Bethesda's Todd Howard On Fallout 76's Poor Launch, What He Would Have Done Differently

This is absurdly laughable. Todd brushing off the Meta-critic score like it doesn't matter and yet when Obsidian made Fallout New Vegas, they weren't given their promised pay bonuses because Bethesda didn't think the Meta-critic score was high enough. Sitting at 84 currently.

"It's not how you launch, it's what it becomes." Screw off Todd, when you launch a buggy, broken, empty, joyless turd of a game, then yes, it DOES matter because that shouldn't be the norm, that should be a thing to be ashamed of, and the fact that Bethesda or Todd have never apologized for the shockingly bad state that Fallout 76 was, which was and is the digital equivalent of dog shit, it's worrying about where things are going, where crap is cranked out and we the masses are expected to bow down before the generous and benevolent developers/publishers and thank our lucky stars that they saw fit to bless us with another title. These executives and CEO's are roach-people. Just giant Radroaches in suits.

I don't care if a game becomes better down the road, if it was a solid experience in the first place. But for it to be so blatantly broken, that the developers knew it and still released it anyway for shits and giggles, no, that shouldn't just be waved off, Bethesda doesn't just get a pass, at least from me. If they EVER hope to get even a cent of my money every again, they need to shape the hell up and pull their heads out of there asses and take some damn accountability for their inexcusable actions. But judging by the dismissing nature of this article and Todd himself, that doesn't seem likely.

So no Todd, I haven't and never will buy your broken Fallout 4 asset flip, live service scam of a game, even if it reaches decent levels of quality as other games have done. Because I will never ever support something that is that insulting; daring to sell that crap for $60 as if it were a complete and polished product. Until I see some fairly powerful evidence to convince me that Bethesda has learned their lesson and changed, then they, as far as I am concerned, are a write off.

Shameless cash grab is what this was. Fallout was one of my favorite franchises and this greedy jackass ruined it. They knew full well that you can't just bolt multiplayer into a single player game. All they did was re-use fallout 4.

"This is not going to be a high Metacritic game; that's not what this is, given what it is."

I guess when you aim low, this is the result. He makes it sound like they wanted to have scores in the 5's (out of 10) range.

"We knew this game was broken but we'll launch it at full price and take your money anyway."

People were just pissed because flossing wasn't added on day 1.

For me it was the lack of NPC's, plain and simple

I think they should have taken a step back and asked themselves if anyone wanted a game like this? When it was announced most the comments I remember were, "no, more FO4 please, make FO5..." The only positives for this game were along the lines of, "I love FO, I'm gonna buy it..." I don't recall folks being excited for this specific game style.

I have to agree with others that I think the driving factor was to hop aboard the money train. (Nothing wrong with it, making a profit, if you come up with something people actually want.) I won't fault them for trying, you won't know unless you try. But this nonsense that, "we should have tested longer..." well of course. But there is the corporate levels that says, "release in qtr 3 because we need to bump our stock up" vs "what do we need to do to make the best game, to make something we can all be proud of."

I didn't buy the game as I had no interest in it. I love the single player games. But hope they can salvage this for those that did buy in.

I ignored this game. Part of me wasn’t even sure if the title started with BGS or if an amateur studio started it and BGS were asked by Zenimax to finish it and with little time to do so.

It’s not even a matter of me not wanting multiplayer. I just don’t think “Online” should be a focus of a Bethesda title. I don’t even think an MMO should be considered, it takes too much away from the experience. What I WANTED from a multiplayer BGS game was a single player game, but with the ability to invite a friend or two or three into my game world and form a party. Then just go on adventures together. Just a small group crawling through dungeons and experiencing a big world pretty much the same as if it were being played in single player mode.

BGS needs to focus on what they do best and if they bring multiplayer into it, they should treat it much like a group of friends playing D&D. Those are the elements we want BGS to aspire to.

I wasted my money and ended up buying anthem. Anyway my dear gamers should I waste 20 bucks on fallout 76 now or not?

Something very basic is missing from this article: Who is Todd Howard? "Fallout 76's poor release did damage to Bethesda's reputation and the Fallout brand overall, according to Todd Howard."

Basic 101 journalism suggests, "Fallout 76's poor release did damage to Bethesda's reputation and the Fallout brand overall, according to Todd Howard, TITLE OR EXPLANATION OF WHO TODD HOWARD IS HERE."

