Highlights
- Fallout 76's release was a wake-up call for Bethesda, as the company had believed it was invincible after a string of successful games.
- The development team underestimated the challenges of creating a multiplayer game, assuming it would be a simple addition to the Fallout formula.
- Despite its initial problems, Fallout 76 has managed to survive and even thrive, reaching a milestone and gaining support from the modding community.
A former Bethesda dev has revealed that the company thought it was infallible until Fallout 76 came out. Players had high expectations for Fallout 76 after the success of Fallout 4, but the final product was quite different from what Fallout fans had hoped for.
The story of Fallout 76 takes place in Appalachia, 25 years after the bombs dropped. The player emerges from Vault 76 to find a post-apocalyptic America and explore a map three-to-four times larger than the one in Fallout 4. On this journey of survival and construction, Fallout 76 players fight enemies, meet other players and encounter various factions, each with their vision of how to conquer or revitalize Appalachia. And while Fallout 76 today is at a different point from when it was released, one dev talked about how the experience of developing the game impacted Bethesda.
Fallout 76 Player Builds Impressive Island
A Fallout 76 fan builds an immense and impressive island community of connected structures using the title's in-game creation tools.
Former Bethesda design director Bruce Nesmith revealed that the company thought it was infallible until Fallout 76's release. In an interview with MinnMax, Nesmith said that the team was "caught up in their own hubris" after producing so many successes. He explains that players were asking for a multiplayer game, which led to the creation of Fallout 76. Without having experience working on a multiplayer game, the team had no idea how different the process would be. According to the design director, the devs thought "it's going to be the same Fallout," and that "all they had to do was add multiplayer." Fallout 76 had a disastrous launch, riddled with technical problems and a general lack of content.
Bethesda was on a winning streak before Fallout 76 with The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim, and Fallout 4. Nesmith says in the interview that this made Bethesda feel capable of making anything, but "clearly that was wrong." In his years with Bethesda, Bruce Nesmith worked on Fallout 76, Fallout 3, Fallout 4, Skyrim, and Starfield, and left the company in 2021. Bethesda has made big changes to the game since its launch, which has helped Fallout 76 reach a milestone that many gamers would previously have thought impossible.
Todd Howard admitted that he and his team let down many players with Fallout 76. But against all odds the game survived, and this year Fallout 76 reached Season 14, which Once in a Blue Moon update. Fallout 76 has found success in the modding community, with modders releasing new content for the game alongside official releases from Bethesda.
Fallout 76 is available now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
