Bethesda Assures Fans Again that Single-Player Games Aren't Dead

While it’s hard to believe, the announcement of a brand-new Fallout game has people more anxious than excited.

Fallout 76 looks to be a departure from the traditionally single-player series, instead being a “multiplayer games-as-a-service” style game, which has more than a few people worried that one of the last bastions of truly great single-player experience, Bethesda, is going the way of EA and Ubisoft and choosing instead to chase the endless dollar bills that come with the games as a service model.

We already spoke a bit about how Bethesda was trying to fight against the perception that this somehow signaled a change of times (hence the Elder Scrolls VI announcement, remember?), but Bethesda director Todd Howard decided to double down on that assurance while talking with Gameindustry.biz, saying:

"It doesn't mark the future. Corporately we've done a mix—people forget sometimes. Elder Scrolls Online is one of the biggest online games in the world, we have Fallout Shelter which we keep updating, and Elder Scrolls: Legends. Anyone who has ever said 'this is the future and this part of gaming is dead' has been proven wrong every single time. We like to try it all. For a long time we wanted to try a multiplayer game and we had this idea. We shouldn't be afraid. We should try it."

Well, no one's saying that it's not important to diversify (but is anyone else saying Elder Scrolls Online is one of the biggest online games? Can we get a source on that?), so when he puts it that way, it makes plenty of sense. But still, we’ll have to see how Fallout 76 actually plays before we breathe easy. I doubt it will be anything as awful as, say, Star Wars Battlefront 2 or anything, but you can understand why there’s still lots of caution.