From the moment that Fallout 76 was revealed and announced to be an online game, there has been a lot of speculation as to how the game would work and play. Especially given that players from all over the world can work together, fight each other, and everything in between. A beta was done recently and gave some ideas on how things would go, but there are still a lot of questions. And the team at Bethesda is answering them in their own way.
For example, in an interview with Xbox Magazine, Jeff Cardiner noted that things play differently in an online version of a survival title:
“Remember it is a survival game. So we found early in play-testing that people were like, his character’s going to go away in three hours, so I’m going to use all my Stimpaks and ammo,’ but when you’re playing ‘for real’, you’ll make very different decisions. Do I really want to kill this guy with my one Fatman shell, or do I want to save it for the Scorch Beast, because it took me hours to get it. You do make different decisions when your characters are ‘real’.”
Another Bethesda member noted that how you delve into the story will be different as well, for there’s no “pause” button here, everything is happening in real time:
“You play this game 30 hours, 300 hours; sometimes you’ll play in a group, sometimes you’ll focus on certain activities but sometimes you’ll play solo. And those are the times when you’ll have time to delve into the fiction and listen to the holotapes and read all the monitors and really get into the story. But there is more of a tension there, you can’t pause the game to read a terminal. When you’re reading a terminal something could sneak up behind you and eat you. And it often does. The more we’ve play-tested, the more we’ve realised how viable that is, and it supports the idea of how dangerous and how lonely it is out there.”
Fallout 76 releases on November 14th.
