A couple of sources
Kotaku spoke with didn’t feel that the teams had a coherent direction for what was supposed to be during its initial three-year development cycle.
According to one source, Howard was supposed to be in charge of the game, but he spent most of his time working on Starfield, which reportedly started development after Fallout 4 shipped in 2015. One source told Kotaku that his subordinates would call it “seagulling” when he would “fly by later and shit all over an idea” that had popular traction within the design team. Another source felt that Howard was a decent executive producer, albeit one with a “bigger is better” design philosophy.
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In June 2019, Howard
gave an IGN interview about how was a game that “we wanted to play.” In reality, sources said that morale was also very low among some former
Fallout 4 developers who were assigned to work on . They joined Bethesda’s Rockville studio because they were fans of the studio’s single-player games, but now they were working in a genre they had little interest in.
Two sources told Kotaku that many former Fallout 4 developers they knew especially resented being assigned to make a live-service game. These were veterans who’d spent many years at a studio that was famous for prestigious single-player RPGs.
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Bethesda Austin, which was tasked with helping to bring to life, was well-known as a multiplayer studio, and ZeniMax Online is the sister studio that released the highly successful
Elder Scrolls Online. However, two sources told
Kotaku they did not believe that the two studios’ online multiplayer expertise was utilized to its fullest potential until after
Fallout 76 launched. Employees with multiplayer experience said they pointed out major problems during production, but they would not be satisfactorily addressed until after the scathing reviews at launch. Bethesda did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
A similar phenomenon occurred around
The Elder Scrolls Online. The MMO’s launch had been rocky, but the developers managed to significantly stabilize the game by the time began production. However, the multiplayer studio’s successes were not internally given as much merit or considered aspirational.
“
[Senior Bethesda developers] basically treated Elder Scrolls Online like it was this complete fluke,” a source told
Kotaku. “[There was] no respect at all for the hard work and dedication that it took to make an MMO that is still running and is still popular.”
“While we had experienced multiplayer designers [in both Rockville and Austin], they were routinely sidelined and ignored,” said a source formerly at Bethesda Game Studios Rockville. “During development, our design director Emil [Pagliarulo] didn’t seem to want to be involved with the product at all. He didn’t want to have any contact with it…or read anything that we put in front of him.”
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The more single-player-focused main studio at Rockville was the most favored, most profitable studio within the ZeniMax portfolio, and developers from Austin felt resentful that the main studio seemed to undervalue the multiplayer expertise they’d built up on projects like
BattleCry, a canceled online action game. One of the major criticisms of
Fallout 76 was that it launched with
no NPCs to interact with. Though there were some senior-level concerns about technical challenges, almost none of the Bethesda designers wanted the game to launch without NPCs.
The design teams at both Rockville and Austin wanted NPCs to fill out the world of , but they say executive producer Todd Howard was not willing to budge all the way up ‘til launch.
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One source said that the amount of work required to adapt the engine to support a multiplayer experience put additional time pressure on the schedule. Some desirable features would have to go, and leadership decided one such feature would be NPCs. Holotapes, robots, and environmental storytelling were perceived as less risky approaches for conveying the game’s narrative.
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Given Bethesda’s reputation for janky games, it’s no wonder that in an interview with
PC Gamer, Howard said that he hoped that the Xbox acquisition will help Bethesda’s games be better tested at launch.
However, Kotaku’s sources said that Fallout 76 underwent no shortage of testing.
When Kotaku asked about which features were broken as a result of poor scheduling, a developer replied: “Tongue in cheek: the whole game. In general, every major bug in 76 [that appeared at launch] was known by QA.” Bethesda did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
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Working on a beloved IP was supposed to balance out the stressors of working in game development. However, sources told Kotaku the misalignment between the business goal and the actual team members proved to be devastating for morale. One source felt that there was a feeling that “we were making a game that wasn’t primarily for us.”
Or even the fans. The source said that the developers who came from the
Fallout 4 team thought that
Fallout 76 would disappoint a sizable chunk of their loyal audience. “Even though the studio has a reputation for buggy games, I initially still had faith that they would delay rather than putting out a bad game.”
Fallout 76 was never delayed from the release date announced at E3 2018.