Bethesda Warns of Bugs in Fallout 76

Bethesda is known for two things: enormous, sprawling open-world RPG’s and bugs. And not just the giant radiated ones that wander the wasteland, but the kind that make horses report you for crimes in Skyrim or send you skyrocketing into the air when you’re smacked with a Giant’s club. Bugs are a defining trait, and for every content update their games receive, they get about 10 or so patches fixing the plethora of problems that the developers and QA testers weren’t able to stomp out before launch.

Fallout 76 is probably not going to be much different. Which is why they’ve decided to get ahead of the curve and just apologize now, in a note posted over Twitter, just before the beta is launched:
 

We all know with the scale of our games, and the systems we let you use, that unforeseen bugs and issues always come up. Given what we’re doing with 78, we know we’re opening everyone up to all the new spectacular issues none of us have encountered. Some we’re aware of, such as areas where performance needs to improve with lots of players. Others, we surely don’t. We need your help finding them, and advice on what’s important to fix. We’ll address all of it, now or after launch.

While it might be tempting to call them out on lazy design, it’s worth noting that catching bugs is kind of what Betas are for, so it’s hard to fault them for slacking off at this exact moment. And in fact, if you look at the comments, most people aren’t even talking about the bugs: they’re discussing the fact the game has a Battle Royale mode.

Oh, sorry, didn’t you know? The newly announced Hunter/Hunted mode is basically a battle royale. A bit different, but… close enough.

So I guess there are two bits of news in this article.