Suffice to say Fallout 76 was a rubbish when it launched, and it was still seemed a bit rubbish when I tried it a few months later. Everyone was expecting a few bugs, it’s a Bethesda game after all, but no one was prepared for how broken and empty the game felt. That is, apart from Bethesda.
Bethesda’s director Todd Howard has spoken to to IGN and was asked if he knew the game was going to have a good launch and replied “We knew we were going to have a lot of bumps, that’s a difficult development, a lot of new systems and things like that.”
“You know that a lot of people might say ‘that’s not the game we want from you'”, he said, “We were ready for…a lot of those difficulties ended up on screen.”
“We knew, hey look, this is not the type of game people are used to from us, and we’re going to get some criticism on it,” he states before admitting that “a lot of that criticism was very well deserved.” That last statement seems to be the only admission during the interview that the game was a buggy mess when it launched.
“Even from the beginning we knew this was not going to be a high Metacritic game, that’s not what this is,” he continues. Metacritic is a rating system that shows how ‘good’ a game is, so if you’re not aiming for a high Metacritic rating form the start you clearly know the product you are releasing is not up to standard.
“All of the games like this, whether it’s us or someone else, you can go back and look at them, there’s a period once launch, it’s not how you launch it’s what the game becomes,” said Todd. That’s alright then, other games had a dodgy launch so Bethesda think they can do that as well as gamers are used to it and are happy to pay £50 for the privilege.
Source: IGN