Even Deathclaws Can Be Your Companion Now | Fallout 76 Interview

0:05What's good, everybody? We are here at Summer Games Fest 2026, and we are here with two of my favorite folks from the Fallout 76 team. Gents, tell us who you are, what you do. I'm John Rush, Creative Director on Fallout 76. And I'm Bill LaCoste, Production Director on Fallout 76. So, how's the game doing? How's everything going with the crew and everybody coming into the Wastelands these days? Game is great. I mean, ever since, you know, the beginning of this whole this whole process of launching and getting through to to Wastelanders, Wild Appalachia and all the other updates, you know, 68 free updates up to this point.

0:39Things have been going great, you know, and then the onset of the the TV show, which, by the way, is amazing. Oh, my God. You know, we we we watched it multiple times and it's it's nice to be a part of all of that. but seeing the influx of new players come in, players who may have lapsed back in 2018, 2019, you'll come back in and go, oh, wow, this game has changed drastically. It's like, yes, we've been telling you it has. And finally you came back and saw it. So it's been great. And then also players who, or new players too, to even games in general who saw the TV show and were like, this is really amazing.

1:14And they're like, oh, wait, there's a game associated with this? Okay, cool, let's go check that out. John's got some funny stories. And I'm guilty of wearing my Fallout shirt on accident outdoors, you know, and someone will say, oh, I love that show. It's like, well, these are games, too. And they're just like, oh, really? And then they go check them out and they come in. And a lot of them have been a major part of our community now. They really enjoy what they see and what they're playing. And so, yeah, it's been it's been an amazing time. And all I can really say kind of at the end is that that gives us all of the energy, all of the passion, you know, to come in every single day and just try to make this better for players.

1:49Isn't it kind of wild to see it work backwards where folks are like, oh, there's a game too? Who knew about that? Talk to me a little bit about what the kind of reception has been on your end. Fallout has, as a brand, has become a cultural phenomenon. It's become a cultural phenomenon. It's everywhere. My dad, he's 82, and he has a whole wardrobe of Fallout clothes. It's his most favorite thing in the world now. And what he loves most is when he wears these out in public, right? Yeah. And somebody sees 82-year-old dude wearing Vault Boy and they're like, oh, you play Fallout. And he'll go, oh, no.

2:22But my son works on it. And they'll get on his phone and he'll call me and say, Jonathan, this person plays Fallout. And they'll hand the phone to them. I'm like, hey, how's it going? Yeah, so he's having a real moment, a real glow up for him. But it's been great to see. I love the more Fallout fans, the better. Your FaceTime minutes, I'm sure, have gone up a lot with dad in the world. Like, hey, go talk to my son who makes this thing. He had all of this electronics store following him around. They're like, yeah, it was great. That's awesome. So you just talked a little bit about the numerous expansions that have come out.

2:57The fans have been loving it. It feels like right now is even an awesome time about the new expansion that's coming out very, very soon. Is it out yet? It's out now. It's out now. Talk to me a little bit about Infestations because I think that's a really, really cool space for the game to kind of land right now. Infestations. you all out there know the wasteland can be a dangerous place a real dangerous place and six vault since vault 76 opened its doors many many moons ago we've had a lot of alt dwellers coming out millions in fact yeah 76 is a huge vault yeah people didn't know that it's really big and a lot of factions moving in too to kind of stake their claim in in in Appalachia that's been great you know but there's another group that's been kind of left out it's a group that's a little tired of being shot at, being looted.

3:46You know, I'm talking about super mutants, ghouls, these robots with bad programming, mole miners. I mean, they're not having it. They don't want these do-gooders in their Appalachia. So infestations, they're coming back and we've designated 40, about 40 unique spaces on our map as places that could be subject to possible infestations. So all you out there who've left the vault, you need to group up. And when you see an infestation, go take it out. And if you take out that boss, you have a chance to earn four-star legendaries. Infestation serves as the second major platform in our game to give players four-star legendaries.

4:28Not only that, but four-star legendaries unique to infestation. So get in there. There's lots of great loot in there besides the four-star legendaries and have some fun. So when you're kind of coming up with new content like this, how is the community kind of not only kind of informing you of like, here's a direction that we might want to go, but how is it then when you kind of see them start to kind of play through it? You're like, oh, here's some interesting things that we can tweak and play around with and kind of give them even more fun to be had. Yeah, so we're always paying attention to player feedback, right?

5:00Whether it's on like Discord or whether it's through video or really just paying attention to how they play and letting them speak to us in that way. Those types, that type of attention is, we really look at the broad strokes of that feedback to shape what our features are going to be, right? So for instance, going back to like raids, when we did Gleaming Depths, Yeah. The big beats we were taking away were, you know, hey, they want a bigger challenge and they want the next step up in power. It's like, OK, well, how about we give it to them in this form? And then that that that gave forth, you know, raids.

