Gosh darn Todd, the game isn’t doing so well I hear. I’m sure it will be alright. Here, let me tell you a Fallout joke to cheer you up: how many lives does an irradiated cat have? 18 half-lives! Ha, classic.
Anyhow, private law company Miglaccio & Rathod, a Baltimore-based LLP, has posted on their web-page about an investigation they’re conducting into Bethesda Game Studios on the grounds of “deceptive practices”.
The lawsuit of course has to do with Fallout 76 and the way Bethesda handled (and continues to handle) refund requests. Reportedly, in a report-inspired Reddit thread, one of the people claims that their refund request was denied because they “downloaded the game”. Cheeky, if true.
The company actually visited the thread and gave a call to action for anybody whose refund request had been rejected, in addition to apologizing for their web-page being temporarily down, likely having to do with an overwhelming traffic (it has since came back online).
Riffing on Fallout 76 and its buggy, glitch-infested launch has became a favorite pastime of internet dwellers and journalists alike. Personally, I’ve been avoiding the subject (save for things that are funny, like an unkillable character whose owner desperately wants them to die), because stoking the fires of outrage is an exceedingly short-sighted idea. Fire consumes, I’m not gonna pretend I can control it.
But admittedly, the launch was… Rough. 56 GB worth of patches that seem like a mere start, a bug that literally deletes the beta and a bug that made the game impossible to uninstall at the same time (can’t win with it, can you?), downplaying the threat of hackers only to see them thrive like a bunch of molerats on a fresh brahmin carcass and throughout all of it reports of Bethesda support being exceptionally uncommunicative, sending boilerplate responses to frustrated customers…
It’s a mess. A mess I think is exaggerated by rage-fueled, click-generating tunnel-vision, but a mess nonetheless. On the one hand you have legitimately frustrated customers, who wanted to enjoy the game. On another you have people who engage in what I like to call “rage by proxy”. We’ve gotten to a point where “bugs in Fallout 76 is a meme”, is a meme!
I wanted to bring this to your attention specifically because ever since Fallout 76 came out, I feel like my relationship with Todd Howard has changed. How should I put it Todd… I know: I’d hate to see you leave, but I love to watch you go. Give them hell Tiger, I’m sure you can turn this around. With TES 6 if need be.
Information obtained via Gamerevolution.