While it’s in a much better place today, the online-focused Fallout 76 did not have the most successful of launches back in 2018. Designer Bruce Nesmith, who has since left the company, said in an interview with MinnMax that Bethesda believed itself to be “infallible” at the time given the track record of the company’s past games and wasn’t as “focused” as it should have been
“Fallout 76 was one that I definitely struggled with. I think the company’s aim was not as focused as it probably should have been,” Nesmith said. “And you can see the result in that in the way it entered into the marketplace. To a certain extent, our own hubris caught up with us.”
“We had so many–not just successes, but literal game of the years–industry-wide accepted game of the years–not just in our own heads or in these two little magazines over there,” he added. “But everybody is saying this is the game of the year. We started to talk ourselves into the fact of we were infallible–that there was nothing we couldn’t do. Clearly, that was wrong.”