In the midst of disappointing releases like Anthem, it’s easy to forget about Bethesda’s Fallout 76. Releasing late last year as an online-only experience, the title saw myriad of bugs, performance issues, and controversies. Though Bethesda Game Studios has been launching new updates with fixes and new content, many have wondered what director Todd Howard’s stance on the whole deal has been.
At a recent PAX East panel, Howard spoke out about the game’s problems, noting that the development team had “a lot of difficulties during development”. “For us, Fallout 76 is a very, very new thing, for our studio,” he said. “We knew we were going to have a lot of bumps coming out with the game, and we definitely had some, some of them much harder than even we anticipated. This was a very new and different project for us. We’re still doing other things that are more traditional, as I would call them, Bethesda games.
“But this one, to be honest, we had a lot of difficulties during development and sometimes those difficulties do show up on the screen. You never want them to. We grew the studio, we’re four different studios now in North America, the one in Rockville, Austin, Dallas, and Montreal, and this was a game that really took a ton of people across those four studios coming together to make work. And we knew launch was just going to be the beginning. We’re really excited that the game actually did very, very well.”
Interestingly, Fallout 76 isn’t a massive flop for Bethesda. Howard noted that there were “millions of players”, before adding, “We’re getting tons of feedback. Our goal is to build kind of a Fallout platform. We have tons of ideas, it’s been kind of a wild journey so far and we’re excited, there’s a ton of cool content coming.
“It’s been an incredible experience. We will do anything we can to reward that, this year, next year and in the coming years we have big things planned.”
Fallout 76 will be receiving more content in the coming months, like the Vault raids coming in the Nuclear Winter update this Summer. These are meant for parties of four players and are completely instanced. On May 23rd, the Legendary vendor “Purveyor” will also be available to let players re-roll stats on Legendary items. Then there’s the Wastelanders update arriving in Fall, which will revamp the game significantly.
To hear more about Fallout 76 and other projects Bethesda has in development, check out the full day one panel below.