Howard has been extremely critical about the currently newest Bethesda Game Studios title.

We have already discussed the Bethesda Joins Xbox – Roundtable broadcast, but we haven’t talked about what Todd Howard said. When Fallout 76 launched in Autumn 2018 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC, many people already suspected via the pre-launch beta that Bethesda Game Studios has tried to take too big of a bite (an online-centric Fallout, even though the series has been single-player focused). „When that game launched, the litany of issues we had, and we let a lot of people down, and, well, there was very little we didn’t screw up honestly,” Howard said.

Technical problems, weak performance, a lack of NPCs – Howard thinks that their stumbling with the game-as-a-service model will not happen again under Microsoft, as the Redmond-based company will help them with their next titles (Starfield, The Elder Scrolls VI), so there could be more pre-launch testing, and via the Game Pass, making a public beta is going to be much easier than before.

Howard claims that if Fallout 76 was part of the Game Pass, then the first few months of the game could have been easier, and he regrets they never made a free beta for the game (you had to pre-order) that joined Xbox Game Pass in July. He also mentioned that when he called Phil Spencer, the head of the Xbox put him in touch with people at Xbox who were able to aggregate data about similar games to help Bethesda focus on solving its most pressing issues.

As Microsoft now officially owns Bethesda, let’s hope that the classic saying (a Bethesda Game Studios title – this is where Howard is working – is always buggy at launch) will no longer be true. Howard is currently working on Starfield, which might already skip the PlayStation 5.

Source: PCGamer