Fallout 76 Interview

At this year’s Summer Game Fest Play Days, Bethesda Game Studios was on-site to discuss Fallout 76, including its update history, the newest Infestations update, and the future of the game. RPGamer was given the opportunity to sit down and speak with Creative Director Jon Rush and Production Director Bill LaCoste. Fallout 76 is currently available on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, with PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S versions set for launch this summer.

Jordan McClain (RPGamer): After so many expansions and updates, and with the map growing even larger into the reaches of Appalachia with the Ohio-inspired Burning Springs update, what does the team see as the long-term identity and trajectory of Fallout 76?

Jon Rush: Good question. So the long-term trajectory of Fallout 76. So, the way that we view all these updates, each of these updates. We just released our 68th free update. Each update to us is the next chapter in our Appalachia story, right? So, the story started way back when people first left the Vault and there were no other human NPCs. There were other players, or there were robots that were characters, or they found out things about people, you know, from stuff they left behind – even their bodies. And then, you know, settlers started to move in, and raiders started to move in, and it kept growing.

Those are – it’s kind of how we tell the story in chapters like that. So, where we’re taking 76 is… I mean, it’s just going to continue to expand on it with new chapters to the story. And it could mean more regions to explore. It could mean more things to do in the existing regions, sort of thickening that content, as I’ve said in past interviews. It could mean, even, you know, adding onto existing systems and enriching the player experience for things that they’ve already been doing. So, we listen to feedback from players. We read it, we watch it – all feedback. And we take it all to heart. We usually go after the kind of broader strokes and address those.

I know this is a long answer, but one quick example of that would be introducing raids with Gleaming Depths, right? So we had read… nobody said, “Hey, we want a raid with a big, giant snake,” and we’re like, “Okay, we’ll make it.” Nobody said that. But what they were saying was, “Hey, we need something harder. And we want to improve… we want to increase our player power.” So, to us, we’re like, okay, let’s give them an experience like a raid and use both of those as a way to facilitate what players had been saying they wanted, right? Bill?

Bill LaCoste: Yeah, no, I mean, I think you covered all the major points there. You know, the one thing that Jon’s talked about a lot, and we’ve talked about a lot as a game, is that the main character of the story is Appalachia and the regions around it. Not you! You know, sometimes you know, and the people are just a facility you’ve got to go in and actually learn about the story that’s being told there. So, yeah, we want to continue telling the story about Appalachia, but also drop in new things that keep them coming back and learning more about it: stories, terminals, holo-tapes, you know, everything like that.

And so, at the end of the day, you know, the forward progress for this game is to continue telling that story of what happens in this region. Because, again, we’re so far back in the chronological order of games, you know, that we have a lot of things that people are actually curious about. You know, it’s like, “Wait, what’s happening here? What’s happening here? What happened during this time frame, you know, shortly after the war?” It’s like, well, here’s what’s happening. And we were able to tell that story.

RPGamer: How do you choose when to expand the map or deepen existing regions?

JR: Good question. So, we generally look at our year as four big updates, right? And so, I could divide those up into spring, summer, fall, winter. Summer and winter are usually the larger updates, right? The more impactful updates. And spring and fall could be like what you had alluded to. Like expanding existing systems, or adding to existing systems. So, when we decide to expand the map, it kind of depends on… it’s like, what’s the story that we want to tell, right? What’s the story that we want to tell to our players, and what kind of tools do we want to give them to continue telling their own stories?

So going back to Burning Springs, right, which was our most recent expansion of the map, you know, it afforded them a new place to explore and adventure with their friends. New place to build. A new opportunity for creating more of their own stories. And for us, an opportunity to continue telling the next chapter in our story. So how we decide? I don’t know. There’s no formula for it. There’s no specific, you know, checkboxes that we’re going through. We do… we kind of do it by feel. And I’d say a lot of that, they’re really kind of emotionally driven decisions. It’s like, we feel. We want. We love. So, yeah, I don’t know if that’s any kind of answer, but that’s what I’ve got.

