As ‘Fallout 76′ Crosses 20 Million Players Amid Success of Amazon TV Series, Bethesda Game Studios’ Todd Howard Talks Franchise’s Future

Never played 76, never will. Not interested in a multiplayer Fallout game. I’ve heard you can mostly play alone and adjust settings to prevent other players from griefing you, but it still doesn’t interest me.

So, I was you at one point. I didn't want a multiplayer Fallout. In fact, I think that a lot of people are you. And...actually, I still don't really want a multiplayer Fallout.

But I will have to say that while the multiplayer aspect did affect me negatively, it wasn't at all in the same way that I was sure it was going in, and it was a lot less severe.

What I thought was going to be a problem was that I was going to need to deal with interacting with actual humans. Like, I wanted to just go off, explore the world, not have a bunch of random people forced down my throat. I didn't want to be required to do cooperative quests, didn't want to deal with people exploiting the game, didn't want to deal with roleplaying, didn't want any of that stuff. That...really was not a problem, to my surprise. It turns out that a lot of the Fallout 76 player base is...kind of in the same boat. Bethesda even tried to encourage people to team up by creating perks specific to teams, and what players actually did was to create the convention of creating a casual team, join, share a perk card with some other players (a benefit of being on a team is that people can share one of their perks with other players), and then completely ignore the other players.

The most-common interaction I've had is mostly people trying to give me items.

There are multiplayer events, but they're basically ignorable if you really want to do so, and they don't require much by way of coordination.

There aren't that many players on any given server -- it's not an MMO -- so by and large, the only time I really see people outside of multiplayer events is occasionally passing them in the towns.

Griefing really wasn't an issue. There were a couple of trap CAMPs, like, people built houses with doors that opened off of cliffs that you could inadvertently walk out of or something, but even that has a really minimal impact, as death in the game has very limited impact (you drop scrap that you're carrying, need to go pick it up). You can turn off friendly fire.

There are certain locations that you can take and hold to do some (limited, not really time-effective) automated production, and players can try and take the locations from you, but I've virtually never seen that happen. Maybe...twice, three times?

Most meaningful stuff is instanced...like, you and other players don't see the same view of the world when gathering herbs in the forest, for example.

Where the multiplayer does come in for me in that it affects the game design. Like, part of Fallout for me is running around in this immersive, post-apocalyptic world. I can suspend disbelief. But when I'm getting notifications sporadically that multiplayer events -- which aren't terribly realistic, feel like a game -- are starting, that kind of doesn't go well with that. It reminds me that I'm in a video game, and that there are other players playing. When all the NPCs are wearing themed stuff but other players are wearing goofy stuff -- even if I don't see them much -- that doesn't help immersion. The thumbnail for this article is actually a great example.

You can't mod it (or, rather, only in very limited ways). Yeah, the earlier games in the series were good games even in their vanilla form, but a lot of what makes Fallout 4 relevant in 2024 is that, as with Skyrim, a lot of people have done an incredible amount of modding to expand the world and update the game for newer computers. Bethesda's games are some of the poster children for what modding can do for games...but modding is pretty much out of the picture for Fallout 76.

Other player CAMPs are occasionally impressive. Some are even really good additions to the game world. But a lot of them don't "fit" with the world thematically. Breaks immersion too.

In multiplayer events, when killing enemies, players don't kill-steal or split experience. They all get a copy of the experience as long as they did some damage to an enemy before the enemy dies (or in the case of a few bosses, as long as they do a certain minimum amount). The problem is that this means that optimal play is to "tag" an enemy by doing a little bit of damage, then ignoring it and letting as many players as possible get their damage in before it dies. This...doesn't really feel very immersive when playing the actual events. It kind of shoves the fact that you're in a game in your face.

The Fallout series is famous for letting the player alter the world. The decisions you make have all kinds of interesting, meaningful effects. You can do that because you can be the center of the plot. But for Fallout 76, you're in a multiplayer world, and while a few things can be instanced, so that you can change the view of the world that you have, that's difficult to implement in a sane way, and by-and-large that means that you can't change the world. That's a major element of the series that just isn't there.

Also, I don't find that playing the multiplayer events single-player is that exciting. I mean, yeah, okay, it's content. And it lets you keep going with one character rather than doing a restart, as was the norm in earlier games in the series. But once you've played a multiplayer event twenty times, it gets kind of old. So you can keep playing a character as long as you want, but once you've gone through the plot and gotten most of the items, very late game is playing repetitive events to slowly grind for things.

Late game, the fastest way to obtain scrap or herbs is to know where particularly-good resources are, go there, gather them, go to a few other locations where you can very-rapidly pick up a lot of items to overflow the 255-long list of items where the game remembers your instanced "view" of the main world, hides items that you've picked up, then hop to another server, regenerating that particularly-ideal source of resources. This also encourages gameplay that doesn't feel very immersive.

You can't pause it, a problem that affects most multiplayer games. If you're in a firefight and your kid starts screaming, you can't just suspend the game world until you deal with whatever's going on in real life.

Oh, and lastly...it's a live service game. The games in the series have had tremendous longevity, partly because people can go back and play their much-beloved game and modify it. But...there will come a day when the lights will go out on the Fallout 76 servers, and then the game won't be playable (absent Bethesda releasing the server or something like that). That kind of sucks, and is always in the back of my mind. It's an experience that will, one day, probably go away forever.

So for me, the problem with multiplayer isn't so much the behavior of other players or needing to deal with them, which I had expected. It's mostly just how the fact that the game is multiplayer necessarily affects the game design and experience, which I hadn't expected.

You can, if you get a subscription, have your own private server, twiddle its rules to a limited degree, and if someone is absolutely determined not to have other players in their world, they can do that, but I understand not wanting to get a subscription for that. I didn't.

None of that is to say that you should get it over another game in the series. But before playing, I had the same concerns and I didn't find that those concerns were borne out (though there were other downsides that I didn't anticipate), so I thought that I'd mention it at least.

After watching the show, I fired up Fallout 3 and FNV on my PC, modded together with Tales of Two Wastelands.

Yeah, that's a pretty good option too, though I don't know if I'd recommend that for a new player on their first time...kind of affects the New Vegas experience. Definitely a good option for going back and doing a marathon through those two games, though. And (generally) lets New Vegas mods work on 3, which is neat.

I feel like I got my money from it, and they've fixed it a lot since launch. But it's not Fallout 5. If you want to play it as a purely-single player game -- obviously, if you want multiplayer, it's the only option -- I'd say that it's the weakest of the mainline series. If someone just wanted to "try Fallout", had never done the series before, I'd probably direct them to Fallout 4 or maybe New Vegas.

It's the newest, but graphically, not that much has changed since Fallout 4. There's the more-organic Mire, and there are panoramas of forest. Nothing like the jump from New Vegas to Fallout 4 or Fallout 4 to Starfield.

It's not very moddable, which is a major element for many people with Fallout 4 (and a big part of why that game has had such longevity).

At least for me, there are some minor graphical artifacts that I didn't see with Fallout 4.

It's got other human NPCs that have been added in over time since the release, but there are fewer human NPCs than Fallout 4 (though to be fair, I guess West Virginia isn't as populated as Boston, and some of that is stuff like forests). There isn't that much by way of character development for most of them. I do think that the NPCs were more-believable then Fallout 4, where every other character seemed to be downright psychotic. But they also weren't as memorable.

Its late game is fixed (has to be, since the intent is to let players keep doing the late game as long as they want). Fallout 4 without mods ultimately had enemies turn into bullet sponges in the very late game.

I think that New Vegas was the best of the series, if you compare them at launch, but it's also pretty old.