Was Fallout 76 launched too early or just in time to be saved?

A legend famous in the game industry, often attributed to the legendary Nintendo designer, Shigeru Miyamoto: "A delayed game is finally good, but a hasty game is always bad." That might have been true when he said it, but that seems a bit outdated in the game industry "now launch and correct it later".

I've been thinking a lot since listening to an IGN interview with Todd Howard of Bethesda yesterday about what he admits to being a "bumpy" deployment for Fallout 76 last year. In the interview, Howard acknowledges that it was "a very difficult development on this game to do it where he was," noting that "whenever you do something new like this, you'll know that you are going to have bumps. "

Fallout 76 at launch, criticized (including ours) by widespread criticism and half-cooked content. Looking back, Howard now says that he and his team knew that "even from the beginning, it will not be a very metacritical game".

This is partly because "this is not the type of game that people are used to at home," he suggested. But it's also because "a lot of these [development] the difficulties ended on the screen, "Howard said.[We knew] we are going to receive criticism about it, and it's largely a well-deserved criticism. "

In the same breath, though, Howard also suggests that this knowingly half-cooked launch was not a big deal for a game like this. Fallout 76, long-term. "All games like this … It's not how you start, it's what it becomes," he said. And Bethesda has indeed followed a series of updates that have kept a group of dedicated players in the months following its launch. "There is no strategy [for fixing it] Howard said, "The people who play it will come back."

We will do it live!

For many years, developers and publishers have been talking about the "minimum viable product" release cycle. You publish a game when it meets the minimum requirements to attract a core of early adopters, then you continue to fix it and update it to attract more players. This is an idea that has become increasingly prevalent as more and more gaming devices are connected to the Internet in a perpetual way in the developed world.

Howard's frank assessment therefore puts an important point on the issue that is at the heart of the modern gaming industry: what must be the quality of a game before it is " minimally viable "? On the flip side, how bad should a game be before deciding that it is not ready to see the light in its current form?

The recent history of the game offers many examples of both sides of the coin. In 2013, EAs SimCity The reboot has never been able to recover from a cluttered congestion launcher featuring big game problems.

Diablo III, on the other hand, faced his own problems of balance and server at launch, as well as his opposition to the "real money auction house" that underpinned the game economy But after a few extensions and many fixes, the game has managed to attract 30 million sales by 2015.

This kind of problem is not just about titles that are still online: even single-player games can get off to a rough start with post-launch attention these days. In 2016, critics and gamers widely felt that No Man's SkyThe ambition of has exceeded its current content (partly thanks to an excessive hype before the release). But the Hello Games team kept their heads down and focused on new features and major extensions that filled the size of the galaxy. Now, the game is considered a long-term success that can still attract 100,000 simultaneous players when launching new content.

The examples are almost too numerous to list. There are games like evolve, Paragon, Warrior-born, Artifact, and Lawbreakers who have never been able to reverse the situation after moribund launches. Then there are titles like Rainbow six: seat, For the honor, Final Fantasy XIV, and that of Bethesda Elder Scrolls Online which have been successful in the long run despite some early problems. Right now, the brutal launch of Bioware Anthem seems to be sitting on the edge of the razor between these two possibilities.