Bethesda Game Studios is lauded for the side content that its games offer and oftentimes, it can become the main attraction when the story feels lackluster. To that effect, Fallout 76 will have lots of side content as well – over 150 hours worth. This was confirmed when Bethesda spoke to Official Xbox Magazine for its December 2018 issue (Issue 170).
That doesn’t count the copious amount of content that will be coming post-launch as well, thanks to the game’s online service model. With so much content and so many ways for players to gain the right tools, could later parts of the game descend into chaos? According to Fallout 76 project lead Jeff Cardiner, survival will still take precedence over simply wasting items.
“Remember it is a survival game,” he said. “So we found early in play-testing that people were like, ‘his character’s going to go away in three hours, so I’m going to use all my Stimpaks and ammo,’ but when you’re playing ‘for real’, you’ll make very different decisions. Do I really want to kill this guy with my one Fatman shell, or do I want to save it for the Scorch Beast, because it took me hours to get it. You do make different decisions when your characters are ‘real’.”
You can also expect the overall story to play out differently, since there’s that constant tension and threat of being attacked. In fact, it’s somewhat plausible to believe that you can’t just barrel through the story like your average Elder Scrolls or Fallout title. As development director Chris Mayer notes, “You play this game 30 hours, 300 hours; sometimes you’ll play in a group, sometimes you’ll focus on certain activities but sometimes you’ll play solo.
“And those are the times when you’ll have time to delve into the fiction and listen to the holotapes and read all the monitors and really get into the story. But there is more of a tension there, you can’t pause the game to read a terminal. When you’re reading a terminal something could sneak up behind you and eat you. And it often does. The more we’ve play-tested, the more we’ve realized how viable that is, and it supports the idea of how dangerous and how lonely it is out there.”
Fallout 76 will release on November 14th for Xbox One, PS4, and PC. The beta goes live for Xbox One on October 23rd, with its pre-load currently available. Those on PC and PS4 will have to wait till October 30th for their chance to play.
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