Interview With Marc Tardif & Jeff Gardiner Makers Of Fallout 76

For those who do not know Jeff Gardiner is the project lead of Fallout 76 and Marc Tardif is a studio director. Both worked on 76 Tardif working on the battle royal mode Nuclear Winter while Gardiner oversees all of 76.

Recently Fallout 76 added their own battle royal to the game.Tardif noted that a big inspiration of adding nuclear winter was games like Apex and Fortnite. “We all just fans of those games it’s what we’ve been playing. Our decisions primarily based on one of the desires to have a game mode within 76 that offered a much shorter play session than a traditional adventure mode session” said Tardif. The whole idea pretty much came from Todd Howard. The whole team has loved it so much they’ve showed up to E3 early just to get a few games in.

It’s no secret that when 76 had first launched not many people liked it. A big part has to do with the lack of NPC in it. “We knew when we took NPC out of the game that it was going to be a different kind of game. We wanted to focus this game on community and trying to encourage others to roleplay which we did see with fans who played the game” stated by Gardiner. They saw the opportunity to add NPC in the game again and it seemed to be because of the criticism at launch. It seems too that everyone in house is happy that the game is going back to its roots. “When I first saw those dialog trees in game I was like ya I personally happy they’re coming back” said Gardiner.

Even though this is all coming as a part of the year 2 content. They do have plans for a year 3 but not much thought has been given to it right now. “There definitely be content coming 2020” as said by Gardiner. He went on to say “We are going to commit to doing private servers at some point and also bringing mods into servers at some point too.” But don’t hold your breath on that because they don’t even have a date for that at all.

For Nuclear Winter there goal isn’t to sway people away from fortnite and apex at all. As a matter of fact they have it in there solely for the fans to enjoy themselves more. “We haven’t sought out to make a game that’s going to compete against apex or fortnite. All we wanted to do is create a battle royal experience for the players of 76” stated by Tardif. They still wanted to stay true to fallout when making nuclear winter to keep the players happy and not rob them from a true BR experience. You can still do just about everything you can do in the base 76 version into the BR portion of the game. They do plan to roll out updates for the game, but they are still unsure because of how early it is, and they want to see how the players react to it as well.

One struggle they often find is what kind of content to come out with. With doing what the fans would want versus what they think would be better for the game. “ A lot of times the problems are very evident but the solution are where the trick is” said by Gardiner. They believe making those kind of decisions requires a strong leader ship. They pride themselves in being confident in making those kind of decisions while at the same time being open to change.

They’re aware of backlash they got from launch of 76. But despite what people had said about it they still carried on and didn’t give up on it. “The criticism was hard and it was hard on the team but we’re not quitters we realised what we need to do to fix it “ said Gardiner. They want the fans to know that they do care about them and want them to feel rewarded for all the effort they put into it.

When wastelanders comes out in the fall it’s almost going to be a whole new game. So everyone will see all the NPC even when you come out the vault. They don’t plan on altering the original game at all this will just be added on to it. “We’re not going to remove or radically change the existing content.” said Gardiner. You’ll still be able to just everything as before. This mode is meant to bring new and old players back into the game.

For wastelanders the big lure is NPCs and the ability to make decisions. So whatever you do will affect the way people interact with you. One thing that’s important to note is that whatever you do in the game will only affect you, and no one else. So if you kill someone important in the story they’ll still be there for other players in the lobby to interact with. “No we’ve thought about that but with the fact we don’t want mark to buy the game and not be able to play the quest because you decided to kill the main NPC”. Said Gardiner. He then goes further on to explain

“We’re heavily investing in what’s called instanting tech. The first iteration of that you’ll see of that is vault raids we’re putting out late this summer. That’s going to allow us 1 to be able to have an NPC there and we’re both be able to talk to it at the time and see different things and hear different things. 2 once you go through a load door you’ll be able to go onto another area of the game that will be unique to you.”

Another big part of wasterlanders is that it will have companions. People you can romance with as well, even people who will hangout in your camp. Gardiner went on to explain how we will have companions but not fully because they don’t want everyone to run around with one. Especially if it’s a main NPC that could spoil the story.

When asked about aliens being in fallout 76 they were not allowed to answer it, so maybe we might see them later on in the game? Gardiner went on to say that “We’re fans of aliens and ancient life. There are certain things we don’t want to over do. We had Mother Ship Zeta for Fallout 3. We don’t want the game to turn into a game about aliens. I’m not saying that we won’t do anything like that in 76 in the future with the aliens but we want to keep that with a sort of cherry on top” said Gardiner

Lastly when asked if the Elders Scroll and Fallout share the same universe Gardiner had this to say “I don’t know if theres a meta world that someones keeping secret from me but I do not believe they are in the same universe.”

Fallout 76 has turned around a lot since it came out. And it seems like it’s only going to get better from here on out so maybe consider if you haven’t picking up a copy soon.