It's fine from there on in, attribute quotes to last name, Howard, but on first reference, context of who you are interviewing or quoting, and why they are relevant, is needed. "According to Todd Howard, former brand manager for the Fallout series" is very different from "According to Todd Howard, my college roommate who played Fallout 3 for 24 hours straight, missed his finals and lost his scholarship."

I could Google Todd Howard for his relationship to the Fallout series, but I shouldn't have to. Even if there's a degree of "assumption" that readers are familiar with the subject matter, you still define who the subject of an article is on first reference.

"Trying something new" with an established IP like Fallout requires the same appetite for risk you'd require to attempt jumping the Grand Canyon with a Vespa.

A game no one wanted and it is also badly done. This was the first, Anthem was second and I hope this trend dies soon.

lol howard sugar coating the reality... you call that stuff NEW? give me a break... it is as if bethesda has no idea how connect players together on a server in the year 2019. yea, that sure was ambitious stuff there and warranted all those bugs and performance problems... right. it is more like bethesda didn't want to fully test the game before release and instead depended on the community to shell out the money for a full priced game and be the guinea pigs. boggles the mind how a publisher could charge full price for this game rather than release it digitally as an early access build for a budget price and then proceed to put out the full game at a later date. who the hell wants to hear about this game at e3 this year? other than the most delusional bethesda shills, everyone else has moved on. howard should do the same. at the end of the day, i feel like bethesda overvalued its BRAND and thought they could get away with this based on fan loyalty.... guess what? the bethesda brand doesn't mean as much as you thought. now, more than ever, it is synonymous with broken, bug ridden games and very poor support and pr. the only good products coming out of betehsda these days are the wolfenstein and doom games and has nothing to do with bethesda studios (thank god) other than funding for development.

I really don't care what you would have done. I only care about what you are going to do. The game is still broken Todd!

You keep shoving out new content onto a somewhat functioning game. You know what. Take a breath. Gather your team. And fix the game.

I'd say more, but I don't know how to do that without being censored for three paragraphs.

At least the helmets and minifigs turned out well.

The helmet + Boring Co's flamethrower made for some fun during the holidays.

...and then came the amazing Fallout tabletop game, where the minis added a bit of color.

Until one comes out that breaks the paradigm, I think I'm done with the FPS MMORPG format. even the successful ones are just big grinds on top of average narrative experiences.

should have been a F2P expansion for FO4

why not have focused on both the multiplayer aspects and the traditional single player aspects?

What I imagined this game being from the get go was a fluid mix of this new concepts and traditional Fallout mechanics (including interactions with NPCs)

I did not played the game, but you can see clearly that Fallout 76 is cash grab. The classic corporate strategy of minimum effort high profit.

Not a word about the policy abuse and deceit, huh? You think gamers are just upset about a buggy game? We get buggy games all the time. We get upset, the devs apologize, fix the game (or don't and then we blame the publisher), and then we move on.

Fallout 76 was more than just a buggy game. It was a giant declaration of what Bethesda thinks of its fans, and that message was "**** YOU!".

Witcher and RDR2 open worlds will put anything bethesda do (open worlds wise) to shame... They sure need to step up theyr game, or Fallout 5/Elder Scrolls 6 are bound to be ashamed.

Howard said Bethesda's main takeaway or lesson learned from Fallout 76 was that the developer should have kept the game in a testing phase for a longer period of time. The game might have benefitted from being in beta for "a number of months" before launching, he said.

The developer should've kept the game in a testing phase for a longer period of time. Bullshit. This was the first real game they worked on that has actually seen the light of day. They worked on Doom, but it was post-release multiplayer content for an already finished game. I don't believe they had enough pull to do that... to push the release date back a couple of months for beta testing. If the big boy studios are willing to launch games in a broken state to appease their parasite overlords, I don't believe they'd allow a C-squad studio to delay a game.

Wow, he's been missing for a while eh? 'It was our B-Team, not my fault!' ok pal

They HAD a beta, and it was so close to launch, they clearly had no intention to delay the launch despite bad feedback. He is completely full of it.

The biggest mistake was not making an actual Fallout game. The second biggest was jumping straight to forced online multiplayer instead of taking a half-step with just optional co-op, testing some multiplayer ideas and systems while seeing how the market felt about those changes. I know plenty of people who would've eagerly embraced a proper Fallout game that they could play alone but had the option to play with friends, but wanted nothing to do with a Fallout that was chasing the half-assed MMO trappings of Destiny.

Lol. I like how he's very sure to point out it was their B-team.

And I also like how he's just now come to the conclusion that beta testing is good.

He knew exactly what they did wrong, and they went through with it anyway. They deserve all the hate they get.