[Watch] Go in-depth on the making of Fallout 76 with 40-minute documentary

Fallout 76 was easily one of the biggest surprises in the lead up to E3. A new Fallout just three years after the last one? Preposterous! It’s online too? Another shock! Bethesda are taking their popular IP and blowing it up… again. So, with that megaton announcement, we all obviously have questions.

Luckily, after that big info blowout at E3, we still have more details pouring out thanks to a documentary from NoClip’s Danny O’Dwyer. The documentary goes inside Bethesda Game Studios to talk to a bunch of the developers (including Todd Howard himself) behind the post-apocalyptic multiplayer game, discussing the obstacles they’ve had to overcome to overhaul the foundation of a single-player game and make it multiplayer, bringing in the lore of West Virginia itself, and of course, what the gameplay is like.

It sounds like it has been a pretty hard game to tackle, starting all the way back in 2013 during the production of Fallout 4. To start, Bethesda had to dig through the code that has been used since Morrowind. They realized it was built for one player and the game simply doesn’t load when you try to put more than one person in the game, once they realized they had to rewrite a lot of the code and script, they began cooking up the game itself.

Fallout 76’s gameplay also sounds like a much more hardcore survival game in comparison to Fallout 3 and 4. You can gain diseases, you must eat and drink to stay alive and keep your strength, earn gameplay mutations, item degradation, and you can activate a limited amount of perk cards that allow players in parties to specialize in specific areas.

It sounds like the team is still working on trying to narrow down the player count but at the moment it features 24 – 32 players to ensure that it fits the tone of the game, you’re not constantly running into people in the apocalypse but there are enough to make it feel alive and even allow for a comfortable single-player experience. The map is 4X larger than Fallout 4 so it’s pretty sizable but is filled with lots of depth to keep players actively engaged.

You can view the full documentary below.

Fallout 76 launches on November 14th, 2018 for Xbox One, PS4, and PC with a beta scheduled sometime before release.