RPGamer: No, no, I think that works. You want to add to that?

BL: Yeah, no. I think Jon actually covered it pretty well. It’s… There is a story every year we’re trying to do. And part of that underlying story, too, is like, how are we making the game better every single release? How do we improve the game better and better and make it more accessible for players but also more fun for players to come in and enjoy. And along the way, as we’re starting to add those things, we get ideas along that way that, you know, it may include an expansion of a region. But it’s so that it makes sense. You know, a lot of things we do in there want to make sense in the course of the story we’re trying to tell.

RPGamer: At launch, Fallout 76 was focused on rebuilding Appalachia, right? Does Protect Appalachia and the Infestations gear Fallout 76‘s future towards defending a living world as time continues to progress? And how do Infestations reflect the design philosophy of this update?

JR: Sure. So, yeah, as we progress through the chapters of Appalachia’s story, it’s mostly been focused on people moving in, new factions moving in, and players rebuilding, right? Well, you know, there’s another side to the folks that occupy the Appalachia space. And they’re kind of tired of these do-gooders moving in. They want to take it back! So a lot of abandoned areas. A lot of areas without that many NPCs to defend, you know, these nefarious opportunists have decided to move in. We’ve got super mutants, we’ve got ghouls, we’ve got robots, we’ve got all kinds of stuff – mole miners moving in. And so it’s up to players to get in there and take it back.

And for players that are up for the challenge, that want to help to cleanse the wasteland of this filth, they can go in, and they’ll be handsomely rewarded if they succeed. Infestations is a feature that supports and encourages group play, right? Team play. If you find an infestation while you’re wandering around, you’ll get a notification, all I have to do is hold a button down and I’m right there with you. And if we’re successful, we can get four-star legendaries. Some unique four-star legendaries specific to Infestations as well.

The way it supports kind of the team’s philosophy towards design and updates is, going back to that word “thickening” again, it thickens and enriches the experiences that players already have on the map, right? It’s, yeah, the region expansions are great, and they’re tools for specific things, right? But this is a way – I’ve kind of said before that it’s almost like fishing. But without water, and the fish bite back. It’s a feature that promotes traversing the map again. Maybe areas you haven’t been to in a while or, you know, you’re back there looking for the next big thing, and that’s what Infestations is, to us, it’s the next big thing.

RPGamer: Anything you want to add?

BL: Yeah, I mean, I think also for new players that are coming into the game, too, you know, they’re still trying to get all the POIs [points of interest] that are around the world, and this is a really good way for them to go in and, like, fast travel to it, you know, with their friends to go ahead and, like, “Oh, cool, now I’ve got a new POI I can fast travel to.” So, there’s a couple underlying elements there even for new players to come in and explore too.

RPGamer: Will players see persistent changes in zones based on cleared or failed Infestations, and how do those affect the game world?

JR: In its current state, no. In its current state, it’s very straightforward. It’s: go here, kill the things, get the stuff, right? We have plans for supporting this feature and expanding on it for the next patch, the patch after that, and so on. So, additions like that could be coming at a later date, but it’s certainly only going to keep getting bigger and better from here.

RPGamer: What are the biggest challenges in adding Infestations to Appalachia, and were there any technical hurdles or considerations about the world when deciding how to incorporate those?

JR: Oh, absolutely. So, here we go. So, our biggest challenge and it remains our biggest challenge is – you know, Bill and I, we play a lot. The other devs, we play a lot, and we think we’re pretty good. Well, you know, we’re playtesting these Infestations. We’re getting it handed to us every time we playtest. We’re like yeah, players are gonna – you know, we get it out to players, and they just zip right through it.

RPGamer: [laughs] There’s always somebody better, right?

JR: Oh, there’s many, yeah. So, that tells me that we’re not as good as we think we are. But one of the biggest challenges was trying to decide what that right balance was for launch. And as we saw, you know, these things are coming up and lasting about a whole minute and a half. We need to make them a little harder! So, that’s coming. So game balance was the biggest challenge.

