Week End – Fallout 76, Because SEO

A summary of news and observations from the week.

In The News

It’s been an incredibly bleak week for news, to my eye. Maybe everyone took the whole week off, because Monday was a holiday here in the US.

Bethesda teased us with an announcement of a new game called Fallout 76. It’s debatable whether this deserves to be mentioned on an MMO-themed blog, but see above about bleak news. Bethesda themselves told us basically nothing about this game, but news sources are alive with speculation that instead of a single-player RPG like Fallout 3 or 4, it’s going to be an “online survival” game in the style of … well … I don’t know, exactly, because the phrase “online survival game” does not conjure up any games in my mind. ARK? Conan Exiles? I actually consider both of those to be single-player games myself.

Kotaku breathlessly quotes three anonymous sources (“so as not to damage their careers” ha! such high drama! it’s just like the Pentagon Papers!) who claim it will look like Rust or DayZ. For myself, all I can say is that I did kind of enjoy playing the “Survival” difficulty of Fallout 4 … by myself, obviously.

Anyway Bethesda will reveal more at E3 in a couple of weeks, and there’s no reason whatsoever to talk about Fallout 76 … except to drive search engine traffic to my site. Such blatant exploitation of your earnest search terms! But surprise, that is pretty much what 97% of all content on the Internet really is: Tricking you into looking at somebody’s ads. So much rambling I am doing! Because there is literally nothing to talk about this week. I’m not even going to edit out the word “literally” there. It’s like I’m writing a paper back in high school!

Bless Online launched into Early Access on Steam this week. This game is so far off my radar that I barely even consider this news, but a launch is a launch I guess. It’s $30 and there has already been a news item talking about fixing a duplication bug sooooooo, yeah, there’s that. The game’s most notable feature so far seems to be the ability to generate a lot of controversy and bad feelings.

Elder Scrolls Online is exactly the same as every other online connected service in the universe. I mean, ZeniMax is tracking your every move with something called Red Shell. The 90s called and wants its surprise and outrage back. Zing! See, it’s funny because it’s so common now that it would be far more newsworthy to learn that a company wasn’t tracking us.

Dark Souls Remastered is out on Steam. This should have been in last week’s post, as it came out on the 25th, but I missed it completely. It’s half off if you already own the Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition, so that was the easiest $20 I ever spent.

My Week

To be honest I’ve barely played any games this week. I tried Dauntless for about 20 minutes, and that’s about it. I had so little interest in the game that I simply tacked a paragraph about it to the end of my hastily-written post on the installation process.

I’ve mainly been re-watching The Expanse and writing thousands of words about it for a blog series exploring where the show went wrong for me. I have no idea if I’ll ever post this series, because I’m literally terrified of superfan backlash, but I’m having fun writing it.

In fact I’ve been so deep into studying The Expanse that I completely forgot to make a podcast episode this week, so I apologize if anyone was waiting for one. I’ll see if I can make two for next time.