How Bethesda Game Studios Made the Call on Fallout 76’s Online Multiplayer

Fallout 76’s E3 2018 announcement seemed a rather contentious affair among fans. While excitement soared over another Fallout game launching so soon after Fallout 4, worry over its being online-only appeared. The chief concern was whether publisher Bethesda Softworks wanted to cash-in on the shared-world trend, leaving Bethesda Game Studios to develop a project out of its comfort zone. According to the publisher’s Senior Vice President of Global Marketing and Communications, Pete Hines, this most certainly isn’t the case. In fact, the studio itself decided what Fallout 76 would become.

In an interview with GameSpot, Hines noted,

It’s down to our devs and the kinds of experiences they want to create that will really drive what we make as opposed to, ‘X percent of our games have to have a heavy emphasis on single-player or be only single-player.’ That’s silly and arbitrary. What does Arkane want to make next? What does BGS want to make next? Let’s focus those things and how excited we get. And if we are, we feel like everybody else will.

Of course, the online nature of Fallout 76 raises countless other questions. One centers on Bethesda’s ongoing support of the title, which Hines also addressed while speaking with GameSpot. Apparently, Bethesda aims to leave servers running for as long as players have an interest in returning to the game’s world.

For those with Fallout 76 B.E.T.A. access, you can dive back into West Virginia twice more before launch. Fallout 76 arrives on the PlayStation 4, PC, and Xbox One on November 14, 2018.

[Source: GameSpot]