempting to locate gas during a bike chase will end that chase in failure. It’s the same problem as running out of ammo. You can’t carry spare ammo with you or on your bike. You’re forced to go to a merchant or hunt for a cop car and spend time cracking it open to raid the trunk. Ammo is another item that’s not easily found simply lying about. It can only be found in very specific locations throughout the game and it takes way too much time to find it. Invariably, the chase will take you in some direction no where near a gas pump or any ammo.
Overall
This game is trite and cliché. The play value is crap. The quests are uninspired. The game is repetitive and insipid. The game is not thoughtfully designed for either functionality or fun. There’s really very little redeeming about Days Gone other than its very pretty rendering engine. I feel sorry for the graphics and map designers. They spent a lot of time and effort to make the game seem very realistic. Unfortunately, the game mechanic designers completely failed the graphics guys. The game’s mechanics are horrible, insipid, repetitive and, at times, unplayable. The story is even worse to the point of being unengaging. Why should we care about these people, Bend?
Graphics: 9.5 out of 10
Audio: 8.5 out of 10
Combat: 3.5 out of 10
Bike Combat: 2.5 out of 10
Main Story Quests: 2.5 out of 10
Side Quests: 7 out of 10
Overall: 1.5 out of 10
Recommendation: Rent only. Do not buy this absolute turd of a game.
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Game Review: Control
505 Studio’s Control is game that seems like it should have been a good game. Unfortunately, it’s an average third person shooter with a lot of problematic game design elements sporting one almost redeeming concept. Let’s explore.
What kind of Game is it?
Control is a game about, well, control of sorts. Not so much the control you might expect, but the control that the game designers want you to come to know. Basically, your player character, Jesse, is thrown into a world of objects dubbed O.o.P. or Objects of Power. These are everyday objects that contain a supernatural force. In this sense, the game ripped off Friday the 13th The Series and Warehouse 13. Both of these TV series revolved everyday objects imbued with a supernatural element that, if harnessed, would typically lead to wanton destruction.
In this same vein, the game world in Control has this same problem. These everyday power objects not only allow people to harness the supernatural forces within, these objects bestow unique abilities upon the bearer. However, in those aforementioned TV series, their objects not only gave the person a supernatural ability, it typically sapped the good out of the person leaving only evil behind. In this video game, this object situation does not similarly exist. The player character remains in full control of their faculties and remains sane and able to ward off any evil that may be part of the object.
As you might surmise, as you progress and find more and more power objects, the player character grows in strength and abilities. That’s how the skill tree opens and progresses. The game is much like other similar superhero games like the Infamous series, The Darkness series and, to a lesser extent, Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series. Basically, as you find and gain abilities, your character’s strength grows. It’s obvious that this setup is leading to a final boss level where you’ll have to close out the game using many, if not all of the character’s abilities to defeat that final boss. It’s a fairly standard and cliché setup for a video game.
Story
The story in this game is mostly utilitarian. It primarily exists for the purpose of creating this video game. The story is essentially there to support the character’s gaining of new abilities, not the other way around. The character finds herself in a building called the Federal Bureau of Control (FBC)… it’s this video game’s equivalent of the FBI or CIA… with the added twist of also investigating all things of a supernatural nature. This situation she finds herself in affords her new abilities along the way. Though, she already has one ability that she’s already gained as a result of exposure to a power object when she and her brother were both kids.
Now, Jesse finds herself confronting the very outfit that kidnapped her brother, but at the same time becoming the FBC’s savior because the building has somehow gone completely out of control… which, this story setup is probably predictably obvious.
The first object of power that Jesse finds (well, technically the second) is a gun which now affords her protection. There’s nothing really very special about this object of power other than it’s a gun. I was a little disappointed to find the game developers offering up the weakest of all power objects as the first that she finds. I mean, what’s the point in finding an object of power if it doesn’t somehow confer a new supernatural ability? No, instead we find a gun that’s just a gun. It shoots bullets, but other than that it doesn’t do much in the way of anything else. It’s not even a very powerful weapon. It’s simply a pistol. So far, the game is starting off weak.
