Fallout Worlds is live now and we have a few extra details you need to know
Fallout 76 has scored a massive update today, with the release of Fallout Worlds, an all new way to play the game, but also change the game.
Now players can make the rules and explore new, customisable versions of Appalachia, where the sky, or at least 20 stories up, is the limit, check out this new trailer to get an idea of what is possible.
Fallout Worlds is broken down into two parts, the public worlds, created by Bethesda and free to all folks to enjoy or the custom worlds, that Fallout 1st members can make use of.
Public Worlds are curated and hand-crafted by the team at Bethesda Game Studios, showcasing a slice of the possibilities and experiences powered by the various customisation tools within Custom Worlds. Public Worlds will be available to all players as a rotating series of uniquely themed Fallout Worlds, each highlighting a new combination of settings available in Custom Worlds.
Custom Worlds on the other hand allows players to access a laundry list of gameplay settings and modifiers to truly make Appalachia their own. Change everything from combat rules and C.A.M.P. restrictions to weather effects and unique visual filters. For those who are not Fallout 1st members, if you have a friend who is, they can make a world and then bring you and up to six other players, for a total of eight, into the new madness. Below is just a small sample of these settings included:
Proximity Spawner – Spawn creatures around you during your game
Happy Builder – Construct platforms and structures in otherwise inaccessible areas and change height limit on settlements
Unlimited Ammunition – Combine unlimited ammo and no reload for an endless stream of destruction
Weather Effects Controller – Control the environment by enabling fog, nuclear radiation, or even Quantum Storms
Personalised Gameplay – Change PVP rules and difficulty settings
Gravity Settings – Enable ragdoll physics, turn on varying jumping heights, and turn off fall damage
We also had the chance to chat with Mark Tucker, Design Director, Fallout 76 and Bo Buchanan, Fallout Worlds Lead, Fallout 76 this morning, to learn more about this latest addition to the game.
Maxi-Geek: Fallout Worlds is opening up modding, or at least a very light version of it, to players of all skill levels, were there any considerations into making things easier for those players who didn’t understand maker type games, or was it a matter of adding in functions that would be useful, no matter the skill level?
Bo: Actually, both of those discussions, a good case study for that is the difficulty slider in the game, you’ll notice there is also damage received and damaged delt, and the conversation internally was why do both of those exist? Is the difficultly just lowering or raising the amount of damage you receive and deal and the answer was yeah, its one of the things it does.
But there are expert players who want to control and tune, how much damage they are receiving in other things and then there are players who are like, ‘I would just like you to make it easier’, for them it needs to be something that they can hop in and immediately deal with. So what we put in, we tried to make sure it was intuitive, as long as you were aware of what Fallout 76 was, so if you’ve played a little bit of Fallout 76, you’d figure it out easily and then we put somethings in there, I think one of the things we used internally was, what do you expect to be here.
Like if you were playing and I told you this was the feature that it was, what would you kind of expect as a user, to be something that we added and then we tried to add all of those. Except day and night, that we had to cut, because we just couldn’t get it done in time.
Mark: It is worth nothing that was a lot of settings that we tried that unfortunately didn’t see the light of day, we are shipping with around 30 and there were a lot more that we tired and more on list we’d like to get back to at some point, because it was a pretty big undertaking.
One thing I will add, in terms of usability and user experience is just that, if you are familiar with modding in previous Bethesda games, there is a lot of complexity, a tremendous amount and a lot of ways that you can screw it up, break your save and all that, so that complexity still exists in our system to, just in different ways.
Like the complexity of how we the structure of where we copy your character and now you have a clone of your characters for worlds, there is a ton of stuff that we are doing under the hood that is complicated, to the point that when we were discussing it and developing it, we would even get confused on things, because there was just a tremendous number of things under the hood, that we smooth over and try to make it really easy for the user. So, I am really happy with where the team landed and what we’re offering and how we’ve been able to take, what is generally a very complicated process, in changing our games, on top of making that work in a multiplayer game no less, so while it may not be as powerful as true modding, it does, I think, offer up a tremendous amount of variety and permutations to create your own experiences and we’ve done it in a way that anyone can do this, you just log in to the game, make some changes and try it out, if you don’t like that, change them again.
We will have to see what the fans say, but I am confident that we have made something that is really accessible.
Bo: I do want to call out that last point there, you can continue to change the settings, so when you make your world, you can turn settings on and off, you can move them around, it doesn’t create an all-new world, doesn’t wipe your characters and that highlights the ease of use an accessibility that we added.
If you create a camp that is so massive, that when you lower the settings down on camp size, the game will just tell you it can’t load your camp, so if you crank the settings back up, you can place down your camp again, so it won’t just break your entire game. That is important, because we want people to experiment and decide, if they want to keep the new settings or revert things to get their camp back, instead of just saying oops, camps gone, sorry.
Maxi-Geek: Fallout Worlds is a great new addition for long time players, but will the addition of Expeditions allow for players to venture out of Appalachia to create their own worlds, or will it be limited to the main world?
Bo: Fallout Worlds will progress with the adventure game, so you can think of Fallout Worlds as an extension to the game as it moves forward, so everything that comes to the adventure and new features they get, Fallout Worlds will just build on that and let users make use of that new stuff. Right now, the only limitation to that are the account unlocks, so earning S.C.O.R.E, Atoms, achievements, those kind of things are not possible in Fallout Worlds, at the moment, because if you are in your own custom world, you can set all these settings and give yourself a massive advantage over everyone else. So, while we haven’t enabled that here, we might bring it in, some point in the future, we are still talking about those things.
The other thing is that everything you do in Fallout Worlds, stays in Fallout Worlds, meaning that you can’t bring things back to the main game, so if you get a one-shot weapon, that will never go back to the main game with you. In Fallout Worlds you can be as wild, crazy or wacky as you want, but everything stays within Fallout Worlds.
Maxi-Geek: Fallout 76 has been growing and evolving ever since it first launched, with the Wastelanders update, then Steel Dawn and now Expeditions, was there always the goal of adding something like Fallout Worlds into it, like how did this even come to be?
Bo: Well, adding customisation to a Bethesda game is kind of a no-brainer, it’s something that everybody expects, that was literally one of the first questions that we got, like where are the npc’s and how do I mod it? So, while we had to spend a lot of time, making changes and improvements to the game that the players expect, before we could tackle something big like customisation.
We’ve told people this before, but we spent around a year and a half, prototyping, working through various things to try and find a way that is inclusive for an online game, to be able to start adding customisations tuff. All that takes time, it requires engineers to be available and not working on Wastelanders and all these other features that we’ve put in, to be set aside and it is something that we’ve always wanted to do, it was just a matter of finding the time to really do it right.
Maxi-Geek: With Fallout Worlds, are the tools available to players able to let them wild in their creations, for example, could I build my own 3d version of Fallout Shelter within the game?
Bo: We didn’t add support for a settlement system, like you can find in Fallout 4, as part of Fallout Worlds, we didn’t directly add any major features, we more just gave the ability to tune things that exist, in ways that players would find useful, with the possible exception of the weather and the proximity spawner, those are the closest to new features, but if you haven’t played around with that, I highly recommend you do, its like having an enemy chase you around the game.
Mark: It’s a constant horde mode, you are always being attacked, its really fun if you just want to get in and get instant combat.
Bo: Yeah, we don’t have the ability to do any of the settlements or building your own NPC town, or that kind of things, anymore than you can currently do within the camp system. You can though make your camp much wider, add a lot more budget to it, you can increase the height by like 5 times, making it like 20 stories tall now, it is ridiculous how tall you can go
