Fallout 76 may have launched in a state that was not exactly drawing in the players, but over the years, the team at Bethesda Game Studios, have worked very hard in changing that around.

Since then, the game has been receiving near constant updates, which have added in new content, fixed systems that players were not fans of and more, but it is their big story updates that draw folks back.

Last December, the team launched Steel Dawn, a new chapter in the ever evolving story that is Fallout 76 and now the second part, Steel Reign is almost here, or by the time you read this, is out now.

I had the chance to speak with Jeff Gardiner, the Project Leader for Fallout 76 and Mark Tucker the Design Director for Fallout 76. We spoke about the balancing act of making an MMO from the foundations of a single player experience and whether or not Dropbears would make it into the game, so read on.

Maxi-Geek: Given the online nature of Fallout 76, what approach do you take in the balance of providing a Fallout experience for all players, whilst being able to provide the single player experience many are familiar with?

Mark Tucker: That is a great question and our game is very unique, in the sense that we have a MMO architecture, but we have a lot of players that play solo, a lot of players will only play solo and we have a lot of players that play on teams, so that is always in the forefront of our minds when we are talking about new features and content, with the release of Wastelanders then Steel Dawn and now Steel Regin that is about to come out, we made sure to focus on the story content that is a bit more sort of single player, that is more intimate, where your making choices for your character and yes other players can join you, but it is really more about you having that traditional Fallout experience.

Along with that, when we are looking at other things, we added Daily Ops, late last year and we are continuing to support that, we approach that with the mindset that ‘We think this is going to be a lot of fun, if you play on teams’ and we wanted to make sure that there were really good soft incentives to play on teams, but we don’t require you to play on a team, in fact there are a lot of solo players who do the Daily Ops. So, we don’t require you to play on a team, but we do try to find ways to make the experiences more interesting, because we are a multiplayer game at the end of the day, so we do want to foster that and we have public teams, which we released last year and is another way for players, who want to play together, to find other players to do things.

It is a part of the process, but what we have learned is that there is still a very strong expectation for our game to be a traditional Fallout game, that is important to us and we want to ensure that we still have that experience in our game, because that is a lot of our player base.

Jeff Gardner: Yeah, adding to that, we have found that not only do we have in the internal game teams, but we also have a community of players that take photos in our photomode and get together, in a meta sense on Twitter and Reddit and share their builds, and how they do things. We have a really unique game where we have builders, loot grinders and people who play for the story and more traditional RPG elements, so we try to find ways to appeal to them all.

Also, to show player show are one of those categories, the benefits and perks of playing in one of the others, like a loot grinder might want to start building their camp out, or vice versa. I think this is traditional for all Bethesda Game Studios games, you get out what you put in, and we give players a lot of tools, to get a lot out of the games.

MG: With Steel Reign being the next chapter of the Fallout 76 story, is this part of an already established tale that you want to tell, or will what happens next change, depending on how players react, once they play Steel Reign?

Mark: I’m going to say it’s a combination of both honestly, we have a lot of stories that we’d like to tell, you know not just about the Brotherhood but other parts of the game and the world and I think we’ll get to those at some point. But player feedback and reaction definitely fuels a lot of our decisions, and we had set out with the intent to say that this is a Brotherhood story, we had the first chapter with Steel Dawn and the second chapter with Steel Reign and I feel like we have a good conclusion to it, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t revisit that down the road.

With some of the choices, it would be a developer challenge on our end, because you can make some pretty big choices at the end, that we would need to work through, but I don’t think there is nothing saying that we wouldn’t go back there at some point, we have a lot of other ideas and stories we want to go to and not every Fallout fan is a fan of the Brotherhood, so we want to try and make sure that we tap into other parts of the universe and different locations and things like that. It is a little organic, but there are things we would like to do, that we just haven’t gotten to yet.

Jeff: Player feedback has more of an effect of future features than story content, there definitely isn’t an over arcing meta story, that we have in mind, but I am sure there will be on by the end of it, which is exciting for people. We look more at story settings and other meta things we want to do, in order to draw people in.

MG: How has player feedback been, on previous chapters, have they indicated they wanted more, or was this just the story that you wanted to tell, which drove more Steel Brotherhood content? As someone who is not a fan of the Steel Brotherhood, I prefer the smaller groups, how has player feedback shaped Steel Reign?

Mark: From my point of view, the feedback has been well received and it is positive, there are players such as yourself, that are very adamant about getting some of the other factions explore, or re-explored, so that is something that we talk about, asking what do we want to do next and that kind of stuff. But generally, the feedback has been, even back to Wastelanders and the content we put out then, it has been positive in that you are now no longer getting quests from terminals and notes, you are now engaging with other characters and having conversations, I think that was a massive sea change for us.

We have gotten a lot of feedback on the Brotherhood of Steel content; they love the characters that we’ve added to the game and the conflict that we are building with those characters. With this latest release, Steel Reign, even in our internal playtests, we have gotten a lot of feedback from our developers that there are some decisions that are really hard for them to make and pull at the emotional strings and it is like yes that is what we are trying to do. Even if you don’t like the Brotherhood there are somethings that you can relate to or characters that you might like more or less, so that hopefully some of those decisions that you have to make, have more of an impact and hit you emotionally and when I hear that feedback, that’s what we are going for, that is what we want in a BGS game, that is the story we want and the emotional impact to the choices they are making.

Jeff: We split Steel Dawn and Steel Reign into two, due to production realities, it wasn’t the original intent, so we split it in half in order to give it justice to the story we wanted to do for it. That is why it has gone out in two parts

MG: The world of Fallout 76 is now its own thing, people were sceptical in the early days, how has it been in creating a world that is more green, than players may have expected, but still balancing the fact that it is a wasteland of sorts. How much fun has it been in creating a location that isn’t as desolate as other locations in the Fallout universe, but also balancing that line between it still being a wasteland?

