I may have a little anxiety about my upcoming game releases, but at least it won't be as bad as Fallout 76. If nothing else my audience is smaller, but I think that there are a lot of things to say about Fallout 76's launch that are important take-aways for any designer/publisher.

I'm not just saying this to knock on Bethesda, either, though I really can't see the logic in some of their decisions. I bought Fallout 76 over the Thanksgiving weekend, and I haven't really had enough time to play it, but my initial impressions are generally positive, with a couple nit-picks.

1. Don't Oversell

Trailer courtesy of Bethesda Softworks.

One of the big issues that Fallout 76 has is that it created a mythos it doesn't live up to. The trailer above was the world's first look at a multiplayer Fallout experience.

Multiplayer Bethesda games have been on the gaming world's wish-list for a long time (I am an internet acquaintance of the TES3MP developers, so I may be making a statement that is not as universal as I perceive it to be). They provide deep immersive worlds that generally create a whole lot of exploration experiences.

Exploration is fun with friends, so it stands to reason that Fallout 76 would by extension be fun with friends.

I think it is, personally. But a lot of people don't. And some of the reason for this is that it's lost a lot of what makes Bethesda games work; when everyone's dead, what's the point of going around doing quests?

Honestly, my one big issue with Fallout 76 as I see it is that I have no reason to move on from the starting area. If I'm just rebuilding the world, I should be able to set up camp–or C.A.M.P.–right outside the vault and call it a day, since that's the safest and area in the game (good planning on behalf of Vault-Tek though it may have been).

I think the big problem however is that it's not a Fallout experience like other Bethesda games. Fallout's always been fairly personal, and while Bethesda's managed to pull the nameless stranger trick with the Elder Scrolls for forever, it just doesn't work in the post-apocalypse as well. The Overseer doesn't have the emotional connection that you would see from other causes in Fallout; she's not your home vault, your missing father, or your missing son.

The trailer above, however, shows us a pretty clear cut Fallout experience and is perfectly in line with other trailers, except perhaps for the multiplayer aspect.

The promise that there would be no NPCs in Fallout 76 rang hollow because instead of having human NPCs they instead have robots everywhere. Robots that have the exact same issues that NPCs would have in other games (like only one player interacting with them at once) but without the merits of forming human attachment. Other players aren't able to fill the role of quest-giver in the Fallout 76 setup, and it's just sort of a shallow experience (even though we were promised it wouldn't be).

Another issue that's come up is that the "canvas" bag promised in a collector's edition turned out to be nylon instead. That's a fulfillment problem and Bethesda just couldn't make good on promises.

2. Don't Drop the Price

I got my copy of Fallout 76 for $36 over on Humble Bundle through a mix of Humble Monthly discounts, existing credit, and the massive 33% price cut for the Thanksgiving weekend.

While that's good for me, it sucks for everyone who pre-ordered and then feels robbed. If the game's not worth $60, don't charge $60 for it, but if it doesn't sell like hotcakes immediately on release, you still probably have to wait a while before dropping the price.

A lot of the really tepid reviews for Fallout 76 (especially on PC), mentioned that there weren't PC-standard features (like the ability to disable depth-of-field and adjust FOV) in the PC version, and that the experience was glitchy, buggy, and unstable.

To have the price drop to entice people to buy the game without addressing existing customers' concerns is going to create a massive backlash, especially if the drop comes just a few days after release.

Basically, people who pre-ordered got less than the best experience, and the price was lowered so they didn't even get rewarded for their trust in Bethesda.

3. Test. Test. Test again.

When I heard that the Fallout 76 beta test had been very limited, I was a little surprised. I've been pretty busy, and I didn't expect to get 76 when it first came out (I'm a price-drop guy), so I didn't think a whole lot of it, but my experience with the game has been a reminder of this.

When you have someone running off a SSD on a GTX 1080 and an overclocked i7, you shouldn't be seeing flat-out freezes during gameplay. That's a sign that something's wrong.

Also, my first "game-breaking" bug came the minute I first booted up the game, when my brother and I were trying to form a group and got blocked from contacting each other because apparently we sent friend requests too quickly. That's something that you would think should be caught in testing.

We were able to resolve the issue, but it's an obvious use case and shouldn't have required a work-around.

Part of the thing about testing before releases is that you get a chance to do things you'll never get to do after release and make changes that will break your release. Fallout 76 has a large player base of people who have established characters and wiping their accounts to make dramatic improvements is a nightmare for any game studio.

Honestly, from my position I don't see how Bethesda went ahead with the release as planned. They should have delayed the official release and just made this release a "beta". Hindsight is 20/20, but now they're in a really awkward place (they can't just wipe the servers and fix stuff) and sitting on a release that's catching flak from all over.

4. Going off-platform

You know where you can download and play Fallout 76 digitally?

Bethesda.net

And literally nowhere else.

You can purchase it on a third-party site, sure, but Bethesda.net is the only place to play, and the Bethesda launcher leaves a lot of stuff to be desired. I haven't been touching Steam much recently (Forza Horizon is my recent go-to game, and I haven't even been playing it as much), but at least it lets you see when your friends are online and has a lot of tools to let you get in-game together.

Bethesda.net requires another install, doesn't provide any social features, and I personally just don't care for its layout nearly as much as any of the competitors, and I'm including EA's Origin (which I haven't used in years, so picture a very out-dated competitor) and uPlay in that, both of which I generally regard as storage space parasites.

5. Comfort your Customers

Bethesda's been on top of things, and it sounds like they are generally issuing refunds (though not always; I haven't had a chance to investigate to figure out what their criteria are and how they've changed in recent days) despite their store policy being not to do so.

They've been okay at putting out follow-up publications and patches, but the consolation they're giving pre-ordering fans who bought a $200 special edition that didn't pan out is $5 of in-game currency that can be earned in game, is not really enough to get anything decent, and an entirely optional system.

Ubisoft gave out free games after a botched Assassin's Creed launch, and I think that Bethesda should probably do something like that (at least for the pre-order people) to build goodwill. Admittedly, Bethesda doesn't crank out fifteen Fallout and Elder Scrolls games a year, and most devotees probably already have them all, but they have a lot of stuff in their library that's worth giving, and they should consider passing out some freebies to patch over hard feelings, especially since they have other killer franchises like Wolfenstein and Doom that could have been skipped by fans of their RPG lineup but have pretty broad appeal.

The whole idea when you buy something is that you're exchanging money for value. If you wind up with a situation where customers feel they didn't get value in exchange, you need to try to make that right. When you produce digital products with a very low cost-of-delivery, you have the opportunity to make up for that lost value very easily and compensate your customers.

Even if a large portion of Fallout 76 players feel satisfied, giving the satisfied customers a freebie pumps their value from the purchase up and creates a good experience that can help to mitigate some of the angst caused by a botched launch.