Since its rocky launch back in 2018, Bethesda’s Fallout 76 has seen a number of updates -- both large, small, and fundamental. The always-online multiplayer but still very much Fallout began with a weird rule that saw its depiction of the Appalachian wasteland as one where no other sentient NPC humanoid would roam. A deviation born from the fact that other players were roaming the wasteland. So, if it moved it was real.

That all changed though, the Wastelanders update in 2020 added factions, NPCs, and a story that involved a diverse collection of characters. That first stark and isolated outing beyond the Vault no longer exists, playing Fallout 76 in 2021 is a very different experience. Continual updates over the past year have changed things even further, bringing new things to the table like seasonal rewards, the arrival of the Brotherhood of Steel, and more bug fixes that you’d think were possible.

Fallout 76’s journey to where it stands today, a first-party release playable on Xbox Game Pass, is a long and interesting one. And with the latest addition to the game being the customisation and mod-focused Fallout Worlds update, that journey is showing no signs of slowing down. With Fallout Worlds the team at Bethesda are tapping into the very core of the franchise and Bethesda Game Studios.

Building The Foundation of C.A.M.P. Fallout Worlds

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“Fallout Worlds is something we've been working on for quite a while,” Bo Buchanan, Fallout Worlds Lead at Bethesda Game Studios says. “It's an initiative to bring customisation to Fallout 76. There's mods in all Bethesda games, and there's customisation in all Bethesda games, so it's an important part of who we are. But, Fallout 76 is different. It's not the same as a lot of the other games we’ve made.”

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"There's mods in all Bethesda games, and there's customisation in all Bethesda games, so it's an important part of who we are. But, Fallout 76 is different."

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“Everyone's playing together on the same servers so we had to figure out how to bring customisation to 76 in a way that is easy, and makes the most sense for our fans,” Bo continues. “And most importantly, that it doesn't cause massive problems that they have to then deal with. Developing Fallout Worlds was basically trying different things, and figuring out the right way to bring customisation to players.”

Fallout 76 is always online, it’s not really an MMO but it also is. It features a narrative thread that spans a vast open world, and in terms of the story it plays out like what you’d find in Fallout 3 or Fallout 4. But on a larger canvas. With multiplayer there’s opt-in PVP, the ability to group up and tackle challenges, explore together, build together.


Fallout Worlds presents customisation across a wide range of settings, with Fallout 1st subscribers able to create their own Private Worlds they can share with friends. With access to game-changing settings they can adjust build limits, the weather, and things like the damage they take. Or, something seemingly innocuous like jump height.

Public Worlds, curated by Bethesda, will be open to all players. The first of which is live now, offering up an Appalachia that lets them build wherever they want or the ability to create a towering skyscraper made out of recycled and probably irradiated wood.

“This first patch we call ‘The Framework’, it's the thing we need to set expectations,” Bo Buchanan explains. “Where, [as a player] I can go into my own world and I can change all of these settings and my progression is different from Public. Understanding how that works, how there’s Worlds that are different from the Public Worlds. My save, my concept of who I am in Adventure Mode is safe while I'm going into these spaces.”

“Trying to figure out the right way to do it, and then trying to come up with something that's inclusive, was tricky,” Bo continues. “If you've ever tried to put mods in any game, usually it's a kind of a crapshoot. You have to come up with different ways to do it, you try stuff, sometimes it breaks. You're trying to explain it to your friend, here's a list of all the things, make sure you install them this way. Right now Fallout Worlds doesn't work like that. You just hop in, you set some stuff and you start playing. And you immediately get a new experience in Fallout 76.”

But Wait, Is Fallout Worlds the First Step Towards Game Changing Mods?

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“There's a reason I call this The Framework,” Bo responds when asked about the potential future for Worlds as a tool set or place to support traditional mods. “We had to have a safe and appropriate way to start isolating things so that we can add customisation. The first thing you do, anytime you talk about mods, is work out where you’re going to get or access your saves and reload them. Some of these saves are going to work, some of these saves aren't.”

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"This first patch we call ‘The Framework’, it's the thing we need to set expectations."

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“With Fallout 76, there aren’t saves that you have access to, so what do we do when there are no saves that a player has access to?” Bo adds. “We have to come up with some way of dealing with that. We have split character progression and reloading available in Fallout Worlds. We've spent a lot of time trying a lot of various things, and this is the first thing that we’re able to get in front of people. We are very much looking forward to showing and talking about other things in the future. But at the moment, I can't say anything else.”

Okay, so that’s jumping the Plasma Gun a bit. With the Fallout and Skyrim mod scene providing a thriving platform for players and budding creators -- going as far as giving them the ability to create entire games both old and new and have them playable -- it’s worth setting the scene for where Fallout Worlds fits into the larger modding Bethesda games picture. Even though having 30 settings to mess with can and does fundamentally change the Fallout 76 experience, across a wide range of playstyles, this is only the beginning of more ‘modification’ to come.

