Since its release, Fallout 76 has evolved with numerous patches and new content. Some players felt that this wasn’t fast enough. The Product Lead, Jeff Gardiner, now says that faster is not necessarily better.
Why aren’t the developers patching faster? In an interview with PCGamer during E3 2019, Jeff Gardiner discussed the challenges of developing a game-as-a-service like Fallout 76.
Fans want their problems addressed as quickly as possible. According to Gardiner, however, it is not good to patch a game too quickly and constantly. This leads to more problems:
We are trying our best to find a balance… we can’t feed the beast fast enough. But the faster we feed it, the more likely it is to get indigestion. So you have to find a good balance somehow.
This is what happens when patches are made too quickly
What kind of problems are we talking about? Gardiner cited one issue as an example which had quite a wide reach: Bobby Pins. Bobby Pins are an important tool in Fallout 76 used for lockpicking.
The items started the game weighing 0.1 pounds. This quickly resulted in players becoming overencumbered with their limited inventory space when carrying just a handful of Bobby Pins.
Players expected a quick fix for such a “small” problem and even sent Bethesda’s head Todd Howard a packet of Bobby Pins to show that the weight was absurd.
Those were already problems: Eventually the issue was fixed, and the weight was reduced to 0.001 pounds. However, in a later patch, this fix was accidentally reversed, so it had to be addressed again. Such occurrences can happen more frequently when patches are constant:
That was a reaction that caught us off guard. But again, we are only human. This is a 70-gig game; that’s a lot. We don’t do this intentionally. And we are not doing this because we are lazy.
This is how Fallout 76 proceeds now
This is the patch plan: To prevent patches from introducing new bugs that need to be patched again and thus get caught in a vicious cycle, Bethesda has established a fixed patch plan against this.
In the roadmap from early 2019, all new content and major updates are listed. Bethesda now intends to work through the milestones of this roadmap. Every few weeks, there will be a major patch with new content.
In between, smaller patches will come for bug fixes or with features that did not quite make the deadline for the larger update.
The upcoming update is “Nuclear Winter”, of which a major feature has already been implemented in the game:
