We tend to like classifying things when it comes to describing games initially, mostly because it’s easier to call a game an “online survival title” instead of “a multiplayer game with a brusque survival mouthfeel that melds with small-scale multiplayer and finishes with a bright, crisp narrative aftertaste.” But when you try to decide the Fallout 76 sub-genre, don’t use survival according to Todd Howard.
Howard seems pretty adamant about the topic purely because he wants to ensure Fallout 76 isn’t classed with some of the more bad apples of online survival gaming. “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,” said Howard. “If you think about the survival modes we’ve made in Fallout 4, it has that vibe.”
This point extends to the bad behaviors inherent in the example survival games, where new arrivals can get decimated by stronger players. “That’s not fun,” he continues. “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.” To that point, Howard alludes once more to PvP protections mentioned earlier such as killed players not losing their items or progression.
Ultimately, Howard wants to focus on the surprise interactions that can spring up when strangers meet each other in-game. “You don’t know what’s gonna happen when you run into somebody else. That interested us greatly from a design-mood standpoint,” he explains.
Our Thoughts
…so it’s an online survival title that could likely be designed intelligently and with understanding that open PvP games can often be like running blenders if there aren’t controls in place. It’s okay to call Fallout 76 an online survival game if the devs have successfully include smart PvP protections.
Source: The Guardian via PC Gamer
Related: Multiplayer, News, Survival SandboxRelated: Fallout 76
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