Fallout 76’s online-centric shared world nature is something very new for both Fallout and Bethesda Game Studios. Much has been said about it, but while it’s true that it will present its fair share of challenges for the studio, and while Bethesda themselves have admitted that the very prospect of such a huge change in direction is scary, there’s also no denying that there’s inherent advantages to making the kind of game Fallout 76 is.
Chief among them has to be the ability to support a product for a number of years. Bethesda have spoken in the past about how they plan on supporting Fallout 76 “forever”, and while “forever” is a bit of a nebulous concept, the implication is clear- that through updates, content additions, events, and other such things that one usually associates with games-as-a-service experiences, Fallout 76 is in a good position to have a long shelf life- at least if it’s handled correctly.
Speaking with AusGamers, Bethesda’s SVP of marketing Pete Hines spoke to that quite a bit, talking about how they plan on continuing to support the game for many years, and how they have every intention of constantly taking player feedback into account and improving and iterating upon the game’s core concepts.
“We need to embrace what this game is,” Hines said. “There needs to be a reason for someone to log in. That could be something as simple as ‘on this day we’re doing this special thing’, or ‘this week’, and we have a tonne of plans and many ideas like this, some of which we’re already going working on. Some of which we’ll create in response to feedback. We’re going to get a lot of feedback and to be able to change and adapt what our thinking is around the kinds of things that people want is key. Of course, even more new stuff will come post launch, we also need to be thinking about the Level 60 players.”
“We joke about it,” he continued. “Fallout 76 is the worst version of the game because every day, the next day, it always gets a little bit better. And that will be true for many years. We will constantly be looking to make the game better, add new things, and we do want to be able to say to somebody who hasn’t played the game, a year later, to say, ‘it’s still Fallout 76, but here are all the other things that we’ve added’. Maybe one of those things was the reason they were holding out.”
Fallout 76 goes into beta at the end of this month, and launches in full on November 14 for the PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Recently, it’s final file size was confirmed. Read more on that through here.
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