Fallout Worlds Interview: How Bethesda Is Counting On Players To Break The Online RPG
We catch up with the creators of Fallout Worlds ahead of the update’s arrival this week.
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“I think the actual idea of Fallout Worlds came from Todd Howard, he comes up with all of our best things,” Fallout Worlds design lead Bo Buchanan tells me. “Fans will always surprise us, they will always show us the right way to use anything we release, and it helps us stay creative. Like we can intend something to be used one way and our players will show us we’re wrong. They’re like ‘No, this is not how you use this’ and we’re like ‘Oh cool. Okay, well, that gives us an idea for what to do next!’ I personally can’t wait to see what players are able to do with Fallout Worlds.”
If you haven’t been keeping an eye on Fallout 76 since its controversial launch almost three years ago, you’ve missed out on its hard fought, incredibly unexpected comeback. While it might have began life as a hollow imitator of its single-player sibling with lacklustre multiplayer, the post-apocalyptic MMORPG has grown into a robust experience with a solo campaign, meaningful customisation options, and a seasonal model that aims to expand upon the world with new stories, lore, and gameplay features that the community are constantly asking for. Fallout Worlds is the next major step for the game, introducing paid private servers and a newfound level of creativity that will allow the community to create things with their friends like never before.
“Worlds is so exciting because it’s just giving the players more tools, more knobs, more things to show us what they can do, how creative they can be, and what events they can set up for them and their friends to play on,” Buchanan says. Design director Mark Tucker expresses a similar level of excitement, inviting players to push Fallout 76 to its limits wherever possible. “I’m sure they’ll break some things, but that’s also the neat thing about putting a lot of power in the hands of players. At times, we might have given them too much power and it breaks something, but it’s worth the risk to give them the opportunity to create.”
World construction first appeared in the Fallout universe with the fourth instalment, with players free to craft bespoke sanctuaries using a number of items both aesthetic and functional. Looking back, it was clearly a prototype for systems that 76 would expand upon, allowing users to create camps that can be their own in a vast interconnected web of post-apocalyptic homesteads. Worlds aims to take the expertise existing players have learned from the base game and transplant it into something completely new and without restraints. “It’s okay for players to get themselves into weird positions,” Buchanan states. “It’s okay if something [in Worlds] doesn’t work the way it did before, because it’s a setting that you’re turning on and you can turn it off and decide if it’s worth the fun you’re getting out of it.”
Worlds will allow you to stretch Fallout 76 beyond its previous limits, and Bethesda seems aware that this will result in performance issues for those who choose to populate their private server with endless amounts of items, or decide to assemble a camp that goes beyond the boundaries found in the main game. It’s all about finding a compromise. Of course, because your existing save doesn’t carry over to this new mode, there’s no need to worry about corrupting everything or dooming your progress to oblivion.
Fallout Worlds will consist of Public Worlds and Custom Worlds, the latter being custom showcases developed by Bethesda that aim to provide an example of what the customisation tools are capable of producing. These also won’t be limited to Fallout 1st members, meaning anyone can jump into them without worrying about a monthly subscription. This is clearly intended as a way to coax casual players into the ecosystem, while encouraging the creativity of those who might be playing Fallout 76 as a more traditional RPG. It’s a novel idea, and on the surface is very similar to Fortnite’s Playground mode.
“We didn’t want to release a feature that was only for Fallout 1st members and their friends,” Buchanan explains. “We want to create things that represent the different kinds of playstyles our community has. You have builders, those who are more afraid of people, or those who just want to go on a rampage. By the way, the dark bog weather is one of my favourite things we added in Worlds. It’s dark, boggy, scary and you can’t see more than 20 feet in front of you and it’s terrifying to play the game that way. We want to give everyone in our community some benefit to come into [Worlds] and play in a different way.”
Progression in these Worlds will disappear once they cycle out of rotation, and will only remain for Fallout 1st members, so you will need to be a regular customer to truly take advantage of Worlds. Otherwise, it feels like a cool feature of bespoke modes you can dive into when Bethesda offers them. While you’d need to put down some pennies to take proper advantage of Worlds, I’m assured new modes and features will be directly based on player feedback. “We’re going to be paying attention to the more popular settings players are using and listening to their feedback,” Tucker says. “This will very much influence the kinds of things that we release moving forward both in terms of public worlds and other types of features [for the game].”
Worlds is now available on consoles and PC as a free update for Fallout 76.
Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/fallout-worlds-interview-bethesda/