Scorchbeast tweaks for Fallout 76’s next patch inspire little confidence in community

Fallout 76’s official blog outlined some changes coming to the beleaguered game later this month, and calling it underwhelming would be an understatement.

Basically, Scorchbeasts and their Queen are getting some tweaks, and that’s about it. To be fair, Bethesda Game Studios indicated that these are a couple of changes coming for Patch 6 later this month, meaning it’s not the only fix or feature in that update. But some in the game’s increasingly restive subreddit took it as a bad sign that these were the two highlights the weekly “Inside the Vault” post chose to pull out.

The changes coming will mean Scorchbeasts use their sonic screaming attack less frequently, now with a minimum of 10 seconds between each shriek. The patch will also fix a bug with the Scorchbeast Queen that causes her to drop the same crafting plan, even after multiple kills. “Additionally, we are also looking into ways we can make her loot list more ‘legendary’ in the future,” Bethesda wrote.

“And not a single mention about how the amount of time and resources required to take one down are not worth the reward,” said one Redditor.

“The only two ‘MAJOR’ changes they are talking about are a cooldown on an ability and a loot table change,” said another. “How is this all they have to share?”

Polygon took a long look at Fallout 76 today with Cass Marshall, who has put a couple hundred hours into the game, and neither Scorchbeasts nor the loot the queen drops came up as a top priority issue facing this game now three months after launch. Item dupers flooded their worlds and the Fallout 76 economy with so many overpowered weapons so early on that there may be no fix. Piecemeal fixes since then have tried to lower the value of these duped items, which meant several unintended consequences for other players.

“You guys are a bigger company now, with a lot of manpower than ever before,” said another Redditor after the blog post went up today. They called themselves a lifelong Fallout fan who had never complained about 76 before but, “this is getting ridiculous. Fix your game. You can do plenty more communication with us.”

That today’s “Inside the Vault” closed with a come-on for some new items in the Atomic Shop, where folks can spend real money, cheesed players off further. Through the weekend, players who sleep (in the game) long enough to earn the Well Rested buff will get its effects (an XP bonus) for 50 percent longer.

A “known issues” post set up six days ago shows what Bethesda Game Studios is aware of and will be fixing in the next patch or a later update. Duplication exploits, crashing and sever stability, and the capacity of players’ stashes remain top concerns.