Did Fallout 76 launch too early or just in time to be saved?

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  You won't find many human NPCs in the wasteland, but there are plenty of deadly robots. [credit: Bethesda ]

There's a famous quote around the game industry often attributed to legendary Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto: "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad." That may have been true when he said it, but it seems a little outdated in today's "launch now and patch it later" game industry.

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

Fallout 76 was savaged by critics (including our own) at launch for widespread glitches and half-baked content. Looking back, Howard now says he and his team knew "even from the beginning this is not going to be a high Metacritic game."

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