When I asked lead producer Bill LaCoste, on a whim, if anything he learned while developing NBA Jam in the early 2000s was still applicable to his current work on Fallout 76, he responded with this: “There was already a similar IP.”
“We had to rebuild a lot of it ourselves from scratch, and it was really about ‘how do we keep it consistent’ because we had no relationship with Midway at the time – we were just licensing NBA Jam. So, the idea was ‘we need to recreate this, we know how to make it fun for people, we know what people will get out of it’. It was the same with the Fallout games: there was already a lore, there was an established timeline. We had to make sure we represented that game correctly.”
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Fallout 76 was first released in October 2018 to well-documented mediocre reviews, but it stood out in the Fallout series. It wasn’t popular, and LaCoste says he discovered that when he played the game before joining Bethesda. Then, in the process of joining the team shortly before the 2020 Wastelanders update, LaCoste says he reported to the development team what he saw as areas for improvement (in a decidedly constructive way, by the way).
“I went through the same struggles as everybody else,” he told me. “Oh my god, the lack of NPCs. I felt like everything was incomplete. I said that in interviews. But I also said, ‘I know you guys are thinking about the future and where it’s going, and I want to be a part of it.’
“I get a lot of feedback about the team, but because I’ve been doing it for a while, I understand the problems – even question,but challenge — teams are going to go through this,” he said. “I know they have stories. I know they’re going to have more stories to tell than just saying, ‘Oh, it’s West Virginia, go play, we’re done,’ and then leave it at that.”
Since that interview, Fallout 76 has gone through quite a transformation – not only has a ton of new content been added, but Bethesda has also implemented a number of processes to deal with the range of technical challenges that come with making a game like 76 run smoothly.
“I think, at the beginning, one of the main things we wanted to solve was making sure stability was better. Making sure that if a player was playing the game for longer and it wasn’t crashing, they didn’t have the opportunity to go play another game,” he told me.
“Even if we’re working on a bunch of new features, like we’re talking about with Skyrim,” he added, “some of the systems in the game may have a lot of issues that may be exposed by the new content in Skyrim. So, we’ll definitely incorporate those into development.”
Like many of its sister games in the Fallout series, Fallout 76 has seen a recent surge in player numbers following the release of the Fallout TV show. This infusion of new blood hasn’t presented any unique issues, and has been treated like a rush of new updates, even giving the team reason to improve the early game experience for new players by tweaking how locations, enemies, and gear are introduced.
This has proven to be a perfect transition to Fallout 76’s new expansion, Skyline Valley, which launches today, June 12 (the game will be offline for the update to be applied at 3pm BST / 10am ET). With this new expansion, the idea was to create a new setting that was “fresh, but also gave every player in the game something to do in this space,” regardless of which aspects of the Fallout 76 experience different people were more interested in.
As for whether there’s extra pressure to capitalize on the influx of players trying the game for the first time (or again) that Amazon’s Fallout franchise brings, LaCoste says the answer is yes and no. After all, 76 is Bethesda’s latest Fallout game.
“There is pressure because you know with all these people coming in, it’s a lot of people and we want to make sure that the game we’re giving them is obviously viable, it’s good quality, it has all the right content,” he explained. “But we keep putting pressure on ourselves and every time we put out a patch or an update, we keep looking at the feedback and we put that content in because we know where we are from 76 at launch to where we are now, and we’re still focused on the future.”
Given that the TV show has naturally led to discussions about the next single-player game in the series – even though Elder Scrolls 6 will apparently come out before Fallout 5 – I asked LaCoste how he thinks 76 fits into the overall series right now.
“We have a long-term plan for 76, and I don’t think we’re going to really close the gap between games,” he told me. [Fallout] In this period [overall series] The timeline, and any future decisions about Fallout 5 will coexist with those games, just like the TV show.”
As for how the eventual release of Fallout 5 will affect the popularity of 76, he added: “I think we’ll have players constantly or continuously playing 76 because we still have players who played Fallout 4, Fallout 3, and even Fallout 2 and Fallout 1 because they were re-released, and they also play 76. I think even if Fallout 5 is released, it will be the same, of course people will play it, but I believe there will be a lot of people who keep coming back to 76 because [they’re] Just playing a game in the Fallout universe.”
While this is a modding project not directly affiliated with Bethesda, I also asked LaCoste if he and the other developers were aware of Fallout: London, a game that has also been receiving a lot of attention in the series community due to its upcoming release, and until recently, updates for Fallout 4 were no longer pending. “A little bit, because a lot of us are fans of Fallout, we’ve been keeping an eye on all the mods and new updates, and fan-created content,” he responded.
“So, yeah, we focus on that, and I’ve always loved how engaged our community is, and that’s not just for 76 or Fallout, but Elder Scrolls. I mean, people make tons of mods for Skyrim and things like that. So I think that’s really just a shout-out to our community, that they’re really engaged with all of the Bethesda Games Studios games, and that they really enjoy and enjoy playing games in those spaces.”
However, as LaCoste told me, he and the team remain completely focused on Fallout 76 as they prepare to release Skyline Valley. Even if the process of continually refining the Appalachian experience might look a little different than when a member of the Acclaim marketing team gathered up Austin’s biggest NBA Jam fans and brought them into the studio to give some feedback on how Kobe and Shaq’s alley-oops should feel.
Fallout 76’s Skyrim expansion is released today (June 12), with the game going offline for deployment at 3pm BST / 10am ET / 7am PT.
