This content details the development journey of Fallout 76, highlighting the challenges of transitioning a beloved single-player franchise to a multiplayer online experience, and explores the unique setting of West Virginia as inspiration for its world and lore.
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(electronic whirring)
(gentle ominous music)
- Hello friends, and welcome to the woods of West Virginia.
Perhaps not the most traditional location
for a Fallout game,
but then 76 isn't exactly a traditional Fallout game,
now is it?
Is it, Larry?
I'm so lonely.
We've been making game design documentaries for a while now,
but this was the first time we had the experience
of being embedded in a studio
before a game had even been announced.
If you've watched our doc
on the history of Bethesda Game Studios,
you know that this part of the design window,
the final nine months or so,
is when the entire team is playing the game,
tinkering with mechanics,
and putting in those final details.
By this stage, nobody on the team
had ever said the words Fallout 76 in front of camera.
Our time in the studio began around six weeks
before the reveal of the game at E3.
So a lot of what you're about to watch
was recorded while fundamental decisions about the game
were still being made.
So we came prepared,
and had three fundamental questions
that we wanted to have answered
by the time we left the studio.
Number one,
we wanted to know the story behind its development.
Number two, we wanted to explore the world of West Virginia.
And number three,
we wanted to dive as deep into the gameplay
as we possibly could,
and find out what exactly you'll be doing
while playing Fallout 76.
Oh, and we really wanted to know
what was going on with Starfield and the Elder Scrolls VI.
But we'll probably wait until the end
before we drop those questions on Todd.
So first things first,
where did the idea for this multiplayer Fallout
even come from?
And how did the team at Bethesda Game Studios
land on West Virginia?
- Since debuting Vault 76 last year,
in honor of America's tercentenary,
Vault-Tec continues to expand with plans
for well over 100 vaults around the country.
(dissonant electronic music)
- [Danny] In our previous documentary,
we covered the development of Fallout 4.
But what we didn't mention then
was that during this period,
the team was also designing 76.
- 76 is the multiplayer design from Fallout 4.
- [Danny] Oh, is it really?
- Yeah. - Oh, my goodness.
- No one said that? - No.
- It is.
"Hey, should we do multiplayer?"
"Probably not."
"What would it be?"
"Okay, it would be this.
"Let's talk it through."
"That's pretty awesome."
And then you kind of, you put it away.
"Alright, let's...
"Let's do our thing."
And then every once in a while,
you keep talking about like,
"Hey, you know, we should...
"We should've done that."
Or, "We should do it."
And then as Fallout 4 is going on,
it becomes a, "No, we should really do it."
Like, as its own thing.
- [Danny] As far back as 2013,
the team was conceptualizing
what a Fallout multiplayer mode might look like.
But the idea was too big at the time,
and so it was put to one side
so the studio could focus on the single-player game.
At this stage, the team at Bethesda Game Studios
in Maryland was over a hundred people strong.
But they didn't have much experience in making online games,
neither in terms of their design
or in terms of their technology.
But it was around this time
that parent company ZeniMax
opened a new studio in Austin, Texas,
a studio that might just be able to help them out.
- ZeniMax had opened BattleCry Studios,
which was made up of a lot of like,
MMO experts in the Austin area.
People like, you know,
Chris and Doug go way back to Ultima Online
and Star Wars Galaxies and Star Wars The Old Republic.
Like, this is an amazing staff of people.
And they were, they were building a really cool game.
But the lead programmer on 76, Jason,
had been the client lead on Star Wars.
He knew them all.
We were talking about it, and he's like,
"Hey, you know, those are the guys to do it."
And I'll admit I was like,
"Hey, you know, we could hire."
I'd gotten approval to hire, you know,
server backend people and all of that.
But I had been through that.
And hey, if you have a team that works really well together,
that is interested in working with you on it,
like, hey, let's try to do that.
So they started it before we shipped Fallout 4.
- [Danny] A month before Fallout 4 was released,
BattleCry Studios
went through a significant round of layoffs,
as their free-to-play action title BattleCry
was indefinitely put on hold.
During all of this,
the team in Maryland was transitioning onto Fallout 4 DLC
and spinning up Starfield.
So BGS asked the folks in Austin
if they'd take a swing
at retrofitting multiplayer capabilities
into the Fallout 4 engine.
Using tech from another sister studio
in Richardson, Texas,
BattleCry started trying to implement the Quake netcode
into the Fallout engine,
a massive undertaking that posed significant challenges,
even for some of the most experienced network engineers
in the business.
