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Fallout 76 did not launch in a good state. While Bethesda’s MMO-lite RPG is in a great place nowadays, the game was a hog on release with game-breaking bugs, rancid netcode and a complete lack of NPCs to interact with. In fact, in our original review, our reviewer hated the online take on Bethesda’s open-world formula.
In an interview with VideoGamer for an upcoming episode of the VideoGamer Podcast, former Bethesda Studio Design Lead Dan Nanni discussed the feeling of working on expansions for the MMO as the title launched.
Working at Escalation Studios, which became Bethesda Game Studios Dallas, Nanni and others were already working on the game’s Nuclear Winter expansion while the main team was still in active development of the MMO.
“We were trying to build expansion while the game was still being built simultaneously,” the developer recalled. “So we didn’t know what the game was going to end up being. We just knew what our goal was going to be, but we were so dependent on the game being finished.”
At the time, the team had no idea how Fallout 76 servers were going to work, what the major systems were like, or the full scope of the game’s Appalachian map. While the team was aware of the major systems, setting and vibe, Nanni recalls the “beginning of it was just getting everybody all aligned on what the product was going to be”.
“You knew this is going to be a rough ride. You knew that this was going to take some dedication, right, and perseverance. And you had to fight through that.”
FORMER BETHESDA STUDIO DESIGN LEAD DAN NANNI
The game’s Nuclear Winter expansion was a 52-player battle royale that released in 2019 but has since been removed from the MMO due to low player counts. However, at the time, the introduction of the mode was one of the first signs of significant support for the game after its disastrous launch.
“Let’s just be completely honest: when we were told we were going to make a battle royale for Fallout 76, I think everybody was hands on heads like, ‘oh, man, here we go. This is it’. Like, you’re boarding this train and you know it’s going in a direction that you did not agree to be going into,” he explained. “So much as you knew this is going to be a rough ride. You knew that this was going to take some dedication, right, and perseverance. And you had to fight through that.”
Nanni explained that when the game launched to negative reviews and fan vitriol—so much so that the game’s project lead was publicly harassed in an Apple Store—there was a “lot of emotion across the entire studio”. While it may not seem like it to the average gamer, forcing multiplayer into an engine that was only ever designed for single-player games was “a feat”. To this day, modders have spent years trying to get games like Skyrim properly working with multiplayer co-op and those mods are still extremely rough around the edges.
“A lot of people worked a lot of hours… totake that engine and to make it multiplayer was a feat,” Nanni explained. “That itself was an amazing feat of technology, that was worth the price of entry, but you can’t sell that to a gamer. ‘Hey, look at all this work we did to make it work and it shouldn’t have worked but it did!’ You can’t sell that as a product, right? But it doesn’t matter, it still hurts.”
“Working on the product that’s supposed to follow that up knowing that the rumours are out there and nobody wants it, it just makes you feel like you’re marching towards doom.”
FORMER FALLOUT 76 DESIGNER DAN NANNI
By the time Fallout 76: Nuclear Winter launched in June 2019, Bethesda had already rapidly patched the game to add some semblance of stability, but the team’s work upcoming work was still judged by what came previously.
“Working on the product that’s supposed to follow that up knowing that the rumours are out there and nobody wants it, it just makes you feel like you’re marching towards doom, and it’s not a good feeling but you have to do it,” the developer said. “It’s your pride, it’s your passion; you have to change your perspective, you have to change your frame of mind. You have to think what is good about this and put everything into it.”
Nanni explained that everyone at Bethesda was dedicated to making Fallout 76 better because they simply “love to make games”. While the game was flawed in almost every aspect, it was still a Fallout game with the same gunplay, themes and choices that players were used to.
After Nuclear Winter, Nanni and the team worked on Wastelanders, the update that technically saved Fallout 76. To this day, the MMO is filled with thousands of players every single day, and new expansions are constantly in the works. Loot has been revamped, quests have been overhauled—it’s technically an entirely different game.
However, none of these improvements would exist without the dedication of the team working on the game back during this period. In the face of what felt like certain doom, the dedication to improve the game and give gamers what they deserved ended up creating another beloved game in the long-running series.
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