Fallout 76 Wastelanders Broke Bethesda's Voice Acting Budget

The Fallout 76 team has had a lot to do since the game launched, working to flesh out a world once populated only by players and monsters. It may come as no surprise to find out that some of the game's upgrades have came in over budget.

In an interview published by USG, Bethesda vice president Pete Hines went into some detail about the process of developing Wastelanders, discussing both the project's goals and what went into getting them done.

With a world of new NPCs to be integrated into the game, Hines reveals that the designers went hard with adding dialogue that would then have to be delivered by voice actors. "They went much beyond what they were budgeted to do because designers can't help themselves. So they blew past their word count budgets," he said.

The design on NPC interactions and quests has had a focus on replayability, as Hines is realistic about not being able to produce content as fast as players can play through it. "There's just no reasonable cadence that you can put out large volumes of quest content, that will keep up with the extent to which players burn through it, because it's gonna take you six months, nine months, a year to make content that they're gonna burn through in two weeks," Hines said.

He also discussed the similarities in the Fallout 76 reworks to the post-release updates Bethesda had to make to Elder Scrolls Online. The approaches are so similar that Fallout 76 is even getting a One Wasteland initiative to match ESO's One Tamriel--a series of changes that will allow friends to play together even if they are in different factions, or if they are vastly different levels.

If there's one thing the new update won't touch much, it's PVP. As we reported earlier, the original release of Fallout 76 had more of a focus on PVP than the majority of players were interested in, so the new update will balance out that error.

Wastelanders will be available as a free update for all PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 players on April 7, coinciding with Fallout 76's Steam launch.