(gentle dramatic music)
- This engine has been around since Morrowind, at least.
Some of the cool things, like when you dig through the code,
is like, you get to see,
oh my god, this was used back in this game
that I used to play when I was barely out of college, right?
Like nothing was developed with multiple players in mind.
So all over the code there's, you know,
what is the player doing?
I want you to give a quest to the player.
It's like, well, that has to go.
I guess one way to look at it
is the entire engine was based around a world with a player.
Now that has to sort of change
to you need to base it around the player
who could be in any world.
So just that statement alone
implies many, many, many changes.
Like, the game doesn't load except around one player.
- There's this thing we refer to as Atlas.
And Atlas is, because there was one guy in the game
we called him Atlas, because he held up the world.
Because the world that you have
only had to be accessed by one player.
So they were tightly intertwined.
So what we had to do
is essentially decouple Atlas from the world,
so there could be multiple people.
- Wherever Atlas went,
that's where was loaded.
So for many months,
it's like you couldn't go away from Atlas as another player.
If you did, you'd crash
because you're outside the realm
of what was actually loaded.
So a big effort was just changing that aspect as well.
But then it sort of spreads out.
So all of the quests that you get in a Skyrim or a Fallout,
they're all based around the quest itself,
because the quest is its own entity.
You need to re-architect that,
because multiple people could all be on the same quest
and they could all be in different stages.
So really, the quest data needs to live on the character,
no longer on the quest itself.
So that was very challenging as well,
not only just in retooling the way
the scripting stuff works,
just getting the design team
to start thinking about it from that perspective.
- The first thing is it's a mindset change.
You have folks who have been making single-player quests
here for so long.
And what does it mean
to be able to support more than one player?
So there's a lot of things that go into that.
Oh, how many people read a note at once?
Or who gets this bit of the story?
And those are things we've never had to think about before.
Is this stored on the server?
Like, those crazy, like those.
What does that?
Things that, there are reasons
why we've never gone into multiplayer before.
- [Danny] BattleCry had figured out
how to modify the engine to work with multiplayer,
even if quite how many people the world could support
remained to be seen.
Meanwhile back in Maryland,
a small group of leads were tasked
with brainstorming this multiplayer Fallout project.
They realized that just sticking multiplayer
into an old Fallout map wouldn't cut it.
To retain the same sense of scale with multiple people,
the world would need to be big, really big.
Plus by this stage,
they'd been building cities for two Fallout games.
What if they did something more rural, less desolate?
The team had looked locally for the location of Fallout 3,
and so they did the same here.
Except this time instead of looking south,
they glanced west
towards the vast wilderness of West Virginia.
- [Man] One, two, three, four.
(twangy guitar music)
- Actually, every, every game starts with the map.
Fallout 76, we decided, you know,
it's gonna be set in West Virginia.
And the first thing we did is we made the map.
I believe it's always been four times the size of Fallout 4.
It was pretty big.
Todd sits with designers
to figure out what story points we're gonna have.
- There was just the small handful of us leads
deciding what to do,
and starting to lay out the map of the world,
figuring out how to take an entire state and shrink it down.
Because before, we did, you know,
like a city and then the area around it.
But we decided to do all of West Virginia.
- I mean, I think we picked West Virginia
because it was still East Coast.
And it was a place that isn't really touched.
Like, if there ever were a nuclear war,
none of us would be here.
DC's done.
We're first.
So I'm perfectly content to know
that I will not have to deal with with any of that stuff.
But West Virginia, no one's gonna nuke West Virginia.
So we were thinking that we would be able
to do more of like, we would be able to do trees.
We'd be able to do an interesting visual look.
The leads went out to West Virginia and started the project,
to look for landmarks and places to go.
- So we find out, what are our landmarks that we want?
We know we want Morgantown and the Summersville Lake.
And we take the real map and start to like,
redraw it and remix it a little bit,
to find out how we want things to flow.
Because West Virginia also isn't a square.
But we kind of had to take...
Like Harpers Ferry is so cool,
but it's way out here poking over Maryland.
Let's just kind of shove it back in.
- The state of West Virginia
didn't only provide the team
with a massive landmass to play with.
But as it happens, the lore of West Virginia
was full of myth and conspiracies
that fit perfectly into the Fallout universe.
West Virginian myths
are among the creepiest in American folklore.
Isolated villages trapped in vast, unforgiving wilderness
has fueled terrifying stories
of creatures that prey on unfortunate souls.
There is the Grafton Monster,
a giant, pale-skinned, headless horror
that prowls the woods outside of Grafton.
