Fallout 76 devs were surprised the community turned out to be so friendly: 'It’s post-apocalyptic, it’s Fallout, they’re going to all want to kill one another ... it's the complete opposite'
The funny thing about Arc Raiders is how friendly it is. Trios mode is fairly reliably violent, and you'll occasionally get popped by people like Fraser, but in solos mode most players are, unexpectedly, quite cooperative. It's a little weird, given the nature of videogames, and developer Embark Studios was perhaps a little surprised by it, in a good way: Art director Robert Sammelin said in December that "we were certainly hoping that we would see cooperation happen, but I think to the extent that it happens at launch, and seeing how people treat each other socially is heartwarming, it is really uplifting to see."
Embark isn't the only studio whose players have done something unpredictable with the world they're given. In an interview with The Game Business, Fallout 76 creative director Jon Rush said Bethesda was surprised that players turned out to be a lot friendlier than developers assumed they'd be.
"Before we released the game, we were like… it’s post-apocalyptic, it’s Fallout, they’re going to all want to kill one another," Rush said. "It’s the complete opposite. The complete opposite. It’s been great to see that. I’ve never experienced a community as great as the Bethesda Game Studios community."
That friendliness came to the fore recently in response to the influx of new Fallout 76 players, drawn to the game by Amazon's hit TV series. Instead of preying on fresh meat as you'd expect hardened post-nuclear survivors to do, wasteland veterans stepped up to help the newbies get off to a good start.
"We’re always making small adjustments to the game here and there that make it a bit easier for new players to hop in, or make it easier for players that are coming back after a little while," Rush said.
"But honestly, I’d say a lot of the onboarding was done by our wonderful community who recognized all of these fresh vault dwellers emerging from Vault 76, and set up camps outside … giving them free stuff and showing them things, 'look at what I built.' So it was very much a concerted effort between us and our community, welcoming this influx of brand-new players and returning players."
I compare that to my many-years-ago 'onboarding' in a different multiplayer survival game, Rust, which consisted of being held at gunpoint along with another guy by three heavily armed players who ordered us to strip naked and drop all our stuff, none of which they had any use for, after which they took it all anyway and then shot the other guy because he was lipping off too much. And hey, it was kind of fun in its own perverse way, but honestly? I'll take a friendly community any day.
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