Former Bethesda dev went indie in part because of Fallout 76’s noxious reception: ‘If you put out a game that people don’t like, the internet’s gonna treat you like you’re clubbing baby seals’

Fallout 76 has undertaken something of a redemption arc in recent years, but if you were around during its much-anticipated release you’ll remember that it, aside from being mired in all sorts of controversies, had some pretty serious issues despite a promising skeleton.

The masses didn’t exactly take it well, with project lead Jeff Gardiner getting yelled at in public and Todd Howard later admitting in a Wired interview that the team “struggled” to meet expectations.

Nate Purkeypile, who was an artist at Bethesda for 14 years, left triple-A development to become a solo developer. In a GDC talk last week, he noted that he swore off the big time partially because the response to Fallout 76 was so caustic.

“Putting out Fallout 76 was a tough thing,” said Purkeypile. “The internet can be really awful; even if The Elder Scrolls 6 is great, I’m sure there’s gonna be these hour-long YouTube videos and death threats yet again. So I didn’t really want to deal with that.”

He went to say the problem extends to much of the industry, and that solo development drew fewer angry eyes.

“If you put out a game that people don’t like, you know the internet’s gonna treat you like they’re clubbing baby seals … I was pretty sure that no matter what I didn’t put in a game, it wasn’t going to be anything like that with that level of exposure.”

The comment certainly resonates with all the recent, uh, discussion around Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ inclusion of a historical Black samurai. A clip of streamer FightinCowboy recently did the rounds after he shut down arguments in his chat, saying that “normal people don’t get upset about this shit.”

The conversation around the game got so big Trump advisor and Path of Exile 2 account boosting customer Elon Musk chimed in, triggering a swift shutdown from Ubisoft’s own Assassin’s Creed X account. Things haven’t gotten much more civil since 2018.

In a post on X, legendary game designer Hideki Kamiya, behind the likes of Devil May Cry and Resident Evil 2, added that the hate campaign against Assassin’s Creed was “pitiful,” lamenting that “regular folks” tend to stay quiet and weren’t nearly as visible as all the outraged commenters.

Shadows released seven years after Fallout 76, and despite having much better critical reception, seems to have attracted just as much or even more ire from players. While not directly comparable, both situations do speak to the ongoing prevalence of toxicity in online discussions, with Ubisoft developing an anti-harassment plan to keep its developers safe from infuriated players. I hope Purkeypile is wrong about the reception of The Elder Scrolls 6, but it seems a prudent time to prepare for the worst.