“We started to talk ourselves into the fact we were infallible”
Bethesda veteran Bruce Nesmith discussed projects from his nearly 30 years at Bethesda in an interview with MinnMax on YouTube. He started out on games like Daggerfall and The Terminator: Future Shock in the 90’s. later on, Nesmith became the lead designer on Skyrim and then contributed to Starfield. He also contributed to games Oblivion and the Fallout series.
Most of those games saw massive success and the games themselves spoke for themselves at their release times. One game though did not share the same success story, Fallout 76. Fallout 76 is Bethesda’s weakest and darkest launch to date. Years later with massive add-ons and improvements the game never reached the save review scores of other games developed and published by Bethesda, nor other games released in its release period.
Nesmith commented that one of the contributing factors behind this was because Bethesda allowed its own reputation to get the better of it. “The company’s aim was not as focused as it probably should have been, and you could see the result in the way it entered the market. To a certain extent, our own hubris caught up with us.” Nesmith went on to say.
“We had had so many, not just success, but literal Game of the Years,” he continues. “Like industry-wide-accepted Games of the Year. Not just in our own heads, or in these two little magazines over there, but everybody saying ‘this is Game of the Year.’ We started to talk ourselves into the fact that we were infallible, there was nothing we couldn’t do. Clearly that’s wrong.”
Fallout 76 has been out for years now, and both Nesmith and the interviewer stated that the game has improved somewhat since its original rocky launch. Fallout 76 was never abandoned and received support throughout the years to improve its standing and what it offers its players. New areas were added to the game, expansions followed and massive overall improvements were made to the game.
Given the age of the game, its numbers aren’t massive when compared to other MMO’s but on Steam it has a decent player base though. Bethesda has put in a lot of work to improve Fallout 76 which leads one to think that there were some hard lessons to be learned. Based on how they addressed the situation it seems like they learned those lessons very quickly. Lessons that they kept in mind to ensure Starfield didn’t suffer the same fate as Fallout 76.