I would say, technically, what the biggest challenge was, was not adding more high-functioning AI to the map at one time because that can have server degradation. So, what we were able to do was we found a solution where a lot of – all of these locations where these Infestations take place, about 40 locations, have existing spawn points for things that just naturally occur there. They could be scorched; they could be super mutants. And so, what Infestations does is it overwrites those spawn points with the harder mobs. So that was a technical consideration we had to take from the get-go, because when we’re like, “Yeah, this place comes in, and all these monsters come in.” And it’s like, well, that’s going to crash the server. Okay, well, let’s figure out how to make it work. And so that was kind of a big technical consideration from the get-go.

BL: I was going to say, you know, Jon kind of undersells it. We’re actually pretty good at the game. Like, we’re actually pretty good. But, you know, when we factor in the numbers of legendary mods, you know, three-stars, four-stars, as well as the different types of power armor and the different types of regular armor and then, you know, whether you’re a ghoul, whether you’re human. There’s just a lot of pieces to the puzzle, you know, to try to balance that out all for everybody. Different perk set loadouts, you know, stuff like that. So it’s a lot for us really to go through.

And so, you know, that’s why we go to PTS [public test server] a lot. You know, get PTS out there, get people giving us feedback so we can actually piece through that data and figure out where we’re going, and then we release with something that we think is comfortable. It’s good. It’s right in the right spot. And then we start analyzing things even after launch, as well. And so, like Jon said, there’s going to be some things we do probably after launch that we look at and say, “Hey, let’s improve this. Let’s make this a little harder to do this.” But yeah, I want to make sure that people know out there that Jon, myself, and other people, we’re actually pretty darn good at the game.

JR: Yeah, maybe we’re pretty darn good. We’re not great, but we’re pretty darn good. Pretty darn good. Not great.

RPGamer: Is there anything else you would like readers or players to know about the newest update?

JR: Anything we’d like players to know about the newest update? Anything in addition? What do we got, Bill?

BL: More four-stars. More fish. New season. I think actually a lot of really good stuff in the season. But just a continued addressing of balance, new game balance, weapons, armor, perks. You know, things like that. But, just, you know, every update’s kind of like that for us. You know, we’re always constantly ingesting issues that may come up in the past. So we fix up, get out for players, and also just continue to iterate on the on the current content that’s out there too.

So, I think the most important things for people to know, and I think we tell them this all the time is that, look, we’re always in Discord. We’re always reading feedback. Some of those things that they have just take longer than others to fix, sometimes, you know, to address. But we’re constantly in there and trying to find what we’re going to be doing for the future. And we listen to them, you know, we wouldn’t be where we’re at right now seven years later if we didn’t listen to the feedback that our players had. Yeah, so, they can they can rely on us to continue doing that in the future, too.

JR: What’s our next big glow up coming this summer?

BL: Glow up?

JR: Yeah.

BL: I don’t know, I think that’s for you to break.

JR: I’m not the technical guy.

BL: Okay, alright, so I’ll break it for everybody. So, we are going to be releasing Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Pro native builds. Yes, so that’s finally here. Everybody’ll get to play it, they’ll get to jump in. We don’t have an exact date on the flight version of this, but we actually want to get this out to people ahead of time before release so we can start gathering data, look at stability, make sure everything is in line. Because, internally, everything looks pretty good. We’ve got support for 1440p, 60 frames a second, 4k support. It all looks really, really good on those on those current hardware now. So we’re really excited to get that out, and just stay tuned, and we’ll let people know when they’re able to go get it.

RPGamer: Perfect, excellent. Anything else?

JR: And it’s not just a glow up for folks on the latest consoles: it’s also a nice boost for folks on the older consoles, too, as those are now separate builds from the newer consoles. And it allows us to optimize those independently to make sure that performance is better for our players with the older hardware, too.

RPGamer would like to thank Jon Rush and Bill LaCoste for taking the time to answer our questions, and to Micaela Davis and fortyseven communications for facilitating the interview. Fallout 76 is currently available on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, with PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S versions set for launch this summer.