Is Todd Howard doing some self-criticism, or is it just some PR talk about Fallout 76?

Howard told IGN in an interview that Fallout 76‘s reviews, as well as the game’s technical state at launch,  caused „some” damage to Bethesda. „It would be naive to say it’s had zero [damage dealt with us]. We knew we were going to have a lot of bumps. That’s a difficult development; a lot of new systems and things like that. ‘Hey, we’re going to try this new thing.’ Anytime you’re going to do something new like that, you know you’re going to have your bumps; you know a lot of people might say, ‘That’s not the game we want from you.’ But we still want to be somebody that’s trying new things. That was a very difficult, difficult development on that game to get it where it was …a lot of those difficulties ended up on the screen. We knew, hey look, this is not the type of game that people are used to from us and we’re going to get some criticism on it. A lot of that–very well-deserved criticism,” Howard said.

He added that Bethesda never expected Fallout 76 to get strong average scores on a 1-100 scale on Metacritic: „Even from the beginning, [we thought], ‘This is not going to be a high Metacritic game; that’s not what this is, given what it is.” And he’s right: the score is just a mere 53 on PlayStation 4, 52 on PC, and only 49 on Xbox One.

Still, Howard thinks that Bethesda felt strongly about making an online-only, multiplayer Fallout game, which will improve over time, just like how The Elder Scrolls Online did (which now has 8.5 million players, but we have no sales info about Fallout 76… lol?). „It’s not how you launch, it’s what it becomes. If there is one thing I would have done differently, [it would have been to] find a way to, at scale, let people be playing the game 24/7 before you say, ‘Everybody in. Here you go. Pay us,’” Howard added. He meant a longer beta phase before the game’s release here.

Fallout 76 wasn’t made by the main Bethesda Game Studios team in Maryland. Instead, it was developed by the Austin team in Texas with some help from Dallas, Montreal, and the home base in Rockville, Maryland.  They will announce something regarding Fallout 76 at E3?

Source: GameSpot