Summary
- Fallout 76 was met with major pushback from fans when it was revealed, which only worsened at launch.
- Former project lead Jeff Gardiner remembers being yelled at in an Apple Store over Fallout 76’s launch.
- However, after a series of updates, he now says that it was his favourite game to work on.
It’s hard to describe just how disastrous Fallout 76‘s launch was to those of you who weren’t there, but I’ll try. For starters, many, many fans hated its entire concept, as they had hoped that the newly revealed Fallout game would be a traditional single-player release. It was not, and we’re still waiting on one of those.
Then, everything that could have caught on fire… did. A $200 collector’s edition did not live up to its advertising, prompting Bethesda to give disappointed customers some in-game currency – which made them more furious. Bethesda then said it would replace an item in the collector’s edition, only for the support site to accidentally leak the private information of customers. Oh, and to top it all off, the game itself wasn’t great either, as it lacked any NPCs, was full of performance issues, and came under fire for its microtransactions.
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Unfortunately, this discourse was not contained to the internet. As former Fallout 76 project lead Jeff Gardiner tells PC Gamer, he was “yelled at in an Apple Store”, adding to an already demoralising launch.
Fallout 76 Project Lead Remembers The MMO’s Messy Launch
It took some time – and various updates – for fans to warm to the game
“When you put a game out that’s that maligned, especially on a team that has had such success, the morale is doubly bad internally,” says Gardiner. “So it was my job to make the people who are making the game like the game.”
Worse yet, its live service nature meant that they couldn’t just move on to the next project. “Working on a live service game comes with a lot of stress, because it just doesn’t go away.” And as it turns out, the fan backlash didn’t go away either: “I got yelled at in an Apple Store, I’ll never forget.”
He does, however, say that fan feedback (presumably shared through channels other than being yelled at in an Apple Store) helped the team improve the game. The Wastelanders update was the first major sign that the MMO was on the right track, since this added NPCs into the game.
After a bunch of updates, Gardiner left Bethesda in 2021. He now says that Fallout 76 was his favourite game to work on because of how much the team managed to turn it around. That effort has paid off, as it’s still going stong, seeing a huge spike in players when the Fallout show dropped last year.
- Released
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November 14, 2018
- ESRB
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M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Drug Reference, Intense Violence, Strong Language, Use of Alcohol