With interest in Fallout 76 seeing a new high thanks to the just-released TV series, the question of whether the multiplayer title will allow cross-platform play and cross-progression has come up again. That question has been mostly answered in Kinda Funny Gamescast’s interview with Bethesda’s Todd Howard, who effectively says that he would like to but the MMO’s tech stack is the major limiting factor.
“We keep looking into [crossplay], but the game wasn’t designed that way from the beginning. So obviously we get into server and database silos,” Howard explains. “[F]or us the the more the important thing is cross-progression than cross-play — and we do separate them — we’d love to have it all, sure. It’s something we are looking at but I will say it’s quite […] a technical lift.”
Howard does remark that future teams will try to keep cross-progression in mind when building new games, which doesn’t sound particularly promising for FO76 specifically. Still, he does say in a later point of the interview that adding a feature like cross-progression could “move it up the stack internally” if its absence would annoy employees. In any event, it might be best not to hold your breath waiting for this feature.
