The Game Developers Conference hasn’t just been a place where members of the c-suite pontificate about industry-related things; it’s also been a stage for developers to provide some insight into how some of their games came to be. Case in point, a discussion featuring Fallout 76 lead artist Nate Purkeypile allowed him to open up about the apparent fight that happened to make the game’s map as big as it was at launch.
“I knew it was a game people were going to be spending a lot of time in, and I wanted to capture that epic feel of the West Virginia wilderness,” Purkeypile recounts. “Fallout 76’s map was huge; it’s actually even bigger than Skyrim, and that was something I had to fight for really hard from the start.”
Of course the game had a pretty slipshod launch when it first released in 2018, but according to the dev, players appreciated the map’s size, and of course we all know that map has only gotten bigger with successive major updates, so clearly Purkeypile’s instinct was right on the money. “[E]ven though the game had a rocky launch, people liked the map,” he says. “It was kind of nice to hear ‘hey, that game sucks, but the map’s pretty cool’. I did my job.”