5:36And so four star legendaries and big hard bosses. Right. So with infestations, we got feedback. We got feedback right away. It's kind of funny because when we were playtesting this internally, you know, Bill and I have always championed ourselves as as as really adept Appalachian adventurers. We were like, gee, these are hard and players are going to love this. And players love it, but they also like two shot these bosses. So, oh gosh. So you all out there are much better at this game than we are. I mean, we're not bad, but you guys are just really, really good. So the first piece of feedback we're taking to heart is in the next patch, these guys are getting much, much, much harder.

6:14And in the patch after that, we're going to take the whole event and slow it down. We don't want players to have that sense of FOMO. We want them to have time to get there, to participate and earn those four-star rewards. We're going to slow it down and give them reasons to wipe these guys out, not just the boss. After all, the name of the feature is infestations. You want to get rid of the infestation. It's not named kill the boss and fast travel out of there. So, Hill, you have anything you want to add to that? No, that's perfect. I mean, even you and I, when we were playtesting, we fast traveled in and we're like, oh, wait, wait.

6:48Infestation completes. Like, shoot. so yeah but uh it's been it's been fun and and you know i've said before you know we wouldn't be here eight years later if we weren't listening to player feedback yeah and and players know that we're part of the community that we're invested in our live characters we have multiple live characters that we play all the time yeah um and so building up that trust and that reliability for us to know exactly what the pain points are for them to again trust us you know that that we know what what's going through their minds and what they're asking for and that we can we can execute on it and get it fixed.

7:19I think it's super important. So yeah. One of the things I think is so smart that you all do is you find really good ways to balance out folks who are the lifers and the newbies and figure out that good balance in between by figuring out really smart ways to kind of keep everybody level set, not only in kind of the ways that you run into an encounter and folks can then, you know, be at level, but still feel like they're competent, but also find good ways to be able to kind of find the folks who are like, I want the craziest loot and also want to find good ways to do that. Talk to me a little bit before we talk about future stuff about like how you've all continued to to figure out the good sauces with that so as players of the game you know there there are things about this game that we want that we love i wish there was a specific formula that said you know here's how you here's how you appease all the different player types you go down this checklist multiply it by three and that's it every time and it works but it's not it's a it's it's these are decisions made they're emotional decisions made out of like i want and i love and i need right and and they're coming from the hearts, our hearts of players.

8:17We are players and we represent that community as developers. So it's a very organic process, looking at those broad strokes of feedback, seeing what kinds of things the game could use and figuring out how we want to present those to players, to players like ourselves, to players like you out there, and then factoring that across a timeline to present to players as a story across a year. Badass, badass. Before we let you go, because it's almost time and it's almost the end of the show, because I know everybody has to get on a flight and go home, get some sleep. Talk to me about the future of 76 because I know it is very, very bright.

8:53We've got two exciting things coming. Bill's going to go first. Yeah. So I'm very excited to bring this to you all. So we have current gen, Xbox Series X, NS, and PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Pro. Bill's coming to flight pretty soon. Ooh, nice. To everybody to check out. And that means in the future, they'll be able to see things on PTS as well. So players will be right there alongside their PC friends playing all the PTS stuff and getting a good glimpse of the new stuff coming. That's rad. Yeah, so very good. And then again, in the future, that allows us to, I'll keep it brief, allows us to optimize for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and then the current gen projects as well, and then our platforms as well.

9:35And we have a lot of things lined up in terms of just performance and visual fidelity improvements going forward for those machines. So it's very excited about it. That's going to be great because then you get a whole bunch of new guinea pigs to be able to kind of figure out, you know, what's the next things you want to do and kind of best ways to kind of make the players feel happy about all the goodies there. And John's got a really good one. Oh, yeah, let's get it. Also coming to PTS very soon, very soon, and coming out to players later this year towards the end of the year, a feature that has been long requested in Fallout 76.

10:09Imagine an Appalachian wasteland Where your camp pet Becomes your camppanion And can follow you around Appalachia and adventure with you And quest with you and give you companionship And also fight with you You can tell it to sit, you can tell it to speak You can tell it to come You can tell it to stay You can say guard me, you can tell it to kill You can level up pets They get perks as you level them up We're talking dogs, cats hogs and death claws later this year can't pets simply become pets and super beasts no Bill can I tell it to attack Paris Lily absolutely absolutely best expansion best stuff ever that's what you heard you heard it here second I'm sure everybody else said it as well but it's great that you have to hear it here on Spawn on Me which is awesome Awesome.

11:07Gents, thank you so much for the time. It's always great to be able to see you and talk to you. We got to bug you to come on the show proper and say what's up. We were just talking about you. Get out of my shot. Anyway. We'll see you all in game. We'll see you all in game. We'll see you soon. And we're getting up out of here at the Summer Games Fest for 2026. Much love to you all. We'll see you all soon. Keep on 76 now. It's really, really good. Peace. Later.