There's the Flatwoods Monster
with its terrifying cowl and beady eyes.
The Snallygaster, a dragon-like demon
that haunts an area outside of neighboring DC.
And of course the Mothman,
a winged beast with piercing red eyes
that prey on those in the Point Pleasant area.
Like wandering the real woods of West Virginia,
the world of Fallout 76
is full of monsters to hunt or be hunted by.
There are far more creatures in 76, too,
more varied types of enlarged insects,
and everything from two-headed possums
to giant sloths and even intelligent plants.
- Yeah, the Mothman's incredible.
Because again, it's a different thing.
We've never done it before,
where we're hoping to do stages to him.
You know, early on in the game maybe he's just stalking you.
Like you know, you just see
these creepy little eyes in the dark.
- Because it's closer to when the bombs actually detonated.
So there's more radiation,
so you can get crazier mutants and giant plants
because it's more radiated at that time.
It's half-life.
It's gonna decrease over time.
So that's our justification.
Like, "well, I haven't seen that in future Fallouts."
Maybe that was like, such a bad mutation
that they died out.
But here, it still exists and it's in full swing.
- [Danny] While the team
had been adding plenty more new creatures to battle,
they hemmed and hawed over the inclusion of other AI humans.
They wanted to make sure the feeling
of running into other humans was special.
And if the world was full of raiders,
then instead of hearing distant gunfire
and knowing it was another player,
they'd spend large parts of the game
trying to discern if somebody was human or an AI.
On top of that, the lore of the game
couldn't really support the idea of raiders.
Fallout 76 takes place 25 years
after the bombs were dropped.
Vault 76 is one of a number of control vaults,
meaning that instead of doing weird experiments
on those inside,
this vault was genuinely used
to house people for a generation
before leading them out to rebuild society again.
So this world has yet to be reclaimed
by one faction or another.
And so the decision was made
to leave West Virgina bereft of other humans.
But this caused a problem.
Gun combat with AI
is a central pillar of the Fallout experience.
So they leaned into the lore
and created a new faction of intelligent ghouls
called the Scorched.
- Where they're kind of like feral ghouls
that are not quite so far gone.
They still know how to use guns.
So essentially our raiders are the Scorched.
But yeah, then most of the other things
are just all the creatures and things like that.
I think it's like 63 things that we have now,
because we had all the ones that we had before.
Updated and fixed those,
and then add all these new ones too.
- [Danny] The map of 76 is large,
but it's been divided into a half-dozen areas
with their own flavor and difficulty.
While you may emerge into the relative beauty
of a green forest,
there are much less forgiving areas of the map
for you to explore.
A hollowed-out mountaintop,
soggy flood lands,
festering toxic wastelands,
swampy woods,
and a colossal mountain range
that bisects the entire map.
The new dynamic weather system
can also have an impact on the player,
with distant rad storms warding off expedition parties.
There's a lot of space between things in this map,
meaning coming across new locations
should feel like uncovering something
that's been hidden forever.
Quiet cabins, abandoned wood mills,
tall treetops watchtowers, flooded mines,
and abandoned barbecue joints.
All of these littering a landscape
alongside cities and towns of all sizes,
nuclear missile silos, and even a crashed space Station.
The world of 76 is large,
larger and more detailed than their previous games,
and featuring a bunch of new technology
that the team may just be testing out for future games.
They have a new system to propagate woods,
a vastly-improved dynamic lighting model,
subsurface scattering,
and far more complex animations for creatures
who are going to be attacked by multiple players
for the very first time.
- So we do get sort of like,
the typical Fallout areas in certain spots.
Like when you first start up the game,
it's kind of nice and welcoming.
But then you get to the crappier, dangerous parts,
and get the more traditional feel.
Because this area is...
It was like, factories and things like that.
And our justification for why it's all caked in white powder
is that those factories were like, full of chemicals
and everything spilled out.
With all the hills and the topography of the area,
it's really beneficial for that,
because Fallout 4 was actually a really flat game.
So it's hard to get those landmarks.
Thankfully there's like, skyscrapers and Diamond City,
that giant glow.
But in this case, we have an entire mountain range
that bisects the map.
So we can take that
and put all these different landmarks on that.
Like, we made this ski resort called the Top of the World,
which basically looks like a giant red UFO.
And that's like a thumbtack in the middle of the map
that you can orient yourself around.
And then we have the giant bucket-wheel excavator
on another side.
But it's also designed in that way
where you're supposed to sort of lose where you're at
once you go down in those hills.
So you're deep in the valley.
