Fallout 76 received mixed reviews from the press, scoring only 49–53 out of 100 on Metacritic, and disappointed many fans. However, according to Bethesda Softworks, the abundance of negative feedback is deceptive: the company is very pleased with the sales of the game and has big plans for its development. Todd Howard, head of development and executive producer of Bethesda Game Studios, spoke about this at the Bethesda Game Days conference as part of PAX East 2019.
Howard did not disclose sales figures, saying only that they were "very, very good." The following story begins at the 30:54 mark in the broadcast footage below.
“Fallout 76 is completely different from other games from our studio,” he said. “We knew there would be problems with her, and some of them turned out to be much more serious than we thought. This is a very unusual project for us. We're still doing other, more traditional Bethesda, shall we say, games. But there were many difficulties with this during development, and some, unfortunately, users see with their own eyes.
“Our studio has grown significantly: we now have four offices in North America - in Rockville, Austin, Dallas and Montreal,” continued the head. “[Fallout 76] required the combined efforts of a huge number of people from all of these teams. And we knew that the launch would be just the beginning. We're incredibly excited that the game has started very, very well."
“Fallout 76 has a huge, multimillion-dollar player base, and we get a huge amount of feedback from them,” Howard said. “Our goal is to build something like a platform that we can develop in the future. We are full of ideas. We have already come a crazy way, but we look to the future with enthusiasm. […] We have a lot of cool content to add. This project has already given us incredible impressions. We will try our best to thank the fans. We have big plans for this, 2020 and beyond.”
The original Fallout 76 support plan was released last year, and in February, the developers unveiled a new roadmap. The first of the announced series of updates, Wild Appalachia, launched on March 12 and, among other things, has already added the ability to distill and brew, as well as the Survival mode. On April 9th, gamers will be able to start building their own vending machines and complete the new Shear Terror! quest chain, and on April 16th, they will be able to take pictures with the camera. May 7th Ever Upwards Challenges! will send players to the thicket, and on the 23rd a legendary merchant will appear.
The next free expansion, Nuclear Winter with a mode of the same name, a prestige system that will give advantages to players above level 50, and raids for high-level users in the format of new shelters, is expected in the summer, and Wastelanders will appear in the fall with new main storyline quests, factions, events, gameplay features and other content. In the future, Fallout 76, like all upcoming games from the company, will be released on Steam (now exclusive to Bethesda.net).
Source: 3dnews.ru