Abilities
As the game progresses, Jesse gains more and newer powers and abilities. The difficulty is that this is a slow row to hoe. Meaning, this game is about as slow burn as it gets. Don’t expect to get many abilities very fast at all. They definitely come to Jesse at a very, very slow pace.
Still, her abilities and powers grow as she slowly finds the objects to help her improve her situation with “The Hiss”. As I said above, the building itself has gone out of control. Most of the people in the building are floating catatonic many feet above the ground. These unfortunate people are under the control of what Jesse dubs, “The Hiss”. It’s basically a form of mind control that forces people into this catatonic floating state. Jesse and any who are wearing a Hedron Resonance Amplifier (HRA) can avoid becoming a casualty of “The Hiss”.
As Jesse progresses into the game and into the building, she finds all sorts of departments investigating all sorts of paranormal activities, including ESP, telekinesis, mind control and so on. Unfortunately, the game throws all of this information at you, but Jesse makes no comments on any of it. It’s like she’s simply expecting to see all of this stuff as she makes her way through the Bureau of Control building. Nope, to her it’s not a surprise at all. Yet, to the player, the questions all remain open as the story addresses none of this.
Control Points
As Jesse makes her way through this labyrinthine maze of a building, she finds red circular zones with 3 parabolic dishes aiming at the center. These control points, once “cleansed”, allow Jesse to fast travel to these points in the building. As a game mechanic, fast travel points are convenient. For the game’s story, this whole system feels contrived. Regardless, the control points not only allow Jesse to straighten out screwed up parts of the building through “cleansing”, it allows her to use these points to move around the building more easily… which is needed in this convoluted design of a building.
Puzzles
As with many games of this nature, Jesse’s challenges sometimes involve cryptic puzzles to be solved. This means working out how to solve the puzzle, sometimes using abilities, sometimes not. For example, one puzzle involves getting punchcards into the correct order in each terminal of five total terminals. Once done, the machine dependent on the correct order of cards inserted into the terminals can then be started. Of course, once started, the machine fails leading Jesse to yet another area of the building to get something else.
When Jesse isn’t solving puzzles, she’s fighting enemies, she’s conversing with an NPC or she’s running around in the building. Many of Jesse’s quests involve either fetching something, doing something for someone or attacking enemies or being attacked.
Combat
Since we were just talking about this very topic, let’s expand on it. Combat is part of any first or third person shooter; otherwise, it’s not a shooter. The enemies in this game are The Hiss, a nebulous set of voices that invade a person and can eventually possess that person and have them do things, including fight. All of the enemies in the game are former FBC officers who have been possessed or transformed by The Hiss. The Hiss is a nebulous enemy who lives in an alternate dimension from the game’s 3D human inhabited world. This supernatural force can reach through into the “real” world and control humans. The Hiss doesn’t seem to have any special agenda other than taking up arms against the game’s protagonist… at least, none that the game has let the gamer in on.
In other words, The Hiss is pretty much like The Flood in the Halo series. It’s a nebulous enemy who uses humans to possess and propagate itself into the real world. Unfortunately, like The Flood in Halo, possessing a human corrupts and transfigures the human into unrecognizable creatures that afford only basic life or death instincts… much like The Flood in Halo.
Jesse uses her ever evolving supernatural abilities and supernatural weapons to dispatch these unwanted abominations. That’s where the player comes in.
The combat is fairly straightforward, but with some glaring problems. The game strongly recommends using manual aiming throughout the game. However, in the options panel, there is an aim assist mode. If you enable this mode, the game, again, strongly recommends playing the game through with this mode off making some nebulous statement about being rewarded for doing so.
