“There was a similar IP that was already established,” lead producer Bill LaCoste tells me when I ask him, on a bit of a whim, whether there’s anything he learned while working on NBA Jam in the early 2000s that still applies to his current work on Fallout 76.
“We had to rebuild a lot of that from scratch ourselves, and it was really like, ‘how do we maintain consistency’, because, at the time, we weren’t associated with Midway – we just had the licence to do NBA Jam. So, it was like ‘we need to recreate this, we know what makes it fun for people, we know what people are going to enjoy out of this’. With a Fallout game, it’s the same thing: there’s already lore, there are established timelines that are already there. We have to make sure that we are representing that title correctly.”
When Fallout 76 initially launched back in October 2018, in an underwhelming fashion that’s been very well-documented at this point, it stuck out among its Fallout siblings. It was unpopular, and unpopular in ways that LaCoste says he picked up on while playing it at that time – before he joined Bethesda. Then, as part of the process of joining the team a little bit before 2020’s Wastelanders update, LaCoste says he flagged the areas of improvement he’d identified to the development team (in a manner expressly designed to be constructive, by the way).
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