Fallout 76 hasn’t had the smoothest launch possible, with features and content lacking and underwhelming performances overall.
In a panel at PAX East, game director Todd Howard has acknowledged that there were “difficulties” during the development process.
So, the outcome of the game was at least partially something the studio knew about and knew it had to do better over time.
“For us, Fallout 76 is a very, very new thing, for our studio. We knew we were going to have a lot of bumps coming out with the game, and we definitely had some, some of them much harder than even we anticipated,” he told the fans.
Then again, he was quick to point out that more traditional Bethesda games are in the making, like Starfield and The Elder Scrolls VI so that fans won’t be disappointed on the longer term.
“But this one, to be honest, we had a lot of difficulties during development and sometimes those difficulties do show up on the screen. You never want them to. We grew the studio, we’re four different studios now in North America, the one in Rockville, Austin, Dallas, and Montreal, and this was a game that really took a ton of people across those four studios coming together to make work. And we knew launch was just going to be the beginning. We’re really excited that the game actually did very, very well.”
“This was a very new and different project for us. We’re still doing other things that are more traditional, as I would call them, Bethesda games,” he shared.
The main issue with those is they’ll still take quite a long time before they get properly published for PC and consoles.