After revealing post-apocalyptic online role-playing game Fallout 76[1] at E3 2018[2], parallels were drawn to survival games like Rust and DayZ. It's something Fallout 76 Game Director Todd Howard believes is an unfair comparison simply because it's not designed to have its players be killed and robbed of their loot, leaving you right where you started. Player progression, according to the team at Bethesda, Howard states, is more inclined to keep the in a similar mould of the survival mode of Fallout 4 rather than the likes of Rust and DayZ.
"We avoid the word 'survival', because people’s minds immediately go to DayZ and Rust and certain other games, and those comparisons are not really accurate for what we’re doing," Howard said[3] in conversation with The Guardian. "If you think about the survival modes we’ve made in Fallout 4, it has that vibe … Fallout 76, although it’s an online game, when I play it, I mostly still play it solo. We like those experiences as much as our fans do."
As for game progression, Howard opines that the game loop of most survival titles isn't what Bethesda is gunning for. Usually survival games have players being killed by others and their items being stolen, leaving them back at square one.
"No, that’s not fun," says Todd. "Well, it’s fun for whoever killed you, but not for you … Death is already bad enough in a game, because you’re losing time, that we didn’t feel we needed to add any further penalty. We wanted to make sure you don’t lose your progression."
The mantra of ensuring players don't lose progression seems to be a common theme across Fallout 76's many features and perhaps the reason for...