Fallout 76’s Success Offers One Bittersweet Lesson for Fallout 5

As the wait for Fallout 5 intensifies, there will no doubt be questions about what it will borrow from previous games in the series, including the much-maligned Fallout 76. There are opportunities for Bethesda to recontextualize Fallout series tropes and traditions, but there’s room for further experimentation as well, meaning that the likes of Fallout 76 could diffuse into the project’s DNA.

It was slammed at launch for being buggy, incomplete, poorly balanced, and devoid of meaningful content, but against all odds, Fallout 76 seems to have made a comeback. Following major content updates like 2020’s Wastelanders, Fallout 76 experienced a significant metamorphosis, addressing leading criticisms like the lack of friendly NPCs and the prevalence of copy-paste quest design. Indeed, the questionable live-service venture, which many assumed would have been put down after its first year, has enjoyed a major glow-up, turning into something almost unrecognizable. This may embolden Bethesda to transplant some of its winning features into Fallout 5, which might not be the best idea.

Fallout 76 Is Much Better Now, but It’s Still Not ‘Fallout’

Fallout 76 Is a Different Sort of Fallout Experience

The redemption arc of Fallout 76 has been shocking, as its launch state painted a bleak picture, but not a totally unexpected one. The game was released in 2018, during the first few years of the rising live-service phenomenon that would swallow so many potentially promising games. But unlike other ill-fated games-as-a-service leaps like Concord and Redfall, Fallout 76 was following years of single-player RPG tradition, which is almost totally at odds with the conventions of live-service MMO design.

So, even though most would agree that Fallout 76 has seen massive, transformative improvement over the years, it is still fundamentally opposed to what Fallout stands for. Fallout 76 presents interesting gameplay and narrative opportunities, alongside a compelling open-world, but it’s such a departure from other Fallout games that it almost seems like a different franchise altogether; whatever attracts players to Fallout 76 isn’t likely to be the same things that draw them to the other Fallout entries. Fallout 76 proves that the Fallout world can be a decent enough backdrop for a live-service game, but it requires sacrificing key elements like a contained main story, reactive world, and a focus on fleshed-out side narratives.

Fallout 76 Could Embolden Bethesda to Put Multiplayer Elements in Fallout 5

Clearly, Fallout 76 is a title that Bethesda cares a great deal about—the company wouldn’t have invested so much time and resources in it otherwise. This commitment has led to the reward of a passionate and dedicated Fallout 76 playerbase, which is surprising in retrospect, considering the whirlwind of negative press surrounding it to this day. In other words, Fallout 76 is an undeniable, unlikely success story, which could inspire Bethesda to cut Fallout 5 from the same cloth.

Perhaps Fallout 5 could have some light co-op integration, allowing players to hop into their friends’ games for side missions, or maybe there could be some sort of hub area similar to Destiny 2‘s Tower, where players could socialize and compare gear. For fans of Fallout 76, these might not seem like terrible ideas, and from Bethesda’s perspective, it could be giving these players more of what they want—public perception of 76 has changed quite a bit, after all. But at the same time, these multiplayer elements could adulterate the Fallout identity, possibly being a bridge too far for fans of the main series.