The months have not been kind to Fallout 76 and Bethesda. The once-celebrated flagship of the RPG genre has certainly taken a major beating. Fallout 4 may have been a major success, but the launch of Fallout 76, the latest game in the franchise, was anything but smooth. The marketing run for the open-world survival title was confusing for long-term fans, after all a franchise driven by story was not exactly something one would expect for a multiplayer survival experience. All the hardcore fans I know would have loved to play Minecraft in the wasteland, oh wait. A beta period that was racked with bugs and other issues didn’t bode well either.
But once the game launched, the whole experience just kept getting worse over time. A litany of errors plagued the game, and the process of buying it in some cases. One infamous snafu was all on Bethesda, as they pulled a rather sneaky switcheroo with the $200 Power Armor Edition of the game, switching a promised canvas bag for a much cheaper nylon one. This caused a torrent of backlash, which Bethesda failed to adequately sooth, bugs with Bethesda support even exposed personal details for users who attempted to rectify the problem. But that’s only the beginning.
There’s far too many problems to talk about with Fallout 76, as we’ve discussed many times. If you want a more succinct rundown, YouTuber Matt McMuscles put together a pretty solid video recapping the whole mess.
But it looks like Bethesda is actually making amends in some small way now, or at least they plan to.
Gameplay is getting a pretty serious rework with the introduction of gear and perk tweaks. Players will eventually be able to swap perks out as a full loadout, making hotswapping of character archetypes possible. Public events are being adjusted, and having some bug fixes too, over the next year.
On the security and user confidence side of things, Bethsda has a few new options planned. two-factor authentication, a fixture in the modern internet security landscape, is finally coming to the Appalachian wasteland next year. The clarity of information in future updates is also being worked on, and a big part of that is that the developer plans to introduce a full testing server for players to get their hands on new content early in order to give it a good testing shakedown.
The company is planning a lot more in the future beyond these few major changes. Here is a sneak peek at what’s coming in 2020 for Fallout 76:
- PTS – A Public Test Server (PTS) is currently in the works with the hope to get it up and running in 2020. Once we’ve figured out all (or most of) the kinks, we will be able to provide more details on our PTS and how you can participate.
- Perk Loadouts – Perk Loadouts are also currently planned for early 2020. Like the PTS, this is still very much a work in progress, and while we’re excited to get this system out to you, it’s still a ways off before we can start sharing more details. Look to a future Inside the Vault when we get closer to their release.
- Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) – Account security is very important to us, and we know it’s critical to you, as well. The wonderful Bethesda.net team has been working hard to get MFA implemented for Bethesda.net. They are very close and are planning to have this enabled by the end of this year.
- Legendary Player – Originally, we thought and had planned on the Legendary system arriving this year, but plans had to be adjusted while we worked on other things. This is still very much something we’re looking forward to releasing and currently have this scheduled for release in Q1 2020.
- Social Menu Fixes – We’re aware of an issue that can prevent players on PC from sending and accepting friend invites, and we are also investigating several additional social menu issues for all platforms. We are working to address the friend issue on PC as soon as we can, but this is just one part of a group of social fixes we are looking to roll out across multiple future updates.
- Additional Public Events Improvements – We’ve heard your feedback that the cooldown between Public Events is too long, and we’re planning to reduce it by at least half with a fix we’re including in Patch 14. We are also planning a second phase of Public Event improvements that will bring additional cooldown adjustments, performance-based loot, and remove the need to tag legendary event enemies to claim their loot. Phase two of our Public Events rollout is currently planned for early next year, and we’ll update you as we get closer to those updates.
So whether they manage to deliver on these promises, and whether they work as intended, is yet to be seen. Only time will tell if Fallout 76 manages to bounce back from it’s rocky start.