With Fallout 76, the first online-multiplayer game in the series, on the horizon, Bethesda is eager to start talking about the game. The beta itself launches tomorrow on Xbox One and a week later on other platforms, meaning fans are going to start getting their hands on the game in a matter of hours. Ahead of that hands-on, Bethesda wanted to share a few words with the Fallout community to talk about the game.
“As a development studio, we’ve taken a lot of journeys,” the letter starts. “We’ve tried not to repeat ourselves, yet all of our games have a similar DNA. In 2015, we decided to try something very new and very scary for us – take one of our worlds and make it online only. Once the idea of ‘Fallout-Online-Survival-Game’ stuck, there was no turning back, but still some worry and questions. ‘Will people want this from Fallout? Will they want it from us? How the hell are we going to make this? And what, exactly is this?'”
The letter goes on to explain some of the rationale behind the game, but perhaps the most pertinent paragraph comes near the end.
“We all know with the scale of our games, and the systems we let you use, that unforeseen bugs and issues always come up. Given what we’re doing with [Fallout] 76, we know we’re opening everyone up to all new spectacular issues none of us have ever encountered. Some we’re aware of, such as areas where performance needs to improve with lots of players. Others, we surely don’t. We need your help finding them, and advice on what’s important to fix. We’ll address all of it, now and after launch.”
Fallout 76’s beta, as mentioned, begins tomorrow on Xbox One. The full game releases on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on November 14.
This feels like Bethesda realizing that clips of bugs and choppy framerates are going to get shared around the internet tomorrow and they want to get ahead of it by saying it will be fixed by launch/eventually. I can’t imagine a letter to Fallout fans assumes that community isn’t well used to Bethesda bugs by now, so this letter is presumably for everyone else and is asking Fallout fans to be understanding and not share them.