Wasteland Tinkering 101

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With Fallout Worlds you have direct control over the weather, covering the entire map in one giant Radstorm or Quantum Storm. You can set the level of damage you deal, how much damage you take, remove the need for power, expand C.A.M.P. sizes, and a lot more. Infinite ammo. All born from the team testing different settings to see what worked versus what broke the game or could potentially crash a server.

“One of the settings that ended up adding more than we initially thought was the weather effect stuff,” Mark Tucker, Design Director on Fallout 76 adds. “At first it was this idea, and we weren’t sure if we could do it. One of the designers was able to get some weather stuff in Worlds and then they started adding more and more effects and it was very cool to see. There was some uncertainty as to whether or not it was a viable option, but I'm really happy with the options we've provided. Fallout Worlds has really distinct weather options that make it feel very different from Adventure Mode.”

“We wanted to try to find something for everyone,” Bo Buchanan tells me. “When we were looking for settings, we didn't want to just go only builder or another way. Regardless of what type of player you were, there should be some interest. And we also tried to build it in a way that it provides more knobs than you would think. An example of that is the C.A.M.P. budget and C.A.M.P. radius, which goes up but also goes down. We had lots of conversations internally -- who would want the C.A.M.P. budget to go down? The answer was, I don't know, but we should put it there and see what people can do with it.”


“Players always surprise us, they come up with interesting and cool things, one of the pillars that we have is that we want to try to put as much power into players' hands as we possibly can, as long as it's safe,” Bo continues. “As long as you're not completely corrupting your character where you can't get around it or breaking the experience for other players. If you're okay with your frame-rate dropping because you've cranked everything up to 11 to get a good picture of a house or a good picture of the C.A.M.P. that you made -- and that was the only thing that you cared about. That’s fine. We'd rather allow that than not allow it because you're getting to make your choices, and you're getting to customise 76 and make it what you want.”

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"When we were looking for settings, we didn't want to just go only builder or another way. Regardless of what type of player you were, there should be some interest."

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As a customisation tool the team working on Fallout 76 are conscious of Fallout Worlds being something, like modding, that requires an understanding of how the game works. How it feels, how it plays. So even though the interface is clean and simple, choosing one option over another can have a profound effect. Being able to tinker with settings whilst still in-game adds a distinct creator feel, and a very cool way to find out exactly what double damage looks like.

A Playground for Players and Developers

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For this version of Fallout Worlds a lot of settings were tried that didn't make the cut, some of which the team hopes to get back to soon. But it’s also a tool-set that the team at Bethesda plans to use as it figures out how to expand and grow the new mode. Plus, potentially influence the main game.

“I think the cool thing about Fallout Worlds, and this is something it's just starting to sink in, is that we might be able to use it as a tool to test out crazy ideas and things,” Mark Tucker says. “It's an interesting playground for designers, and developers, and some of those ideas we could bring over into the main game. If the fan reaction is positive and we have a lot of strong data through our various data monitoring, it might be a good argument for us to consider pulling something across to the main game. It's an amazing tool in that regard, it just went live so we'll see how that goes. I wouldn't be surprised if there are takeaways from the first batch of settings that we put out that make us think about changing Adventure Mode.”

“One of the reasons there's only 30 settings is that it takes a long time to test settings, and we didn't want to double down or head in a direction that we thought was fun,” Bo Buchanan adds. “We want to see what the community wants. What do they find interesting, do we need a server browser or do we need this other feature? Do we need to overhaul how you join a Custom World? There's lots of areas we could spend our time on, and really, we'd rather not guess what the right direction is. We'd rather have people show us how they want to play Fallout Worlds. Do they like the building? Do they like PVP? Do they like making the game harder or easier? What's valuable to them. And then we can start leaning into those directions. Of course we have our own plans and we have stuff that we want to look into, but we want to make sure we're not going too far down a path that our community isn't behind.”

That Age-Old Aussie Question… Private Servers

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With Fallout 76 having an instanced player cap of 24 roaming the wasteland and the introduction of Fallout Worlds one can’t help but wonder about the possibility of private servers. For those of us in Australia, having something local to connect to has always been a concern.

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“We want to see what the community wants. What do they find interesting, do we need a server browser or do we need this other feature? Do we need to overhaul how you join a Custom World? There's lots of areas we could spend our time on, and really, we'd rather not guess what the right direction is."

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“We have talked multiple times about how to have an always up server that you could have access to and your friends could join,” Bo concludes. “We do not have any plans at the moment to look into having you host your own server on your own machine, but we have looked at expansions to the private server tech that we have. If there's other ways to do it, to get people larger servers or those kinds of things, we don't have anything on the roadmap or anything that we could specifically point to. But we talk about those things a lot because the community, one of the things I see all the time is ‘give me a 24 person private server’.”

Fallout Worlds is live and currently available in Fallout 76.