Bethesda Addresses Lack of Fallout 76 Cross-Play

Bethesda Softworks has discussed the possibility of bringing cross-play and cross-progression to Fallout 76. Todd Howard, the senior game director behind the Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises, has laid out the developer’s plans for these features in not only Fallout 76 but all future Bethesda games.

Bethesda Softworks' most recent foray into America’s post-apocalyptic wasteland has enjoyed a surge in popularity in the last month, as Amazon Prime’s well-reviewed Fallout TV series propelled the franchise into the spotlight. After its abundance of performance issues and online-only nature divided many fans at launch, Fallout 76 is now more popular than ever before, having recently achieved more than one million consecutive players in a single day. Since its release in 2018, continuous support and regular updates have fleshed out the originally sparse world, and Fallout 76 now enjoys a comfortable “mostly positive” rating on Steam.

While players can choose to traverse Fallout 76’s Appalachianwilderness alone, the franchise’s only multiplayer installment encourages cooperation, and competition, between players as they scavenge for supplies and construct camps to survive in the wasteland. However, Bethesda has just addressed the potential implementation of cross-play to Fallout 76, a feature that many fans have been calling for since launch to allow them to join friends on other platforms. Speaking to Kinda Funny Games, Todd Howard has revealed that cross-play is something the developers “would love to have” and “keep looking into”. However, it’s unlikely that cross-play will be implemented in the near future, as Fallout 76 “wasn’t designed that way from the beginning,” meaning the feature would require a complete overhaul of the game’s servers and databases. Similarly to Fallout 76, Bethesda’s other multiplayer behemoth, The Elder Scrolls Online, does not allow cross-play, but due to backwards compatibility, both games do feature cross-generational play within each