“We want you to be in The Wayward and have all your NPC interactions be based around you and your choices,” Hines said. “Not like I’m talking to an NPC and then somebody else walks up in the middle of that and just starts shooting everybody. Then they’ve made a choice that changes your choices. So it’s an instance to you and your party; anybody else who goes into The Wayward is going to be in their own version because your choices do matter.”
Wastelanders will emphasize Fallout 76’s PvE elements over its PvP content. Hines said that the team was a little shocked by how many of Fallout 76’s players don’t really participate in the game’s pure PvP content.
“I think we were a little surprised how few people wanted to take part in PvP and how much more they were interested in PvE together,” Hines said. “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.”
While a sudden influx of new content may be enough to make Fallout 76’s PvE content feel fresh in the short-term, Bethesda acknowledges that new content for content’s sake is not enough.
“[A]t some point what you know for sure about your hardcore players is it doesn’t matter how many quests you write,” Hines says. “I don’t think content generation is the answer. There’s just no reasonable cadence that you can put out large volumes of quest content that will keep up with the extent to which players burn through it because it’s gonna take you six months, nine months, a year to make content that they’re gonna burn through in two weeks.”