The fact that Fallout 76 is an online-only game hasn’t gone down well with some people, especially given how Bethesda have been outspoken in their support for single player experiences for a long time now. If there are any of you who’re concerned that this might be the direction they’ll be taking with all of their future games, though, you need not be worried.
In an interview with GameStar, Bethesda Game Studios’ Todd Howard was asked if Fallout 76’s approach will also find its way into future games from the developer, such as Fallout 5 or The Elder Scrolls 6, and his answer was, to put it simply- no. Those games are very much still going to be single player experiences. “For those games, we want to keep them as single player,” Howard said. “That is what our focus is going to be. If they have some social aspect we haven’t designed yet, you’ll see. But we treat each of them each as their own thing.”
Howard then went on to speak a little bit about Fallout 76 itself, and gave a few details on the technical improvements Bethesda Game Studios have made with the game and the engine that it is built on, citing examples of rendering, lighting, landscape generation, and more as some of the biggest improvements in the game. “We wanted every aspect to be better,” he said. ” From the graphics to how the controls work, the gunplay, enemy AI, overlapping quests.”
Those are, without a doubt, some of the biggest improvements people would have been hoping for in the next Fallout game. Gunplay in Fallout has never really been as precise as you would see in a proper shooter, relying more on RPG mechanics, such as VATS, and since VATS in Fallout 76 will now be real time, you’d expect the proper gunplay in the game to see major improvements, along with things like AI as well, since those aspects will now be at the forefront.
“In Fallout 4 we tried so many new things and redid so many things we had before,” Howard continued. “We took our lessons in how you strike that balance going into Fallout 76. We improved the hit detection for Fallout 76, it feels much better but you won’t notice unless you go back to Fallout 4 and compare those two games. There are a lot of things we redid for Fallout 76 that I don’t know if the people will notice.”
These improvements, in fact, are only going to ramp up more with more with each new game, if Howard is to be believed, who said that the studio will keep improving its tech with Starfield, and then with The Elder Scrolls 6 as well. Which is to be expected, of course, and also, frankly, quite needed, too- Bethesda Game Studios’ games aren’t exactly technical marvels (to put it lightly). In the very same interview, Howard also talked about cross-play support in Fallout 76, and how the game won’t be able to achieve full functionality due to Son’y problematic attitude. You can read that report here.