Bethesda‘s upcoming title, Fallout 76, will be the first in its franchise to be completely online and as such, the company has already made their plans to release free DLC pretty clear moving forward. While speaking with Metro, marketing executive Pete Hines spilled the beans on how long they plan on actually supporting the title for and, uh, it’s a very long time.
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“Forever,” he said. “I’m not being ironic. Like, forever.”
Good news for people who plan on sinking a lot of time into Fallout 76, I guess. His reasoning makes a lot of sense though, pointing out that tons of people are still playing Fallout 4, Skyrim, and other older titles, so why not keep this one going until the sun burns out?
“Other people have said, ‘Is your timeline [for Fallout 76] two years or five years?’ And I said, ‘Well, they’re still playing Morrowind and you go online and look at how many people are playing Fallout 4 and Skyrim,” he continued. “Those games have been out for four and seven years, and there are literally hundreds of thousands of people playing those games every single day, every single month.”
That doesn’t mean they have a plan for everything moving forward, supporting a game until everyone dies is a long time, and a lot can change over the course of that. In other words, Hines doesn’t really know how future content is going to look just yet.
“Part of our thing is we need to get people in the game and see how they respond,” he said.
We’ve even taken this approach for past DLC. I don’t know if you remember Fallout 3? The big consumer reaction when we launched that game was that they were all upset that it had an ending. And we were like, ‘All the previous games had an ending! We thought we were sticking to what that franchise is…’ But they didn’t want an ending and we had a couple of DLCs in the works but the third one we did we were like, ‘Well, we need a DLC that removes the ending of the game and allows you to continue on.’ So 76 is going to be like that. We have some ideas for this and that, but let’s see what people want more of. Let’s see what they respond to and support that.
Sweet, nuke on, baby. Fallout 76 is due for release on November 14, with a beta set for some point in October. You’ll be able to play it on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
