Starfield's design director says that player trust accrued over the rebuilding of Fallout 76 carried over to the new game.
Bethesda Game Studios' design director Emil Pagliarulo took to Twitter last week on September 1, when the Starfield early access program kicked off, to reflect on the last few years. The Bethesda veteran personally believes that it was the "trust" that build up with players while Bethesda was fixing Fallout 76 that carried over to Starfield, and made the new game even better as a result.
(4/5) When 76 launched rough, we asked for your patience. We had some lessons to learn. And you supported us as we supported that game, and made it the experience you wanted and deserved. That trust clearly carried over into Starfield, and made us want to work ever harder.September 1, 2023
Fallout 76 was an infamously bad launch for Bethesda back in 2018, with players and critics alike panning the MMO spin-off for a variety of things, including gameplay, servers, player interactions, and more. Last year in 2022, a Kotaku report, citing developers who worked on Fallout 76, said the game was severely mismanaged at Bethesda Game Studios.
In the years following the disastrous launch, Bethesda set to work repairing Fallout 76 based on player feedback. The studio added new factions to engage with as well as corresponding new quests, new NPCs to interact with, new areas to explore, and perhaps crucially, a world that scaled with you depending on your own player level.
The result was a game that's now found a dedicated player base, with well over 13.5 million players as of late 2022. Fallout 76 is also sitting pretty at a 'Mostly Positive' aggregate user review on Steam as of over 46,000 reviews, which pretty much cements its herculean comeback.
All of this, Pagliarulo reckons, has spurred Bethesda developers on with Starfield, helping the team forge ahead to deliver the new RPG. It's worth pointing out that Kotaku's report alleged Bethesda burned out numerous developers in the run-up to Fallout 76's launch, so it'd be interesting to see how many developers from the MMO carried over to Bethesda's new game.
You can head over to our full Starfield console commands guide if you're looking for special cheats to help you get ahead.
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