Mark: Well one, I love working in this world, I love the location that was chosen for the game, I think it such a unique and special location, just within the American and I’m glad there is some vegetation in the world. When we want players to invest thousands of hours, its nice to have some green leaves here and there, some flowers, it’s not just a barren wasteland. I really appreciate it as a player and as a developer and as far as adding new locations and changing existing locations, that is something we have the luxury of doing as a game as a service, this game has a long lifetime, we have already changed and overhauled some locations, like the faction hubs. That is a non-trivial thing to do, that is a lot of work, but it is one of the cooler parts of this game, where maybe individual player choice doesn’t impact the world changing, we can still be impacting the world over time and having some fun that way, so players can see how things evolve over time.

It is tricky, we have to be careful with existing content that is in a location, we don’t want to break that content, or take it away, so there is a lot of thought and work that goes into that. The map is getting pretty full, it is a big world and has been a great playground to play in, but we are starting to fill it up a bit, but that is a great problem to have.

Jeff: Having worked on Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, I still think there is a lot of open area, there are so many settlements, factions and sub-factions in those original games, I don’t feel that this one is overpopulated to that extent. The more joy has been, what did you say they were sceptical at first, that is a kind word, but we’ve been able to hopefully do right by those fans, reintroducing back NPC’s, changing the way a lot of the systems work and shoring the game up in terms of stability and balance and making it a more cohesive experience for both new players and the veterans.

I think we’ve done a really good job of keeping this game relevant and expanding on it and doing justice to the fans of the lore and the area too, we were really proud of putting this game in West Virginia, it was a really big decision for us in the early stages of this game and the people of West Virginia still love it and then we are going to the Pitt next, so that will be even more fun.

MG: I want to know a little more about Expeditions, if we can touch on that now?

Jeff: Of course, I will give you the spiel, we have several locations that we want to go to, The Pitt was chosen because it’s a revisit of obviously Fallout 3 DLC and it’s a location that is adjacent to West Virginia and we thought we would be able to continue the storyline there. We are super excited, we are trying to do something different with this, where we are putting in a great story for players, but putting in missions that are repeatable, so that is the balance we are going for and why we are calling it Expeditions. Hopefully, they will be successful and we will be able to do more of them and visit more locations in the future, Mark and I talk all the time about places we would like to go, both old and new.

We’ve been talking about doing this for a while now and some might say we bite off more than we can chew, it might be the Bethesda way, and then figure out how to deal with it, but The Pitt is something we have been talking about for a long time, so we are excited for that and the team is going to do real justice to it.

MG: Will there be an expedition to Australia?

Jeff: I love that idea.

Mark: We won’t rule it out.

Jeff: Dropbears, actual dropbears. But who knows where the game will go, we have long term plans for the game, but we like to make plans about a year out and pencil things in for future years. But again, a lot of live service games are responding to what the fans are doing, what they like and don’t like, what we like, so we try not to set things in stone to far out, because you can make some poor decisions trying to force your idea to happen, when there are probably better opportunities to make things happen.

I mentioned before that Mark and I talk all the time, about where we are going to take this game in the future and its been very successful on Xbox Game Pass, continues to grow on other platforms and we’re real excited for the chance the fans have given us, to keep the game going for the next several years.

MG: You mentioned that the Pitt is the first location for the expeditions, calling back to Fallout 3, has there been many calls or demand for Fallout New Vegas or Fallout 3 content or factions to appear in the game?

Jeff: I don’t know if demand is the right word, honestly we make most of the decisions internally, based on what we think is cool, we do read what other people and fans are saying, we will take any idea from whatever source will give it to us, but I think we are more, I would expect the location after that to be a new location, but I won’t say anymore than that, we aren’t 100% on that yet, but we just don’t want to keep revisiting old stuff.

Mark: As far as the Pitt location, I will say that we look a lot at the posts and comments on our Reddit thread and when we first had announced the concept of Expeditions, there were a lot of players, one of the overwhelming locations was the Pitt. We so wanted to tell them, but we had to wait until we played the trailer at the Xbox+Bethesda Game Showcase, but it was great to see that it looks like our players want to go there, just as much as we do, so it was good confirmation that it was a location that they were interested in going back to.

MG: I’ve always thought the land, well not the land, but the space between England and France would make for an amazing playspace, with a floating city, trying to escape radioactive land on each side.

Mark: That would be, really cool, some kind of flotilla.

Jeff: We are proud of the fact that we go to more unique locations, don’t get me wrong we did DC, but a lot of games are set in New York, London is another one, but I am really happy that chose West Virginia and I hope we keep choosing more locations in the videogame metaverse, I think it’s exciting.

MG: Hawaii?

Jeff: There is a lot of good lore there too actually, I was just reading about the shark people, there is lore for shark people in Hawaii, that could be fun with land sharks.

Mark: Yeah sharks, there is a lot of chickens on Hawaii, oh but then they have the nēnē, the Rad nēnē, that would be cool.

Jeff: Oh that’s right and volcanos, it would be pretty cool.

MG: That would be pretty cool, but that was all that I had.

Jeff: Thank you, just a reminder, we have three big updates coming this years, Worlds Are Changing and Tales from the Stars after that, both of which follow Steel Regin, so it will be a big year.

MG: Fantastic, well thank you for taking the time.

Jeff: Thank you and thanks for taking the time to speak with us.

Mark: Yes, thank you. 

My thanks to both Jeff and Mark for taking the time to answer my questions. For those who don’t have the game, but have Xbox Game Pass, it is included there, so you can give it a shot and who knows, you might be the saviour of West Virginia or perhaps the person who only collect scrap.