‘Fallout 76’ was born out of “hubris”, says former Bethesda designer director

Bruce Nesmith, who served as Bethesda Softworks‘ design director for more than a decade, shared that the mistakes made on Fallout 76 were a symptom of the studio’s “hubris”.

In an interview with the YouTube channel MinnMax, Nesmith said that Bethesda Softworks saw the heaps and heaps of acclaim that games like Fallout: New Vegas, The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, Doom and more had accrued as a buffer.

“The company’s aim was not as focused as it probably should have been, and you could see the result in the way it entered the market,” continued the designer, regarding the release of Fallout 76 in 2018. “To a certain extent, our own hubris caught up with us.”

“We had had so many, not just success, but literal Game Of The Years,” qualified Nesmith. “Like industry-wide-accepted Games Of The Year. Not just in our own heads, or in these two little magazines over there, but everybody saying ‘this is Game Of The Year.’”

“We started to talk ourselves into the fact that we were infallible, there was nothing we couldn’t do. Clearly that’s wrong.”

Fallout 76 is the only entry in the Fallout series that is multiplayer, and in response to this reveal, thousands of fans signed a petition to add a single-player campaign to the game.

The game suffered from a significant number of negative reviews on its release, and this is something that Bethesda Softworks has since acknowledged in the appraisal of its other games.

“It’s the same with Fallout 76. Redfall is no different for us. Okay, we didn’t get the start we wanted, but it’s still a fun game… and we’re going to keep working on it,” said Pete Hines, who was the studio’s head of global publishing, in September.

The experience of Fallout 76 has been fleshed out with four expansions – The Pitt, Steel Reign, Steel Dawn and Wastelanders – and it now has more than 65,000 positive reviews on Steam.

In other gaming news, public voting is now open for the Ultimate Game Of The Year award at The Golden Joysticks, which will be held in London in November.