Todd Howard Says Bethesda Knew Fallout 76 'Would Have Bumps'

By Joseph Knoop

The launch of Fallout 76 was, to put it mildly, a bumpy one. IGN gave it a 5 out of 10, calling its rich world “wasted on a mess of bugs, conflicting ideas, and monotony.” It also earned a spot on our top 10 worst games of 2018 list. Much of the criticism stemmed not only from a rocky launch and massively broken game content, but also poorly handled PR snafus, like when Bethesda shipped bags that looked significantly cheaper than the ones promised in the $200 special edition. Yikes.

On this week’s episode of IGN Unfiltered, Bethesda’s own director Todd Howard sat down with host Ryan McCaffrey, saying that Bethesda saw a lot of these woes coming as the game neared its release date.

“That was a very difficult development on that game to get it where it was,” Howard told IGN. “We were ready for…a lot of those difficulties that ended up on the screen. We knew, hey look, this is not the type of game that people are used to from us and we’re going to get some criticism on it. A lot of that is very well-deserved criticism.”

Howard also shared his thoughts on Fallout 76’s near future, hopes for improving the game and increasing Bethesda’s ability to listen to community input, and what lessons Bethesda learned from the troubled launch.

You can hear all that in the clip at the top of the page, and the full episode debuts on Tuesday, June 4 here on IGN and your favorite podcast platforms. Howard sat down to not only talk Fallout 76, but also his early history as a budding game developer, games industry crunch, and the infamous horse armor DLC, among many other topics.

Every month, IGN Unfiltered hosts some of gaming’s biggest names to discuss what made them the developers and artists they are today. Previous guests include former president of Silicon Knights Denis Dyack, Ubisoft co-founder Yves Guillemot, Uncharted writer Amy Hennig, and plenty more.

Joseph Knoop is a writer and web producer for IGN, and he just wants to go home, country road. You can find him in the place where he belongs: Twitter, at @JosephKnoop.