Do you ever get the impression that Bethesda doesn’t quite understand its own game audience? That’s probably not going to be helped by a new interview in which Pete Hines expresses frustration over Fallout 76’s community not being more brutal toward each other.
“I think we were a little surprised how few people wanted to take part in PvP and how many more they were interested in PvE together,” Hines said. “As opposed to, ‘I want to test my mettle against you and let’s get into a duel.’ There’s some folks who do, don’t get me wrong, but I think it’s a smaller percentage of our player base than we thought.”
This critical misunderstanding of Fallout 76’s audience is one of reasons why Bethesda is changing its development to focus on more PvE and social aspects. Hines indicated that next month’s Wastelanders update is just the start of an effort to gear the online RPG to its actual audience: “[The developers have] done a lot of work on a systems level to make things possible in Wastelanders that they want to build on and use for more content that we’re going to be doing the rest of this year and into next year and beyond.”
