Bethesda is working on a 'five-year roadmap' for Fallout 76

Fallout 76 alien in power armor — (Image credit: Bethesda)

UFOs filled with alien invaders have just arrived in West Virginia. Don't panic, I'm just talking about Fallout 76, which has entered Season 8 and is now filled with extraterrestrial encounters. Fallout 76's new 2022 roadmap also promises arena fights against robots this summer, expeditions to revisit The Pitt this fall (last seen in a Fallout 3 add-on), and a new region boss arriving in the winter.

That's a pretty packed schedule for the year, but according to Bethesda it's just the tip of the irradiated iceberg. Speaking recently to AusGamers, Fallout 76 design director Mark Tucker said they are working on a roadmap that will cover the next five years of the post-nuclear MMO.

"We have long term plans, and things get a little fuzzier the further we go out because we adjust and adapt as things show up and we see what players want and what they're doing," said Tucker. "But, a lot of my time right now is spent on planning that three and five-year roadmap."

That's a long look ahead, and a good sign for Fallout 76 fans that they won't soon run out of new things to do in Appalachia. Since its release in 2018, the MMO has already seen the return of human NPCs with branching dialogue, the arrival of the Brotherhood of Steel, and the addition of customizable (premium) private servers. Not everything added to Fallout 76 over the years has been a success, however: along the way some additions to the game didn't stick, such as its battle royale mode, Nuclear Winter, which was taken offline in 2021.

Don't expect to hear the full details of what Bethesda is planning over the next five years, at least not anytime soon. It sounds like the developers themselves don't have it fully fleshed out yet.

"The three-year roadmap is a lot more understood and known," Tucker said. "At five-years it gets a little more fuzzy."

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.