Summary
It’s hard to describe just how disastrousFallout 76’s launch was to those of you who weren’t there, but I’ll try. For starters, many, many fans hated its entire concept, as they had hoped that the newly revealed Fallout game would be a traditional single-player release. It was not, andwe’re still waiting on one of those.
Then, everything that could have caught on fire… did. A$200 collector’s edition did not live up to its advertising, promptingBethesdatogive disappointed customers some in-game currency- which made them more furious. Bethesda then said it would replace an item in the collector’s edition, only for the support site toaccidentally leak the private information of customers. Oh, and to top it all off, the game itself wasn’t great either, as it lacked any NPCs, was full of performance issues, and came under fire for its microtransactions.
Unfortunately, this discourse was not contained to the internet. As former Fallout 76 project lead Jeff Gardiner tellsPC Gamer, he was “yelled at in an Apple Store”, adding to an already demoralising launch.
It took some time - and various updates - for fans to warm to the game
“When you put a game out that’s that maligned, especially on a team that has had such success, the morale is doubly bad internally,” says Gardiner. “So it was my job to make the people who are making the game like the game.”
Worse yet, its live service nature meant that they couldn’t just move on to the next project. “Working on a live service game comes with a lot of stress, because it just doesn’t go away.” And as it turns out, the fan backlash didn’t go away either: “I got yelled at in an Apple Store, I’ll never forget.”
He does, however, say that fan feedback (presumably shared through channels other than being yelled at in an Apple Store) helped the team improve the game. The Wastelanders update was the first major sign that the MMO was on the right track, since this added NPCs into the game.
After a bunch of updates, Gardiner left Bethesda in 2021. He now says that Fallout 76 was his favourite game to work on because of how much the team managed to turn it around. That effort has paid off, as it’s still going stong, seeinga huge spike in players when the Fallout show droppedlast year.
