Director Explains the Need for Ammo Conservation
Xbox is on the cusp of its beta for Fallout 76, but the “break it early” testers may only scratch the surface of what promises to be a robust journey in the wasteland.
Speaking in Official Xbox Magazine (December 2018, issue 170), Bethesda Game Studios painted more strokes for the full picture of Fallout 76. Sure it will be a large multiplayer game, with a map to reflect as much (four times the size of Fallout 4), but despite the transition from single-player to multiplayer, the studio promises to maintain its affinity for storytelling. We already know the game will offer its share of environmental lore, but the actual side quests shall take up a huge portion of the game time. We’re talking more than 150 hours of gameplay packed on day one; those hours are stacked on top of the main questline.
With so many hours of gameplay and such a large map of bullets to loot, Fallout 76’s project lead, Jeff Cardiner, had to explain why the game won’t feel like a PvP bullet hell. Basically, no one wants to spend hours of salvaged bullets on a player who’s going to respawn anyway.
“Remember it is a survival game. So we found early in play-testing that people were like, his character’s going to go away in three hours,” said Cardiner, “so I’m going to use all my Stimpaks and ammo,’ but when you’re playing ‘for real’, you’ll make very different decisions. Do I really want to kill this guy with my one Fatman shell, or do I want to save it for the Scorch Beast, because it took me hours to get it. You do make different decisions when your characters are ‘real’.”
And just in case you thought there’d be plenty of downtime in the wasteland, Development director Chris Mayer clarified that the world doesn’t wait for you.
“You play this game 30 hours, 300 hours; sometimes you’ll play in a group, sometimes you’ll focus on certain activities but sometimes you’ll play solo,” Mayer said. “And those are the times when you’ll have time to delve into the fiction and listen to the holotapes and read all the monitors and really get into the story. But there is more of a tension there, you can’t pause the game to read a terminal. When you’re reading a terminal something could sneak up behind you and eat you. And it often does. The more we’ve play-tested, the more we’ve realised how viable that is, and it supports the idea of how dangerous and how lonely it is out there.”
Fallout 76 arrives for PC, PS4, and Xbox One on November 14, 2018. The B.E.T.A. for Xbox One users starts tomorrow, October 23, 2018. PC and PS4 players can play no earlier than October 30th. All players must pre-order the game in order to participate.
SOURCE: Wccftech