Fallout 76 Was Never Going to Get Rave Reviews Says Bethesda Boss, Prompting Another Backlash

So Todd admits this turd was nothing but a cheap cash grab, a broken mess of a game which no one would talk about ever, if it didn't have the Fallout logo plastered on it.

Never will I buy anything fallout/scrolls/starfield from him any longer.

Ha ha ha, what a way to start a Monday morning. Thanks for the laugh, Todd. I guess that is how it just works, eh?

"It's not how you launch, it's what it becomes,"

This quote worries me, because 9 out of 10 times a rubbish game is still rubbish after a year.

the game continues to get GB-sized patches every week...really annoying

Usually devs want to make a game the best it can be, some games in the past prove otherwise, but most of the time they give it their all.

Not Todd Howard. Knew the game was bleh, and shipped it anyways knowing people will buy it because of namesake alone.

"It's not how you launch, it's what it becomes,"

is this guy delusional or just a complete and total idiot, if your game launches as a broken, buggy mess then it's going to effect the game especially an online game like this

i'm so sick and tired of this "release it now and patch it later" mentality of publishers and developers now a days, FINISH YOUR DAMN GAMES BEFORE YOU LAUNCH THEM FFS., they never would have gotten away with this crap before the 360/PS3 generation

This is why more games should get delayed. It sucks waiting but it's better in the long run.

@FullbringIchigo The PS3 360 generation was not nearly as bad either. This generation is here is a broken disk with 5 patches as big as the game. 😑

@AdamNovice Indeed but lets be honest Bethesda can fix games even if its on a new generation...

"It's not how you launch, it's what it becomes,"

Everyone posting the same quote but that right there is what is wrong with the industry and in particular "live services". They'll charge you full price now for very little worthwhile content with the promise of more down the line. Well guess what, how many games were crap at launch and turned into good games later on? ZERO!!! It's never happened and never will do, so games like Fallout 76 and Anthem deserve all of the hate they get. And yes it's done huge damage to the Fallout brand, Fallout 4 is one of my favourite games on PS4, whilst Skyrim is up there with my best ever and I'd happily play through it again, yet now the next time Bethesda release a game they have developed I will be very cautious about buying it

@Splat That is why i hate the new generation gamers no patience. And liveserviceeee is the cherry on the pie why release it good and finished if we can fix it later.

@Flaming_Kaiser the reason i said that though was because before those came out and gave them the option to update games via patches they HAD to make sure a game was fully functional before release

the 360 and PS3 opened the door to publishers and developers to just crank out their games unfinished for the maximum amount of day one profits and just patch it later, if a game isn't ready then they delay it until it is

this whole thing started with those systems so i blame them and i blame Sony and MS for letting them do it

"It's not how you launch, it's what it becomes,"

Keep repeating that mantra to yourself until your company goes under buddy.

Man, what a moronic thing to say.

@FullbringIchigo Yeah i know what you mean but then you had patches. Now the patches are bigger then the games almost. 😁

I really despise him. What complete and utter tool.

@Flaming_Kaiser yeah i know, it's ridiculous sometimes and depending on the state of your internet it can take hours before it's done

goodness knows what it's going to be like next gen

I picked this up the other week for dirt cheap 2nd hand and played a couple of hours. It is not terrible so far. Feels like Fallout 4.5 with other players running around you.
Built a house, distilled some water and went for a walk 😂

You need a new game engine, Todd.

"It's not how you launch, it's what it becomes," That pretty much sums up everything wrong in the gaming industry

"We knew we were going to have a lot of bumps"...but Todd,didn't you say "It all just works!"? Oh & being Phil Spencer's mouthpiece that crossplay would be in there but for dastardly Sony...& yet your buggy mess of a game engine is still being used for next gen, propped up by mods (on pc) to fix up what your devs can't?

@manu0 Yet that's exactly what happened with The Witcher 3. Nearly 30GB of patches over the course of a full year and it's still declared a masterpiece and perfect and the best game of a generation. Why is that? Especially when most people admit they need to run at least 30+ mods just to get the game to a state where they can stand playing it.

Fallout 76 was a turd, mainly because of its focus. Yes, it is and was full of bugs and glitches and no real sense of direction whatsoever. But also because it had no real content either. It was an open sandbox game that depended on friends playing together to create their own adventures and even then, still offered little actual content that made it worth the effort.

But the majority of people said, "cool, let's see it when it comes out and play it anyway." Why? A lot of people were screaming about how the idea sounded like a bad one from the start. Todd just went with the flow believing he could pull off enough of a win to justify the mess and people did buy into it. Why doesn't anyone ever learn a damn thing from these disasters and why do we expect the gaming companies to learn when the majority of gamers refuse to?

Yikes! Horrible take and a really bad message to send to your team.

