When Fallout 76 comes out it will be the culmination of months of excitement, skepticism, and Country Road being stuck in our heads. For Bethesda Game Studios, the debut will commence years of support for its very first online-focused game (The Elder Scrolls Online was principally developed by Zenimax Online Studios). A newly published interview with BGS boss Todd Howard reveals some of the approach the studio is going to take to updating and changing Fallout 76 both according to its own plans and in response to player feedback.
Oh, and don’t worry about the French text – Howard’s responses are all in English. For whatever reason, Bethesda’s official French YouTube account seems to be the only one that has posted the video (which was recorded back in July) so far.
“One of the things that we really like about Fallout 76 is that we’ve built it so that we can support it on a month-to-month and week-to-week basis,” Howard explains in the video. “So our plan is, this is the game, and we know based on our previous games that people are gonna play literally for years. So it’s something we’re gonna keep updating.
“And the way the whole system is built, connected, we can add things the players like more of, change parts of the game. And that part is really, really exciting for us: that we have the game that we’re launching, but then we also have the game that it’s gonna be a year from now and two years from now. And we’re gonna do that with the community, so that makes it extra great.”
Adapting to life as a live service company is rarely easy for big studios – just look at the first year of how Bungie struggled to please players of the original Destiny. But it sounds like Howard is expecting some turbulence, and it’s encouraging that the studio at least plans to stay agile in addressing the emergent problems and opportunities of a service-based game.
You don’t have to wait until November 14 to play – check out everything we know about the Fallout 76 beta.