Okay, so I tried to do this for a few levels. However, what became painfully obvious is that the over sensitive camera movement makes manual aiming in this game next to impossible. Most games suffer from this same design flaw, but this super sensitive movement is way more pronounced in Control than most games I’ve played. This makes manual aiming a chore. I could live with this chore, however, were it not for the next additional glaring flaw.
Enemies in Control have near perfect aim every single shot even when hidden behind obstructions. While my bullets miss enemies when I’m shooting at them with the reticle directly over the top of them, enemy bullets connect almost instantly. Wait, it gets worse.
Enemies can shoot Jesse in the head from behind objects with perfect aim and take nearly 99% of her health, sometimes all of it, in one shot. Yet, Jesse’s shots do maybe 10% damage to an enemy even in the head. The enemy’s perfect aim when combined with being so overpowered make the game a joke to play. This game isn’t supposed to be another Dark Souls, which Dark Souls is intentionally designed with combat so difficult so as to make you throw the controller across the room on occasion.
It’s one thing when game developers attempt to make enemies operate at about the same damage level as the player. It’s another when developers clearly don’t give two shits about this and set the enemies as one-shot player kills, yet can absorb every bullet in the player’s gun and still not die. Worse, enemies can literally appear out of thin air, standing right next to you and then summarily execute Jesse in one hit. It’s so absurd that you have to laugh to keep from throwing the controller at the screen.
As a result, I enabled aim-assist. If the game is going to cheat by making enemies so overpowered they can kill Jesse in one shot, it was only fair that Jesse obtains a similar advantage. There’s nothing worse than seeing the death screen in a game over and over and over. It gets worse again.
Death Mechanic
If Jesse falls in battle, the game reloads Jesse back to the closest save point. Because save points can be quite far away from where you were playing, that forces you to spend time sprinting all the way back to that point again. It’s not only annoying, it’s an incredible time waste. It can sometimes even become a challenge to get back there if it requires using lifts or yet more combat to get back there. Therefore, doing something to help mitigate the death loading screen and being forced back to the load point is well worth it. This is part of the reason I decided to enable aim-assist from the beginning.
While I’m okay with a small death penalty, such as consuming points that could be used towards upgrades, we don’t need multiple different penalties. Penalties such as this game has:
- Loss of points that can be used towards upgrades
- Being forced back to closest save point
- Loss of current battle in progress
- Confusion over where you end up after respawning
Thankfully, the game doesn’t lose the progress or force you to start everything over from scratch after Jesse dies, but you must determine where you are, figure out where you were and then spend time traversing back over there. You might even run into more Hiss along the way just to get back to where Jesse fell.
It’s not the worst death mechanic in a game, but it’s pretty close to it. Control will lose points for its weak death + respawn mechanic.
Graphics
One shining spot of this game is its world lighting, background objects and atmospherics. It has some of the best atmospherics I’ve seen in a game. It gives the world depth and it serves to give the office space a sense of realism. While the lighting doesn’t work 100% in every situation, there are some lighting conditions that are exceptional. This is one of the shining points in this game, but not the sparkle in this game… that’s coming below. Unfortunately, a lot of game developers put a lot of effort into choosing an engine that offers a substantial level of lighting realism, but then forget to put that same level of effort into the character models.
Speaking of character models, the 3D character models are average in this game, specifically the main character, Jesse. However, even the supporting character models lack. If you want to see character models that look genuinely and stunningly real, you need to look at the Call of Duty series. The character models in Call of Duty are some of the most outstanding and realistic models I’ve yet seen in a game. Sure, even those models look video gamey as all 3D models ultimately do, but they’re probably the closest to using a human model as I’ve seen from a 3D game character. Unfortunately in Control, Jesse (and the rest) aren’t the greatest of 3D models. You can even see that depending on the lighting, the character models can look okay or they can look flat, dull and unconvincing. The hands are particularly bad. It’s like playing a game using Barbie and Ken dolls.