@ZeD Go back and play it again then see what you think.

@BradT Umm who plays The Witcher 3 with 30 mods? It’s not Skyrim. The game was great at launch and then they added more stuff to or addressed some issues after launch based on reception most people don’t even play it with mods since it’s on console. I play it in PC and I play with two mods. One to remove swearing and the other to remove nudity. Not gameplay affecting. I didn’t notice any gameplay mods that interested me. I looked at a list of “essential” mods and was bored by all how all of them looked.

People aren't used to Bethesda games being glitchy and half baked?

I wonder what people are expecting from Bethesda. Skyrim is 7 years old, had multiple re-releases and still has the exact same bugs as the vanilla version. They never fix nor improve any of their games.

Time will tell if this attitude will keep them motivated to work on and polish this stuff further, and I still kinda doubt the game lives to see me binge up to it when I'm still at the beginning of Fallout 1 (better luck with Fallout 77 or 78, perhaps?😜), but I do like this attitude anyway. Mostly for what it is, causing fans more distress is just an appreciable side bonus.

@FullBringIchigo "they never would have gotten away with this crap before the 360/PS3 generation" - which is why they didn't. They just released the game and they would patch out a possible bug (including gamebreaking ones) in a later edition on separate disks/cartridges at best. I.e. much later if ever. This stuff happened as late as with Harvest Moon DS whose bugs were only fixed... for a separate "female protagonist" edition HM DS Cute, released later.

And we're talking console game developers; PC market had adopted patches much earlier, and even then they didn't always guarantee fixes. Big Rigs remains the arguably ultimate and most unintentionally epic example of such misadventures, but really, crunching and rushing to meet deadlines and skipping some QA parts and shipping bugged or broken versions is about as old as video games are. Like or hate the Patch Age, chances are it has ultimately fixed more bad things than it inspired, because there was not much new for it to inspire at that point anyway. It's kinda like blaming hangover pills for alcoholism.

@FullbringIchigo Thats why i really dislike servicegames it makes these kind of things look normal. If Bethesda releases the sequel it will be just as bad its Bethesda. 😆

@carlos82 Final Fantasy 14 is the exception to the rule. But Square acknowledged its failings and fair play to them. They scrapped the whole thing and started again. Now its very loved.

Could probably put a case in for no mans sky too. Its becoming the game that was promised (i still dont like it)

How about you take a leaf out of Nintendo’s book Howard where they recognised Metroid Prime 4 wasn't up to speed and restarted the project with another developer rather than know you’re releasing a load of trash just to say you met a schedule...

@Tasuki I agree but using my example above, while Nintendo fans were disappointed with the news (me included) we also respected their honesty in being up front telling us what the situation was. We’d much prefer that than them trying to sell us a broken game.

To avoid disappointment for Bethesda is quite easy - don’t announce a release date until you know you are going to meet a deadline with a quality product. There’s no way to hide that this was badly handled.

@Rob_230 No Man's Sky, I played that at launch and whilst there's more to it now, most of it is just window dressing and the core experience is largely the same as it was and one I didn't actually mind at launch. FF14 I'll give you that one and that is the exception that proves the rule, did they take that offline to rebuild it? I can't really remember.

Even games like the original Destiny have improved (at least that worked at launch) but generally speaking there is rarely a huge change to the overall quality apart from that Final Fantasy game

"It's not how you launch, it's what it becomes."

Oh my god what a moronic quote. I counter with...

"A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad"

"It's not how you launch, it's what it becomes."

For every Diablo 3 and ESO there are countless failed games that died way before they had a chance to improve.

Basically he said all gaas games suck at launch and so he thought it was ok if his did as well. What complete and utter garbage.

This is why EVERY gamer and EVERY game news site and EVERY gaming youtuber must stand up and tell others one thing:NEVER PREORDER A GAAS GAME.

Seriously, this has to be our mantra by ALL of us if we want things to change. If nobody preorders and the game turns out like this then they deserve to fail. If it's good then we can all rush to buy it.

But WE, the gamers, are the only ones who can stop it.

@carlos82 >Well guess what, how many games were crap at launch and turned into good games later on? ZERO!!!

How about Rome II: Total War or Hearts of Iron III?

@Robocod he did say that, but I can understand it. He's the mouth piece, the sales man. It's his job to sell the product. That doesn't make it alright but I understand it. I wonder though, was he responsible for the decision to launch it when it did? Could he have launched it as a beta? Maybe all that is above his paygrade. What if Todd is the poor guy who despite saying it's not ready for full release was told the game had to launch on the date and that he had to sell it. If that were the case I hope those who made the decision have seen the error of their ways. I hope Bethesda can make 76 a good game. I hope they pull out all the stops starfield and es6 are decent games. Sadly I fear that is too much to ask.