Bethesda has released a blog post about the state of Fallout 76 in 2020 and things are looking surprisingly good. While this year has been an absolute dumpster fire for the vast majority of the world, it seems that Bethesda is finally turning around the fortunes of the seemingly ill-fated multiplayer Fallout title.
Thanks to the update blog from Jeff Gardiner, the project lead for Fallout 76, we can see that the community has not only grown but has also been very busy in Bethesda's simulated post-apocalyptic wasteland.
In the past year, Fallout 76 has seen some of the biggest changes to the game since launch. New features and updates have included Wastelanders, Steel Dawn, Seasons, C.A.M.P. Shelters, One Wasteland and Daily Ops. All these have been free updates and have rolled out alongside those all-important bug fixes and quality of life updates. There was even an update that added a wheelchair into the game, after a fan request.
It's been a total turnaround for Fallout 76 and the detailed infographic in the blog, of which you can see a section below, shows just how many people have enjoyed these changes.
The other stat tells us that the Daily Ops were particularly successful with 4,243,783 completed, presumably helping players to earn those 299,002,901 Treasury Notes. They also killed a staggering 54,390,065 Scorchbeasts and racked up 4,741,936,147 Scorched kills overall. It seems that Appalachia was the place to be this year and Bethesda is no doubt delighted.
At the end of 2019, things weren't looking so hot for Fallout 76. After finally resolving the cloth bag fiasco, Bethesda no doubt hoped to catch a break but it wasn't to be. In October 2019 the much-derided Fallout 1st subscription service was panned for its terrible value. As if this wasn't enough it was then discovered that the private servers, one of the main selling points, weren't actually private and scrap boxes were deleting players' items. The studio rounded out the year by releasing an update that broke legendary armor and then discovering that hackers had found a way to steal entire player inventories in public servers.
This year the team behind Fallout 76 has really managed to turn things around and the game has gone from a much-derided buggy mess to a legitimately enjoyable title with a sizable player base. As Bethesda enjoys its success and relinquishes its "producer of the most broken game" crown, here's hoping that Cyberpunk 2077 follows a similar narrative. After all, who doesn't love a good comeback story?