A lot of rumors have been around since the release of Fallout 76 regarding the chance of Bethesda making it a free to play game or simply unplugging it to move onto the next project (Bethesda have Starfield and The Elder Scrolls VI in the works right now).
That has not been the case, and won’t be happening given how the studio seems to have placed more assets in the game to turn it into a proper survival title with an exciting story/PvE experience coming in the next update called Wastelands. The new update is going to also include a battle royale mode for PvP.
“I appreciate there might be folks who are tempted to throw up their hands and [call it quits], but that’s not how we’re wired,” Bethesda’s VP of marketing Pete Hines told GamesIndustry. “We believed in it. The fact that it didn’t go the way we expected and it had issues that maybe we should have foreseen and should have planned for doesn’t mean we didn’t believe in what the game was and could become.”
Interestingly, he added that the efforts to make the game right were at least partially made to keep the reputation of Bethesda Game Studios right, as the team is known for tremendous and immersive gameplay experience and it would’ve been just disappointing to waste it all for an online title not working.
“BGS is a team that’s made a lot of very highly successful things,” Hines said. “Still, in my opinion, they are one of the most respected and decorated studios in the world. There is an element of pride — not in a ‘we don’t quit and give up’ way, but we need to show and prove that we are going to stick with it, and that we don’t just hit some adversity and throw up our hands and go, ‘Oh this is too hard, let’s do something else.’ That’s not how we think about things, either as a publisher or as a studio.”
We hope to learn more about what’s coming to Fallout 76 in the future, and how Bethesda attempts to turn around one of their less notable game launches in recent memory.
