Todd Howard: Multiplayer Has the Potential to Create “Magic Moments” in Fallout 76
Since Bethesda announced that Fallout 76 would be a multiplayer game, fan reactions have been decidedly mixed. While some are clearly excited to see how Bethesda approaches multiplayer, plenty of others are more skeptical. Both Todd Howard and Pete Hines have offered reassurances that Bethesda is approaching Fallout 76 multiplayer with a great deal of wariness. Now, Howard has again aimed to reassure fans’ fears in a recent interview.
Fallout 76 Multiplayer
Todd Howard recently spoke with The Guardian about Fallout 76. Among the different topics which he covered was, of course, how multiplayer will change the way that the game plays. Many fans have wondered whether they will get the same open-world RPG experience which they have found in previous Bethesda games. While truly solo play might not be available at launch (private servers will be a post-launch addition), it has been previously stated that there will only be “dozens” of players in each world, not “hundreds”.
Speaking on the subject of multiplayer; Todd Howard explained the benefits which he felt it could bring to the title. “I usually find in our games, the best moments aren’t the ones that we designed,” he stated; “They’re when you’re out in the open world and different systems collide. Putting that power in the hands of the players exponentially increases the number of different magic moments that can happen in the game.”
“Magic Moments” in Bethesda Games
Ordinarily, those sorts of in-game events which cause “magic moments”, as Howard says, would be largely random. Introducing multiplayer does certainly bring a new random element to the game. Interactions between different players could vary wildly from instance to instance; “Some other games out there have done a little bit of that,” continued Howard; “but not in the way we wanted to do it. Fallout 76 is a mix of what you’d expect of us – there’s an open world, with our kinds of quests, and you do have a goal – but then you don’t know what’s gonna happen when you run into somebody else. That interested us greatly from a design-mood standpoint.”
Although there is likely to be less story to some extent, due to the lack of human NPCs; it has been suggested that quests will be conveyed via robots, holo-tapes, and other sources. Certainly, if Fallout 76 introduces an overarching objective early on, it may not need lots of smaller side-quests; those smaller events could be provided by player interactions and exploration during the course of the game.