You're like, where am I at?
And so you're encouraged to actually then go up the hill.
And then we put all these watchtowers and stuff.
So then you're like, aha, that's where I am.
Pull out the binoculars and look around.
- [Danny] Fallout 76 features a number of different biomes
inspired by real world locations.
The team is attempting to replicate that feeling
of stumbling upon new areas from their previous games.
And just like their other maps,
West Virginia has become a template for storytelling.
The state's cranberry bogs with their carnivorous plants
seem like the perfect spot to introduce some wild mutations.
So too does the mountaintop removal
mining region of the state,
which evokes a post-apocalyptic feeling all on its own.
But West Virginia also taps into the Cold War conspiracies
evoked in the Fallout games.
West Virginia is the location
of the United States Radio Quiet Zone,
a 13,000 square mile region
used for research and military intelligence.
And West Virginia is also the home
to the original location of the presidential nuclear bunker,
located underneath the Greenbrier Hotel.
Riffing off of all these real world locations
is something the team has enjoyed.
They have a hotel too,
but their hotel and its adjoining golf course
have something else going on.
They're, well, we sort of don't want to spoil it.
In fact, it seems like much of the joy of this game
comes from stumbling
upon interesting elements of world building
that the team has been working on,
and toying with the increased array of clothing
to be discovered on your journey.
- So there's this town, Helvetia,
that's in the absolute middle of nowhere.
And it's a Swiss-German village,
and they love making cheese.
But they also have this festival
where they build these paper mache masks.
And so we built 10 of them.
There's all different kinds.
And the owl one in particular is pretty popular.
And there's like crazy jesters and skulls.
They're all kind of handmade-looking.
Those are a big hit when it comes to photo mode.
- What is my favorite area in the game right now?
I have to say Charleston is.
It's where the the first responders are.
So it's like an old fire department
where you can find firemen's uniforms
and that kind of stuff.
And there's a terminal
where you can take the training course.
And it's like, what do you do
when you're seeing gas come in from the vents?
Do you put your arm over your nose?
Do you run out of screaming?
Or do you light a match?
You know, that kind of stuff's great Fallout humor.
- I'm playing the game,
and I come across this lighthouse in the middle of nowhere.
And I was like, why the hell is there a lighthouse
in the middle of nowhere?
Like oh, that's that's a real thing.
That's in West Virginia.
West Virginia has stuff like that.
(dramatic music)
- [Danny] We've learned how this game came together,
and we've explored the world of West Virginia.
So it's time to answer our next question.
What exactly are you going to be doing in Fallout 76?
There's been a lot of rumor over the past few weeks
as to how much like a regular numbered Fallout game
76 really is.
And it seems to be the question
that the team has also been struggling with.
How do you retain the elements of those games that work
while doing something interesting?
And how do you do something interesting
without just cribbing off of other survival games?
The version of 76 we look at today
is the end result of months of play testing and discussions.
So before we dive into the specifics,
let's start with the basics.
Fallout 76 is online.
You can play as a lone wanderer if you so choose,
but there are no private maps or offline mode to speak of.
There is a story and there are quests,
but the focus of this game
is on the player dictating what they want to do that day.
Perhaps you want to discover a new part of the map,
or find parts to craft a specific weapon.
Maybe you wanna kill a monster to get a high quality drop.
Maybe you want to build a camp,
claim one of the map's public workshops,
or team up with others to take on events.
- Super mutants are attacking, you know, Aunt Mabel's farm.
So you'll go over to protect from super mutants,
and you don't know like,
will 10 other Yaoguai come running in at the same time
because someone trained them in from across the mountain?
There's a public workshop,
so you can go in and claim them.
You have to kill the monsters in there.
There might be events spawning once you take them,
depends on the situation, the timing, and the area.
And when you take them and you fortify them,
you actually have access to resources
that are super valuable for crafting.
So you'll get access to ore, some kind of ore.
Lead.
And then lead's used for make bullets.
And then you can make bullets,
which in any of these games is super helpful, right?
So you take that for a reason.
Then like I said, you have your camp,
which are mini-workshops you can place almost anywhere.
There's certain restrictions on that
because we don't want you like,
griefing outside the exit of the vault.
But you can place them all over.
They go, when you move servers
if that space is available,
your camp will just be there.
For some reason, again,
this is a big game with a low number of people,
it's overlapping and we can't place it there,
it will be packed up and blueprinted.
You can place it somewhere else, boom.
And then the crafting is a huge part of the game,
because again you're gonna want to find
very specific creatures or flora to combine for recipes.
