While it may not be the best Fallout game ever released, 2015’s Fallout 4 is the “most played” entry in the long-running RPG series yet.
Soon to be released on the Nintendo Switch 2 in a brand-new port of the game’s Anniversary Edition, which was not received well during its PC launch, Fallout 4 is loved by a large number of gamers. While the game definitely has its issues, thousands of gamers are still jumping into the game every day.
Speaking to Game Informer ahead of the finale of Fallout Season 2, Howard confirmed that the fourth mainline game in the series is still its most played. As a game that has survived for a decade, Howard explained that he feels “incredibly fortunate” to have a game where fans are still “talking about it 10 years later”.
“I think it’s still probably the most played Fallout game right now,” he continued, ”and you just feel really blessed that the fans have taken to it and stuck with it. There are a lot of reasons for that. It stood the test of time.”
Howard explains that the game’s massive launch was obviously important, but “it’s almost more important when something stands the test of time in that way”. After all, Bethesda may have just seen the other side of that for the first time ever with Starfield, a game that saw a humongous launch, but fell off rather quickly. While fans still talk about it, the game simply isn’t as big as Fallout or The Elder Scrolls.
At the time of publication, Fallout 4 has 22,000 players currently playing the Steam version of the game with a 23-hour peak of 43,832. For a single-player game that’s coming up on 11 years old, that’s wild. It’s a number many games never reach at all in their lifespan, and this is just one PC storefront.
While many will claim that Fallout 4 only retains high player numbers due to the efforts of the modding community, thousands of players continue to play the game un-modded every single day. Just like Skyrim, Fallout 4 is a forever game, even if the title doesn’t have the same deep RPG quality of Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas.
Alongside Fallout 4, Bethesda’s Fallout 76 is also continuing to improve with years of additional updates in the works for the MMO spin-off. While the game launched in a rough state, Howard explains that he’s proud of the team for not giving up and spending 10 years to give players the game that they deserved on release.
“The game obviously didn’t launch in a great state, but it had an audience, even then, that was like, ‘No, no, we really love this. Stick with it,’ and that allowed us to stick with it,” Howard said. “We had moments where you saw the quality of the game and what it could do, these big jumps, but also a lot of small jumps every quarter for six or seven years now. But it all starts with the community believing that this type of game would not just be Fallout, but be a special Fallout.”
“Let me tell you, I couldn’t be more proud of the team and everybody on it,” he continued. “We started development of Fallout 76 in late 2014, and then in ’15 when Fallout 4 comes out, more so. So, we’ve been developing, non-stop, 10 years. And that takes a certain discipline to do that for that long.”
The next mainline Fallout game, Fallout 5, won’t start development until Bethesda wraps on The Elder Scrolls 6, a game that isn’t expected to release until 2027 at the absolute earliest. With that in mind, the next Fallout game to release should be the worst-kept-secret Fallout 3 Remastered which is currently in development at Virtuous Studios.
