Bethesda’s popular MMO Fallout 76 was horrendous. Originally released in 2018, the multiplayer game was a technical disaster with little content, but seven years of updates have turned the game from disaster to near-diamond in the eyes of its substantial fanbase.

With Fallout 76 Season 23: Blood and Rust coming alongside its massive Burning Springs update, Bethesda’s MMO is in a much better place with a huge player base wandering the wasteland of Appalachia and, soon, Ohio.

In a roundtable interview before the public reveal of the Burning Shores update, which also adds Walton Goggin’s The Ghoul for a spot of bounty hunting, we asked F76 creative director John Rush and production director Bill Lacoste how it feels to see how far the MMO has come after so many years of release.

“Oh, I can spend half-an-hour talking about that,” Lacoste said. “But [it feels] absolutely fantastic. I know John’s been here from the very beginning, I got into Bethesda a little bit before Wastelanders, so being able to see that whole integration of NPCs and then also, that was, what, update 18, and now we’re on 64?

“It’s been an amazing trek to be part of some of the development of those features and bringing all these new features to players and new regions and also new systems within the game. Something that doesn’t get talked about a lot is that we’ve always been very much open o revisiting systems and actually rewriting them to make them better for players, which we’ve done over the course of this past year.”

Lacoste explained that “all the things we’ve been building up to for this Burning Springs update and everything since even before Wastelanders has been a real treat and an amazing experience”, and one that many studios that have suffer a disastrous launch don’t get to have. It can’t be understated how far Fallout 76 has really come to the point where it is a completely different game from the disaster that fed comparison videos and drama bait for years.

“We’re very proud of this game,” Lacoste said. “John [Rush] and I both have over 1,000 hours plus playing as our own personal characters, not just in the office as devs which we do anyway, we have multiple characters we’re invested in. We’re just as much fans of the game as you all are and that’s why whenever you all send us feedback we’re in alignment with you most of the time because we want to see those too… the journey has just been amazing.”

Lacoste and Rush explained that, after 64 major updates, they’re really pleased with the “state of the game” as it is right now. While there’s still a lot of additional updates in the pipeline, the core has been cracked. This doesn’t mean that Fallout 76 is for everyone, it just might not be your cup of tea, but the MMO has proven itself, and Burning Springs is just the icing on top.