(Image credit: Bethesda Game Studios)

Fallout 76 has become another feather in Bethesda’s cap, assisted by the fact that it’s the game best-positioned to take advantage of the popularity of Amazon’s fantastic Fallout TV show, and thanks to the cavalcade of transformative free updates. But it wasn’t always like this. At launch, the reception was rough. An online-only Fallout game with zero NPCs? Yeah, that was never going to fly.

“Working on a live service game comes with a lot of stress, because it just doesn’t go away,” says Jeff Gardiner, who spent 15 years producing The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, and served as Fallout 76’s project lead until he left in 2021. It wasn’t like he could just move on after players expressed their disappointment. And that even followed him when he was out shopping. “I got yelled at in an Apple Store, I’ll never forget.”

But Gardiner believed it was not just his responsibility to get the game to a place where players loved it, but to get the team to love it too, and to feel proud to work on it. “When you put a game out that’s that maligned, especially on a team that has had such success, the morale is doubly bad internally. So it was my job to make the people who are making the game like the game.”

The “upside” of a live service game, he says, is that you’re able to interact with the community more and figure out solutions together. And he also asked the team what they wanted to do. How they would make it better. “Listening to them and allowing them to just go do it. I thought that was really important, because that’s what you finally saw in Wastelanders and beyond.”

Wastelanders was the turning point for Fallout 76. It’s where it started to feel like a full-featured Fallout game, rather than an experimental spin-off that didn’t work. The update filled the Appalachian Wasteland with colourful NPCs, chatting and doling out quests. It introduced factions and meaningful stakes, and laid the groundwork for some of the great updates to come.

“We added so many features to that game just while I was there,” says Gardiner, “and I know that so many more have been added, that changed the nature of the game. Like allowing you to sell things at camps, and all these things that were just really good ideas.”

Wastelanders launched in 2020, and let Gardiner go out on a high note. “It’s a very unique game. It still is. People always ask, ‘What’s your favorite game you’ve worked on?’ Because 76 was such a difficult game and then it turned around to a successful game, it’s actually probably my favourite.”

Gardiner is now working on open-world RPG Wyrdsong at Something Wicked Games, along with other former Bethesda designers.