Bethesda's Pete Hines is someone we've talked to a fair bit in the past about all things to do with the company, and we talked a bit about Fallout 76 at E3, with Hines explaining that the sandbox nature of the multiplayer experience means fans can craft their own adventures themselves without direct intervention.
"I've already seen some of this chatter amongst fans about, you don't need us to create the factions, you create the factions," he explained. "If you want to have the Minutemen, then be a Minuteman, and recruit other people to be Minutemen who go around helping folk and finding settlements that need help and going to do that. If you want to be a trader, if you want to travel around the map, or you want to build an outpost where people come and buy and sell stuff, you should do that; you don't need us to craft those systems, the game will just allow you to do that. You go be who you want in this world."
"Again, it's up to us, and I think we're coming to a good spot where we can create enough rules and boundaries to allow people to have fun without all of the negatives, and I think when folks actually get their hands on it and see what it's like, they're gonna find 'I'm doing lots of quests, I'm leveling my character up, there's lots of different interesting places to explore, there's all these crazy creatures,' and there are these moments where you see other players where you get a little bit of drama. Am I going to help them? Are they going to help me? Are they hostile or are they not hostile? But that's up to those players, not us, to say [...] the player never really knows how any interaction with a human is going to play out."
Do you like the sound of this approach to multiplayer?