Todd Howard Says Fallout 76 Isn't a "Survival" Game

Fans are, for lack of a better word, “apprehensive” about the upcoming online survival game, Fallout 76. While the Fallout brand has successfully been attached to some weird things (like board games and free-to-play mobile games), and seems like a natural setting for a online survival game, the genre simply doesn’t have many defenders these days. Fallout is still a RPG, and there’s nothing that quite breaks your immersion like a bunch of idiots running around in their underwear and teabagging your corpse.

But apparently it really rubs Bethesda director Todd Howard the wrong way when people call the upcoming game an “online survival game”. Not because it’s strictly wrong, but apparently it puts too much emphasis on the “survival” part.

Talking with The Guardian:

"We avoid the word 'survival', because people’s minds immediately go to DayZ and Rust and certain other games, and those comparisons are not really accurate for what we’re doing. If you think about the survival modes we've made in Fallout 4, it has that vibe… Fallout 76, although it’s an online game, when I play it, I mostly still play it solo. We like those experiences as much as our fans do."

This might come as reassuring to some fans, but it begs the question: if it’s not an online survival game, what the hell IS it? Because he seems to contradict the whole “solo play” claim later on when he talks about how it’s no fun to be killed by other players.

"Well, it’s fun for whoever killed you, but not for you… Death is already bad enough in a game, because you’re losing time, that we didn’t feel we needed to add any further penalty. We wanted to make sure you don’t lose your progression."

That’s also reassuring. But it also means I still have no idea what this game is supposed to be. I guess we’ll just have to keep waiting…