Bethesda’s Fallout 76 has come a long way, and the MMO’s new Burning Springs expansion has recently added a whole new region to the once-maligned online game. While the game has expanded outwards with new content to do and new regions to explore, the game’s leads want to expand the game inwards with deeper systems that keep players engaged.
Really, Fallout 76’s RPG-ness—not a word but we’ll run it it—is as slim as Fallout 4’s. While Bethesda spent years dumbing down its RPG mechanics, Starfield actually pointed to a reversion in some of that simplicity, and as 76 continues to evolve, it needs to get more intricate to encourage additional playthroughs and bring in newcomers.
Speaking to PCGamesN, creative director Jon Rush and lead producer Bill LaCoste explained that the goal is to make Fallout 76 “thicker” with new systems that encourage experimentation. Earlier this year, when we sat down with the two, they explained that there are years of updates already cooking, but it seems that the plan is to also make existing content deeper with retrofitted systems.
“We have had a couple of successful literal expansions of the map, you know, making the play space bigger,” Rush said. “For this next year, I really want our gaze to shift from the outskirts to inwards – make the game thicker… new systems or new ways to engage with existing content, those are all very much on the menu for this year.”
While the team has spent years bolstering the size of the game world over the years, Rush explains that they can’t only do that. While they would “love to” continue exploring areas outside of the current map, they explained “there are technical considerations that have to be taken into account there, so we can’t just continue making the map bigger and bigger”.
It’s worth noting that Fallout 76 is built on an older, forked version of Fallout 4’s Creation Engine, not the newer Creation Engine 2. There are some built-in limitations, such as the lack of cross-play or cross-save features, but the team does explain that there is still a lot of the map still left to explore in future expansions.
“There is a lot of space left on the existing map in the game that is unused, that maybe down the road we could open up if it supports the stories that we want to tell, and if we think players would have a fun time exploring those regions and building there and whatnot,” Rush continued.
Fallout 76 has come a very long way since its disastrous launch. In fact, while it’s not for everyone, it has become an incredibly popular over the last few years. It’s not the kind of Fallout game many wanted, but it is a very unique and fun title in its own right.