Audio
Unlike many video games which offer the player character no voice, this game does give Jesse, the game’s protagonist, a solid voice. Not only does Jesse have a voice to speak to other characters in the game, this character also has thoughts of her own. It’s a refreshing and welcome change to see a game developer voice the protagonist and give them a backstory that unfolds as we’re traversing through the narrative. Unfortunately, the musical audio portion doesn’t fare as well. The music chosen is not inspiring or powerful. If anything, I’d use the word utilitarian. The music serves its purpose to cue the player into skirmishes, but that’s about as great as it gets. There’s just nothing much inspiring about the music included in this game. There is one exception and that’s discussed below.
Problems
As with most games that have been released in the last two or three years, I find game developers more and more relying on cliché game tropes to carry the story. These tropes make game development easier because most game developers already have toolkits built which can insert these tropes right into the game. Tropes like the press and hold to interact. Tropes like dead enemies dropping health pickups. Tropes like enemies with perfect aim. However, if the tropes were the end of this game’s problems, I might not even mention them. Combined with a bunch of other problems, it just exacerbates Control’s overall problems.
Video games that rely on quests, particularly where the game can carry multiple quests at the same time, have learned to mark not only on the map where the quest destination is, but also mark on the player’s directional HUD system which way to head to get to that destination. Unfortunately, Control does none of this. Not only does it fail to adequately alert the player where on the map is the destination is, it fails to offer a directional HUD or floating marker to lead you in the correct direction.
Instead, the player is forever fumbling his or her way to get to the destination. Sometimes the destination is so obscure and not marked, it’s impossible to find a way to get to it. This problem is compounded by the building’s convoluted and overly complex layout. I realize the building itself is a kind of extra-dimensional structure, able to rearrange itself at will. Regardless, the structure is overly complex requiring traversal of many stairs and small doors to move between and around areas.
Combine this with the fact that doors are level locked, the player has no way to know how to get into an area until you finally and magically hit upon the correct quest that drops the key in your lap.
Map
Yes, the map itself is also a problem. Unlike many games which choose to utilize a separate map screen, this game uses a map overlay. The map overlay obscures the screen itself, yet the screen stays live with the character able to move while the screen map marker moves. This is mostly a negative for the game. It’s great that you can see you’re heading in the correct direction, but because the screen is so overly obscured by the map, trying to traverse the interior of the building can be impossible with the map overlay open.
The only other game that has offered a similar map overly screen was Technomancer. Technomancer‘s game’s map overlay screen, however, chose not to obscure the gamer’s view of the game play field while still allowing the map to be visible. This meant you could leave the map open and traverse the map to your destination. If Control had chosen to allow visibility of the play field at all times, the game play experience with the map open would have been far, far better. As it is now, Control’s kludgy map overlay system is made worse by its failure to be useful other than for quick glances.
This map situation gets much worse. There are times where the map doesn’t even draw in. It’s just a bunch of question marks and words floating in space with no image underlay showing the room layout. You simply have to guess where the hell you are. Even worse, this undrawn map can stay like this for minutes at a time, sometimes eventually drawing in, sometimes not. It’s also weird that the map worked just fine 5 minutes ago, but just a few minutes later it’s not working. I find it exceedingly difficult to believe that a bug this functionally problematic has been allowed to exist in a 505 studio game over a year after release. Though, admittedly this game studio has had a very rough start with Death Stranding… a game that confused a lot of players, was too slow burn and afforded mixed critical reviews. Control also falls into this same boat, but for very different reasons.
Telekenesis (aka Launch)
Yes, this power also falls under a problem area of this game. In a game that allows you to pick up and throw objects, an accurate object targeting system is imperative. Unfortunately, that targeting system fails more often than it succeeds. For example, there’s a point in the game where you’re required to run through an obstacle course in around 60 seconds. As part of this course, you are required to pick up cube structures and throw them into wall plugs to activate them. Far too many times, the game will, instead of picking up the cube which is right under the reticle, it will yank ceiling or wall material down forcing you to send that flying and try again. Sometimes it will fail to grab the cube multiple times in a row using up the precious telekinesis power bar. You only get about 3 tries at this before running out of power and being forced into a slow recharge.
