Fallout 76 has enjoyed a massive turnaround since its launch in 2018. What initially seemed like a folly, stripping away so much of what made Fallout such a long-lasting, beloved series, has, over the years, transformed into a quality sandbox prequel. The big improvements really began with the Wastelanders update, which reintroduced an essential part of the RPG: NPCs.
It was such an obvious and immediate glow up that it still seems bonkers that this was absent at launch, with no indication it would change. This was Bethesda’s vision for Fallout’s first not-quite-massively-multiplayer-game. Of course it landed with a thud.
Game director Emil Pagliarulo, chatting to Game Informer, describes Bethesda’s attempt to turn Fallout into one of the trendiest genres, the multiplayer survival sandbox, as a “big swing” where the team unfortunately struck out.
Part of that big swing was that it shouldn’t have NPCs. “At the beginning, we wanted it all to be player-driven, so there weren’t NPCs.” And for Fallout, I guess, that is a pretty huge swing, given what NPCs usually bring to the table. But why take a big swing like this? Why cut out something that has only ever made Fallout games better?
“I play a lot of games, and nothing bores me more than a game that’s like a clone of another game,” says Pagliarulo. “It’s like playing the same thing over and over; you change the setting, you change this, it’s still the same thing. And we want to do something different. And we tried to do 76 without NPCs, and have it be player-driven—that was a conscious decision to try and make something different.”
The desire not to just do the same old thing over and over again certainly makes sense. But the idea that removing NPCs makes a game more player-driven is wild. Fallout is one of the most player-driven RPG series around, in part because of its NPCs and factions. Players get to influence and react to these characters, so they actually bolster player agency.
“It’s hard when you’re the first one trying to do something,” Pagliarulo adds, though I might suggest that there’s a reason nobody had tried to take NPCs out of Fallout before. He then mentions another thing Bethesda tried to do first: “Horse Armor was like the first DLC! We didn’t know what that was going to be like, but it didn’t stop us from trying!”
Sometimes it’s worth not trying.
All credit to Bethesda for adapting when players hated its vision, though. Wastelanders wasn’t just an update; it was a top-to-bottom overhaul that finally made Fallout 76 worthy of the name. Though even while acknowledging that Fallout 76 was improved by Bethesda listening to its players, Pagliarulo still seems to be adamant that its rise in popularity was in part down to “us not being afraid to do something different”.
Pagliarulo also notes that one of the challenges of designing a game like this comes from its players. “The internet is a lot of things, but it is not patient, right? There’s this immediate gratification that gamers want, and they don’t understand game development or how hard it is to do things and how long it takes.”
There’s definitely a disconnect between devs and gamers, and there’s still a lot of demystifying that needs to be done when it comes to game development. But expecting players to be content with a game that had a rough launch full of bugs, crashes and the absence of critical features is a bit much. Outside of early access games, gamers aren’t buying games speculatively, hoping that maybe the game will improve or eventually feature all the things they were hoping for.
This one was definitely on Bethesda, not impatient gamers.
