The debate surrounding Fallout 76 and its online shared-world nature seems to be never-ending. Even though Bethesda have gone out of their way multiple times to assure fans that the upcoming title doesn’t set the trend for future games by the studio, Fallout 76’s vast differences from previous games in the series. Because the fact is, it is very different, in many, many ways.
Those changes have obviously had an effect on several things, and one of this things is, quite simply, the way Bethesda approaches talking about the game in the build up to its launch. While speaking with Yahoo, Pete Hines, Bethesda’s senior vice president of marketing and PR, talked about how the conversation surrounding the game is largely different from what it would have been were it just a regular Fallout sequel.
“If it was just Fallout 5 it would be like ‘it’s a single player Fallout and here’s what’s new or different’,” Hines said. “We’d have to do a lot but there will also be a lot that people already know or understand. When we’re saying it’s a big departure there are a lot of questions. How is this going to work as an online game because it’s so different? Even things like ‘what does PvP mean’ Is somebody just going to be able to kill me over and over again? No, we have a system for it.”
Hines then went on to talk about how at QuakeCon, exactly for these reasons, Bethesda went on to drop bucketload of information of these very systems within the game, to answer some of the fans’ most burning questions.
“So at QuakeCon we said ‘here’s how it works, here is the downside to if you become the kind of person that runs around murdering people’,” Hines said. “Here are the negative connotations and everybody’s like ‘ok, that’s kinda cool’. It is making sure folks understand because there is a lot of new gameplay. Something as simple as ‘can I play by myself’. And it’s like ‘yeah, you can’. Is it just a shooter? No it’s a role-playing game. There’s still the SPECIALS system, you’re still choosing perks and levelling up. Even that basic thing people don’t assume. Is VATS still in the game? Yeah, it just works differently.”
Fallout 76 launches on November 14 for the PS4, Xbox One, and PC.