Fallout 76 development reportedly ‘destroyed’ people and ‘ate’ them
Apparently, the same applies to Fallout 76: The revolution eats its children – or something like that?
Bethesda’s Fallout 76 was not the hoped-for big hit, but a real disaster at launch. The game was riddled with bugs and technical issues, more than we’re used to seeing in a Bethesda open world. Many fans were missing the NPCs and the PvP system often felt unfair and broken.
Of course, it is difficult to determine who is to blame for all of this. But a new one, more detailed and truly terrifying Report on the making of Fallout 76 does not reflect well on working conditions during development. The testers in particular complained that people were literally burned to death.
As a reminder, this was Fallout 76 at release:
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Fallout 76 review video: Bethesda’s ambitious failure
Fallout 76 development appears to have been absolute hell, according to new report
That’s what it’s about: Various former employees told Kotaku about their time at ZeniMax and Bethesda. For fear of negative consequences and lawsuits, they all want to remain anonymous. Your statements sound downright shocking. Apparently, the work on Fallout 76 in particular was so hard and riddled with crunch that a number of people suffered damage to their health and left the company completely because they didn’t know what else to do.
“Nobody wanted to work on this project because it ate people up. It destroyed people. The amount of people that went into this project and left Bethesda after that was pretty high.”
Mandatory crunch? Overtime was probably also the order of the day in the development of Fallout 76. Even on weekends, testers had to sacrifice their free time and were lured with “free pizza” and overtime pay. The unanimous tenor of the report is: All the money in the world is not worth letting yourself be ruined like this.
According to the report, people were also pulled from other games like Starfield or Redfall to work on Fallout 76 because the team was running out of people. Management reportedly said that if no one volunteered, everyone would be called up. The main motivation for the tough crunch was peer pressure – and the hope of being promoted to a full-time position.
Production and organization difficulties: Apparently, there were massive miscalculations and problems in the planning of Fallout 76. Instead of setting reasonable, realistic deadlines and postponing the release, the pressure was simply increased and an unfinished game released. Statements like the following sound simply horrible, but probably paint a good picture of the desolate conditions:
“I don’t know how Bethesda made Skyrim. It doesn’t make sense to me. It must have been like monkeys creating Shakespeare on a typewriter. I don’t know how things can be so messy and people still in the able to do their jobs.”
One person is even quoted as saying that all of the major bugs that were included in the release version of Fallout 76 were well known to the QA team beforehand. “The Whole Game” was broken and unfinished due to poor planning.
Questionable decisions: While leaders like Todd Howard were probably convinced that Fallout 76 would be a success even without NPCs, very few other people involved apparently shared this opinion. But despite the design teams’ repeated requests to fill the world with NPCs, the Executive Producer stayed firm to the end.
More questionable statements? In this context, many ex-employees find the statements that Todd Howard made in a IGN Interview 2019 has met. There he announced that Bethesda manages Crunch very well. Which, by all appearances, isn’t true at all, as a former tester explains:
“I find it absolutely disgusting that Howard said Bethesda really had a handle on Crunch because it either means he was ignorant of what was going on or he didn’t see QA as part of the studio.”
Those responsible were all asked for statements by Kotaku, but were unwilling or unable to make any statements. We can only warmly recommend you that really painful and detailed Kotaku report to be read in its entirety. It’s worth it, even if it’s not fun. We can only hope that Starfield and The Elder Scrolls 6 will be very different.
What do you think of this report about Crunch and the working conditions at Bethesda?
Reference-www.gamepro.de