Even with the fastest recharge speed mods, you still have to wait 10-15 (seconds) for the bar to recharge ensuring that you fail the course. I don’t know how many times I had to run through that course before I was able to succeed simply because of this single stupid game design failure.
If you’re developer planning on including short duration timed activities, you need to make damned sure that the mechanics required to complete the course function reliably 100% of the time. Control really failed the gamer with this course. That’s not to say the course cannot be run and succeeded. It will, however, take many trial and error attempts until you can manage to get luck to line up properly with all of the kludgy game mechanics.
Ashtray Maze
Let’s get past all of these pesky problems. What I will say about this particular level is that this level is the payoff for the entire game. It should have been the final thing you do that ends the game. My guess is that this level was designed first. Some developer came up with this level idea which wowed everyone who played it and then a game was wrapped around this one level as a reason for this game to exist.
This puzzle level requires a special object of power to be obtained before it can be run. If you enter into the maze without this object of power, you can only run in circles. Once you have this object of power, the entire level opens up and boy is it impressive. The entire run is so precisely timed to the player that it’s like watching a music video. Yes, even the soundtrack on this level is awesome. As I said, impressive. This level is the sole reason to play Control and, while fleeting, the level is amazing to behold and is the single most impressive thing about this game. After I was done running the level, I was thinking that I want to do it again… it was that impressive.
Unfortunately, one outstanding level can’t redeem a mediocre third person shooter. But, nonetheless, the Ashtray Maze is definitely a must see (and hear) level. It’s too bad the rest of the game couldn’t have been quite so impressive.
Overall
Control is a game not about control, but about being controlled. It’s about, well, nothing much in particular or even too interesting to be honest. This game combines a lot of its not-so-subtle cues from a lot of different games series including Bioshock, Halo, Portal, Assassin’s Creed, Infamous Second Son and Half-Life. In fact, it feels like a mashup of the game series just mentioned. It feels way less original than it should and, thus, it ends up far less impressive overall. However, the developers had a gem of a concept in the Ashtray Maze that they simply squandered away, but which could have been used in many ways all throughout the game to bump up the playability and fun factor of Control.
For example, the silly and repetitive Oceanview Motel sections were not only intensely boring and repetitive, they were completely unnecessary. If those segments had been replaced each with slightly modified runs of the Ashtray Maze, this game could have been much, much better and way more satisifying. I could have done the Ashtray Maze run several times and loved running it every single time. Instead, we got saddled with the trite Oceanview Motel, which is insipid, uninspired, slow and unnecessary. Maybe 505 can learn from these mistakes when crafting the sequel to Control.
One final thing I’ll state is that this game has two endings. This information doesn’t at all spoil the game. However, know that it has a fake out ending and a real one. The fake out ending is still part of the game and there’s a small amount more gameplay (maybe 15-20 minutes) after it, but before you get to the real ending. I’m uncertain why 505 decided to add a fake out ending, particularly so close to the end, but they did. I thought I’d mention it so if you choose to play this game you don’t get caught off-guard thinking that the game ended early and abruptly and put the game away before completing Control.
Graphics: 8.5 out of 10
Sound: 8 out of 10
Game Control: 4 out of 10
Playability: 7 out of 10
Replay value: 1 out of 10
Overall: 4.5 out of 10 (an average third person shooter with only one redeeming level)
Grahm’s Meat Cook Tips
If you’re reading this, you’re probably playing Fallout 76. This likely also means you’re playing the Meat Week event, until August 26th, 2020 (i.e., two more days left as of this post). This event runs every hour on the hour. Let’s explore.
Playing Drums and Turning Spits
A lot of people seem to think that these activities don’t matter to the event. They do. In fact, they’re very important to the event succeeding.
