BethSoft’s Todd Howard Says Fallout 76 Criticisms Were ‘Well-Deserved’

It’s been a little over half a year since the disastrous Fallout 76 launch. Since then, the game has received numerous patches, updates, and fixes that have admittedly improved the game. Water under the bridge right? What we weren’t expecting was Bethesda Softworks Director and Executive Producer Todd Howard openly admitting in an interview with IGN that they knew they were in for a bumpy launch and that the criticisms were well-deserved.

“We knew we were gonna have a lot of bumps. And that’s a difficult development – a lot of new systems, things like that, hey we’re gonna go try this new thing. Anytime you're going to do something new like that, you know you're going to have your bumps; you know a lot of people might say, 'That's not the game we want from you.' But we still want to be somebody who’s trying new things. That was a very difficult, difficult development on that game to get it where it was. A lot of those difficulties ended up on the screen. We knew, hey look, this is not the type of game that people are used to from us and we're going to get some criticism on it. A lot of that--very well-deserved criticism. [. . .] Even from the beginning we understood – ‘This is not going to be a high Metacritic game; that's not what this is given what it is.’”

Looking back at the game’s rocky launch, Howard also admitted that a longer testing phase would have done wonders for the game. “Well, the main takeaway we had was you gotta let it bake with a large live audience for longer than we did,” he said. “If there’s one thing that I would have done differently, is find a way to let more people play the game 24/7 before you say ‘Everybody in.’”

Ultimately however, Howard says that, “It's not how you launch, it's what it becomes. [. . .] There’s no strategy other than just making the game better.”

You'll find the full IGN Unfiltered interview here.