How Fallout 76 is tackling players killing stuff too fast - SGF Preview

Fallout 76's latest season, Infestation, sees mutated horrors overrun the lands of Appalachia, bringing with it all-new dangers for players to confront. During this year’s Summer Game Fest Play Days event, RPG Site sat down with Bill LaCoste, the game’s Production Director, and John Rush, Creative Director, to hear about how Infestation came together and how the plans to address players are blazing through these dangers faster than expected.

New to this season is the titular Infestation system, where various locations around Appalachia (around 40 of them) will become infested with powerful mutated versions of enemies of the game’s various factions. These special events will require players to team up and, in the process, earn some legendary loot and other goodies. In deciding what areas could be afflicted by this new menace, the original count was actually higher. “So we wanted to find a series of locations that offered interesting combat challenges and scenarios,” John explained. “We had actually started with a much bigger list of locations, probably closer to about 60 or so, and through playtesting them, whittled it down to the 40 or so that have shipped.” 

Even with the good-sized pool of areas and situations that can arise during them - such as a mole miner boss that hunkered down inside a bus with a rocket launcher, requiring players to peek inside to unleash a few quick shots over and over to take him out - the team has realized, after looking at the data, that things aren’t playing out quite how they had hoped. John begins, “An infestation pops up in the game right now, and our experienced players, who are much better than us, see one, and they're like, 'Oh, infestation, done.”

As someone who enjoys watching streams of games like Diablo and Path of Exile, where seeing a boss's health pool just melt in a matter of seconds, even on the greatest difficulties, I was curious if this revelation was a surprise to the team, seeing as it's common in popular AARPGs that are out there. 

“What that tells us is it's on us to provide an incentive for them to clear out the others as well. That's the problem that needed to be solved. We've got a solution in place, and that's coming.” John says, followed by Bill chuckling, “Well, with infestations, it was how fast they were hitting the boss. That was a big surprise and very humbling for me. I'm like, I'm not as good as I thought. Yeah, so yeah, that's probably the biggest surprise out of infestations.“

John explains that one of the main solutions they hope will work is to incentivize taking out the Three-star mini-bosses before the main boss, slowing down the events somewhat and making them more meaningful and rewarding. The idea is that they want you to get with your friends, find the infestation, and piss off the boss that they show up after killing his minions. With things like this, the balance in players' minds is whether the rewards are worth the time investment. The crux of the challenge is making sure that the reward for the entire event is of greater value than just rushing to the final boss and finishing them off. What reason is there to kill the mini-bosses if a player’s time is better spent and rewarded by just rushing through? Experienced players will always aim to optimize their time for the highest loot per hour value. The adjustment to try out this new approach is scheduled for the next patch. 

Fallout 76: Infestation is available now for players to check out, along with the much-requested current-gen versions, meaning players can now experience Appalachia on fancy PS5 and Xbox Series X/S optimized versions. And for those still holding out for cross-play and cross-progression, Bill and John promise the team is still investigating it. “One of the biggest things they've asked for is cross-play because people have multiple consoles, “ Bill begins, “ So it's on our list of things to continue investigating, but it's just a huge technical hurdle for us, especially now because eight years later, there are a lot of accounts, a lot of characters being...I would love nothing more than to try to provide that for players, but at this point, it's just a huge technical hurdle. We have to gauge that against new features or new content stuff. A lot of times, we focus on new content because that's what's driving players the most to come back. Hopefully in the future, we can find a way to get there, but for now, usually the content's gonna take priority.”