Fallout 76, Bethesda’s multiplayer take on the Fallout universe, is due out later this year. It represents a major moment for Bethesda as a publisher- the company, long a proponent of Steam for its PC games, will be eschewing it this time around, and launching the PC version exclusively through the Bethesda.Net service.
Do they foresee any issues arising from this decision? Speaking to Eurogamer, Bethesda’s SVP of Marketing Pete Hines said that while the decision to go with Bethesda.Net “might” cause issues, most issues that arise during launch – and he admitted that there may be many of them – will come down to other factors. He noted that the Bethesda.Net launcher has been used for other games previously, and that the company wouldn’t have used it for Fallout 76 if they didn’t have confidence in it.
“We’re definitely going to have issues for sure. They might be because of the launcher, but it’s far more likely that they’ll be because of any number of other systems that have to stand up to massive numbers of people hitting them, whether it’s social features or who the hell knows,” he said. “Because we see enough games like this that do [have those problems], that we know we can’t possibly be immune to everything we see. But I don’t have any worries in particular about Bethesda.net – we use it for Legends, we use it for Quake, we use it for a lot of stuff. We wouldn’t do it on Bethesda.net exclusively if we thought the launcher was going to cause issues.”
It’s good that he’s at least being honest about the potential for problems to arise. That said, I’m not sure I’m necessarily on board with the comparison to Quake Champions and The Elder Scrolls Legends. The scale of those two games’ playerbases is orders of magnitude smaller than what Fallout 76 is likely to have.
We’ll see how it goes either way when Fallout 76 launches for PS4, Xbox One, and PC on November 14 this year. Make sure to check out the newest details we have on the game, including how the game handles camps, and dying during quests.