"We can't just continue making the map bigger and bigger": Why Bethesda want to expand Fallout 76 inwards, not just outwards

Mark’s on holiday today, which means we can’t do our usual thing of workplace-bullying him into writing about Fallout 76 while we sit around in wingback chairs drinking Glenfiddich. But if he were here, he’d surely be thrilled to note this PCGN interview with Bethesda Game Studios creative director Jon Rush, who says he hopes the multiplayer RPG can become “thicker” in 2026. Oh my.

More specifically, Rush explains how following the major map-widening expansions of Skyline Valley and Burning Springs – the latter also serving as a tie-in with Amazon’s mostly decent Fallout TV adaptation – the hope is now to build up Fallout 76’s existing spaces, adding depth as well as breadth.

“For this next year, I really want our gaze to shift from the outskirts to inwards – make the game thicker,” he says, conjuring up mental images of a glowing and uncomfortably spicy roux. “New systems or new ways to engage with existing content, those are all very much on the menu for this year.”

There is some pragmaticism behind the shift in update tactics, with “technical considerations” precluding an endless widening of the game’s explorable world – “we can’t just continue making the map bigger and bigger,” as Rush puts it. But filling out and adding to the wasteland survival pursuits in more familiar locales has been tried before, with success. Rush points to last year’s loosening of the building rules for Fallout 76’s C.A.M.P. construction, which enabled more ambitious and creative settlement builds across a wider range of terrain, as an example of how such, erm, thickening makes for a better game.

The C.A.M.P. changes were, he says, designed to “allow people to get to engage with the world in more ways than they could before… [the updates] had a huge impact on our players, and the things that they want to do in the world.”

While it might therefore be a good long time before Fallout 76’s vault dwellers will be exploring any truly untouched patches of irradiated dirt, it sounds like Bethesda will be providing plenty more things to do on home turf. In the meantime, why not take a tour of Burning Springs’ lovingly wrecked Ohio with a gen-yoo-ayyyyyn Ohio historian? It’s what Mark would have wanted.