“We have not lived up to our expectations.”
That’s a phrase you normally hear from a failed entrepreneur, or more recently, a member of the San Antonio Spurs.
At Summer Game Fest last week, while sitting down with Fallout 76 creative director Jon Rush and production director Bill LaCoste, those were the exact words I heard…and yet, they were positive. The team thought they’d teed up a formidable enough challenge in the first days of the MMO’s latest update, Infestations, which began June 2, but the players quickly proved them wrong.
“We were playtesting [Infestations] exhaustively, and we thought, ‘we’re pretty good, these seem pretty hard, I bet our players are going to have a hard time with this,’” LaCoste said. “Sure enough, no, we underestimated our players and their aptitude for killing; they’re getting through these really fast.”
Infestations, the 27th major update in Fallout 76‘s nearly decade-long history, randomly adds spawns of powerful enemies to the map, pulling from a list of about 40 predetermined locations, and players must travel to those areas and investigate in order to find them and clear them out. Super Mutants, Scorched, Mole Miners, Ghouls, and more are among the creeps infesting these previously abandoned areas. The challenge is meant to be high, aptitude for killing notwithstanding, as high-level legendary items are up for grabs to those brave enough to face them.
Avoiding the fast travel treadmill
Bosses and their infesting hordes will adapt to their surroundings, offering unique obstacles depending on the location they’ve chosen. “You could be at Top Of The World and have a Mole Miner boss decide to hole up inside of a bus with a rocket launcher, good luck getting in there to take him out,” Rush explained. “Or you could be at the golf course and have one of the Scorched show up in the basement, with long hallways that you’ve got to get through, while getting shot the whole way, to finally get to him.”
The team originally had a much longer list of potential areas for infestations to spawn, but eventually they decided to whittle the list down to the 40 now in the update. While these locations offered the “best gameplay” according to Rush and LaCoste, there were also a few predetermining factors. For one, they want to encourage exploration and not just turn the update into a “fast travel game” as they described to But Why Tho?.
“We wanted to see what kind of gameplay we could extract,” Rush said. “You’ll get places where enemies hole up, or you’ll get places where it’s wide open. Like, if you go to the Palace of the Winding Path, it’s wide open, look there’s the boss, but you’ve got nowhere to hide, and he’s got 20 guys around him. It’s about different strategies for different locations.”
Changing Fallout 76‘s map in real timee
What makes Infestations so intriguing to Rush and LaCoste is the “knob under the hood,” or the ability to change in real time what’s going on across the Fallout 76 map. “The team can decide they want more infestations, and poof, it happens,” LaCoste said. “They can decide only super mutants will infest for the next few hours, and look, it’s a super mutant invasion. We can make two infestations overlap with each other and cause mayhem if we want. That’s the benefit of being a live service, we can take advantage of the ‘live’ opportunity whenever we want.”
Having the ability to react to player progress in real time, only for the players to then meet those challenges and the devs to realize they require more tuning, creates a competition of sorts between developer and player that both Rush and LaCoste find thrilling. “We have players where these current infestations are pretty damn hard,” Rush says, “and we have some that can just two-shot them. What’s hard is finding a solution that kind of works for everybody, but if it was easy, everybody would do it. That’s what makes it fun.”
That player base includes Rush and LaCoste themselves, who mention that they both have 1000-plus hours invested in the game outside of the office. “We’ve spent many hours inside the game,” LaCoste said, “and that gives us added perspective from the eyes of the player. When our community mentions issues as they pop up, we’re already well aware of them.”
With Infestations in its early stages, I ask what might be in the game’s immediate future. These infestations currently only inhabit abandoned or low-populated areas; is it possible the mutants and scorchers and robots (oh, my!) may turn their attention to more active spots on the map? “That might be next on the agenda,” Rush says, “but it’s not where they’re starting.”
