While Fallout 76 might be in a decent state today, the game had a famously terrible launch with a host of issues not only in-game, but out of the game too with controversies surrounding the quality of its Collector’s Edition items. In an interview with VideoGamer, former studio design lead Dan Nanni spoke about how the game’s development team was feeling as it shipped the game and started work on its expansion.
For context, Nanni worked on Fallout 76 as part of Escalation Studios, which would eventually become Bethesda Game Studios Dallas. During the game’s development before its launch, the development team was split into groups. While the main team worked continued working on the base release of Fallout 76, Nanni and a group of other developers started to work on its Nuclear Winter expansion. Interestingly, it is also worth noting that Nuclear Winter – a 52-player battle royale mode released in 2019 – has since been removed from Fallout 76.
“We were trying to build expansion while the game was still being built simultaneously,” said Nanni. “So we didn’t know what the game was going to end up being. We just knew what our goal was going to be, but we were so dependent on the game being finished.”
Nanni also spoke about having to work on what was ostensibly a multiplayer-only mode while the studio wasn’t even sure at the time about how the servers for Fallout 76 would work. Working on the expansion, Nanni described feeling like he would have to start getting ready for “a rough ride.”
“Let’s just be completely honest: when we were told we were going to make a battle royale for Fallout 76, I think everybody was hands on heads like, ‘oh, man, here we go. This is it’. Like, you’re boarding this train and you know it’s going in a direction that you did not agree to be going into,” he explained. “So much as you knew this is going to be a rough ride. You knew that this was going to take some dedication, right, and perseverance. And you had to fight through that.”
Ultimately, Nanni considers the fact that the studio was able to make a game engine that was designed for single-player RPGs be able to handle multiplayer servers as an amazing feat in itself. He also notes that behind-the-scenes accomplishments like these don’t really get acknowledged much by players.
“A lot of people worked a lot of hours… totake that engine and to make it multiplayer was a feat,” Nanni said. “That itself was an amazing feat of technology, that was worth the price of entry, but you can’t sell that to a gamer. ‘Hey, look at all this work we did to make it work and it shouldn’t have worked but it did!’ You can’t sell that as a product, right? But it doesn’t matter, it still hurts.”
When Fallout 76 ultimately launched to a fairly negative reception both critically and commercially, Nanni described working on Nuclear Winter at the time as “marching towards doom.”
“Working on the product that’s supposed to follow that up knowing that the rumours are out there and nobody wants it, it just makes you feel like you’re marching towards doom, and it’s not a good feeling but you have to do it,” he explained. “It’s your pride, it’s your passion; you have to change your perspective, you have to change your frame of mind. You have to think what is good about this and put everything into it.”
Eventually, Fallout 76 would start getting a more positive critical reception once some of its more glaring issues were fixed through regular updates. The Wastelanders expansion – which was also worked on by Nanni – would also bring in quite a bit of positive buzz around the online title. The title is still going quite strong, having kicked off its 20th season back in March.
Fallout 76 is available on PC, PS4 and Xbox One. The game can also be played on current-gen consoles through backwards compatibility.