Both playing the drums and turning the spit do several things at once. The first important thing these activities do is to majorly slow the decrease of the Event’s progress bar by a lot. This gives those performing collection more time to complete their collection activities in larger quantities. The more people who are handling these two activities, the slower the progress bar decreases. While these activities don’t increase the progress bar by themselves, they aid in reducing the decrease. This is why these activities are important.
Further, these activities significantly contribute to the 100% success of the event (i.e., getting the best prizes from the event). If no one is playing the drums or turning the spit and everyone is running around collecting meat and greens, contributing Chally’s feed and cleaning up messes and fires, that’s not enough to get 100% event completion.
All aspects of the Meat Cook event need to be touched, including turning the spit and playing the drums in addition to all of the rest. More than this, these two activities are important to contributing to the 100% success of the event, which affords the best prizes. When I have played through this event without these activities, even when the progress bar reaches the steak, you won’t necessarily see the best prizes without these stations having been manned.
Not only do these give the best chances at the best prizes, these slow the progress bar’s decrease by allowing the collectors to collect more. Without these being manned, the progress bar decreases quite a bit faster.
Also, manning the spit 100% of the time during the event raises the chances of getting the best prizes. Keep that spit manned at all times!
Collecting
It seems that everyone prefers to run around finding and collecting greens and critter parts. It makes sense. It’s the only combat activity at this event (such that it is). I get this aspect. This activity alone can’t carry the event.
Cleaning up and Putting out Fires
This is also an important activity. Cleaning up dirty messes, putting out fires and picking up after Chally is also important. Don’t forget this activity.
Prime Meat Collection
Here’s one aspect that doesn’t seem to be that important to the event. Grahm makes it a big deal, but the best that contributing Prime Meat does is give you Scrip at the end of the event.
Chally’s Feed
You’ll learn how to create Chally’s Feed the first time you play the event. To make Chally’s Feed, you’ll need 2 Boiled Water, 2 Carrots, 3 Razorgrain, 3 Tatoes, 1 Wood. This means you’ll need to plant carrots, razorgrain and tatoes at your camp or in a workshop. You can use Green Thumb to double what you pick and Super Duper to help in duplicating more quantities when you craft. You craft this recipe on a cooking station.
Contributing Chally’s Feed to the hay pile near Chally will help you gain a better reward at the end. I don’t believe Chally’s feed contributes to the overall reward of the event, but it does give you a personal reward for feeding Chally. You can feed Chally once every minute or so as there is a cooldown timer after you deposit.
Depositing
When you’re done collecting, you’ll need to deposit your collected items into the Critter Chunks or Greens area. Don’t forget to do this.
Here’s where people make the mistake of attempting to drop what they collect in one by one. DON’T DO THIS. You need to collect as much as you can, then drop it all in at once in a large amount. The more you collect and deposit together, the larger of a deposit bonus you will see. This can move the progress bar very far, very rapidly.
This is why sometimes the bar moves from chicken leg all the way to steak with one go. It’s because people are collecting massive amounts of everything and depositing it all at once. Don’t collect and drop one by one. Do it in bulk and you’ll get a bigger deposit reward.
[Update 8/25/2020] One thing I forgot to mention about Grahm’s Meat Cook is … if 3 people are on the drums and 3 people are on the spits during the entire 2 minute countdown timer before the event begins, this can sometimes start the event just past the turkey leg icon (middle of the progress bar). This means that it only takes a tiny bit of work to complete the event. I’ve seen events that have completed in around 30 seconds if all 6 people are manning these two activities before the event begins. Apparently, these activities do contribute to the event even during the pre-event 2 minute countdown timer. I can’t tell if this is an oversight by Bethesda or intentional.
Hopefully, this helps you win this event if you’ve been having troubles. Please leave a comment below if you have questions.
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Random Thoughts - Randocity! 
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