February 11, 2019 1:20 AM EST
An MMO’s polish at launch involves a lot of different factors, but among the most important are 1) Devotion to quality before launch, 2) Clear determination of how the gameplay should be, 3) Extensive beta testing to eliminate bugs/balance issues prior to launch, and 4) making gameplay clear, simple, and fun.
Fallout 76, Destiny, Destiny 2, ESO, Anthem, and a whole lot of other MMOs tend have missed at least 2 of these. Some games get so wrapped up in making an exciting story that they forget to make the game fun to play. In ESO’s case, they made a beautiful world with some interesting story, but they didn’t seem to have any clue of how to build the game to be playable and fun. I’ve seen that happen with other Zenimax games, like World of Darkness, at launch, but they did a massive amount of work to turn ESO into the cash cow it is today.
Bethesda is not the team that made ESO. They tend not to fix or refine their games very far lost-launch because they’re already neck-deep in a new project. Even Skyrim Special Edition was chock full of the same bugs everyone had known about for half a decade when Bethesda released it.
I don’t believe Bethesda had a pre-game devotion of quality concerning Fallout 76. I think it’s pretty obvious they had no idea what players were going to do in their game world, since they spent a lot of time telling fans and players they didn’t need to make their own fun. I don’t believe they tested Fallout 76 even remotely close to an appropriate length of time for the sheer quantity of bugs being reported. I think they spent most of their time focused on refining the gameplay and let everything else coast (including the merchandise for their collector’s edition orders). If they showed that little pride in the work on release day, I would hold no hope that Bethesda will continue working on the game now that they’ve already made money off of it.