As Fallout 76 considers a second raid, Bethesda is plotting new loadout options so you can "play the game, not the UI"

Back before Burning Springs brought the Amazon Prime show to Fallout 76, Bethesda’s open-world survival RPG was already on a strong run of updates. While the introduction of playable ghouls was certainly a major milestone, I’d argue that its most dramatic addition was the Gleaming Depths. The four-player, multi-stage endgame dungeon is still Fallout 76’s most imposing and exciting challenge so far, and so when I sat down recently with creative director Jon Rush and lead producer Bill LaCoste, I was eager to check in on it. Along the way, we discussed the current state of endgame balancing, potential future raids, and plans to improve loadout options.

It’s been a year since the Gleaming Depths raid arrived in Fallout 76, and, looking back, Rush feels it was successful in providing a step-up in challenge for players, along with the extra power boost that came from its four-star legendaries. “I remember when that hit PTS and a lot of our popular streamers were on there, they said, ‘This is hard, this is awesome.’ They just kept dying over and over again. It was great.” He’s not exaggerating; the level of coordination required is akin to that of a Destiny 2 raid, and a far cry from the more casual action of most of Fallout 76’s other group activities.

As an overall experience, Rush mentions a few things the team has discussed taking steps to address, “such as encouraging players to play through the whole raid, or maybe dispersing the rewards across bosses a little more evenly, so it’s not so concentrated on one boss or another. They’re great lessons for us to learn, and if we do more raids down the road, they’ll be all the better for it.”

Rush has hinted at the possibility of more raids in the past, but as for what they might entail, he says it’s more important that they challenge players than whether they’re structurally similar to (or distinct from) Gleaming Depths. “As long as players are challenged, and they’re encouraged to play with their friends or in a group, and that they are greatly rewarded for being successful.”

New challenges often encourage build experimentation, and the rewards they bring only emphasize that further. But Fallout 76’s loadout options are rather limited, and so committing to overhauling your gear and perk setup can be rather scary. “I’d hate to set something up where it’s like, you have to be this [build], or else you’ll just fall flat on your face,” Rush remarks. “I’d rather let people see a new problem or something they need to overcome and let them choose how they want to do it.”

“We also want to figure out ways to make changing out loadouts – and changing full loadouts, meaning armor and things like that – a little bit easier for players, so you can do that without the time sink that is required for it,” LaCoste adds. He says the team has been having internal discussions about the issue; “I really do want people to have multiple loadouts and outfits that go along with the content they’re trying to engage in.”

LaCoste hopes this can help reward players for carefully selecting their strategy, armor, and weapons based on the environments and challenges they’re facing. “We need to make it a little bit easier and make some adjustments, either on the job board side, or maybe some other tools that we can add for players too.”

Ultimately, he says the goal is “to give people more time playing the game rather than dealing with their inventory – we’re very much against ‘playing the UI,’ we want to play the game. So we want to make sure that we’re restoring balance to the gameplay part of it and not the Pip-Boy part of it sometimes.”

“With that said,” Rush chimes back in, “you know, hypothetically, if there was another raid, maybe the challenges would be skewed a bit differently so that people would need to think of other ways to play through it or gear up for it, you know?” While there’s still not been any official confirmation that a second such challenge is coming, the regular winks and nudges from the team in developer updates would leave me very surprised if it doesn’t happen.

As for how well four-star legendaries have gone down, Rush admits that it “could have gone horribly awry,” but says he’s really pleased with what the design team created. “It does exactly what I was saying – it makes people think about the build they’re making, and gives them the options to try, or the agency to try, different ways of tackling these problems.”

The Fallout 76 community has mastered the art of finding the most broken builds possible, and that was very apparent with the launch of Head Hunts in Burning Springs. These high-end bounties appear as public events, and were designed to be tough even in a group, but it didn’t take long for people to start tearing them to pieces.

“We playtested the hell out of that in the studio with really high level characters, we thought they were specced well, and we were like, ‘Yeah, this is hard,'” Rush recalls. “And then it went live and players were just like, ‘brrr,’ and it’s done.” LaCoste laughs; “I’m actually not surprised that at least some of our high-level, min-max players went in and just destroyed some of the head hunts.”

Despite this, the head hunts have largely been a big winner, and the pair say they see plenty of action. But could they step outside of Ohio and across the main map? “We’d love to expand it,” Rush responds. “The great part about this feature is that it was built to where it could relatively easily be expanded, as far as more locations, more targets, and more mutations that get overlaid.”

Rush says the team is “keeping our eyes on it” and discussing possible ways that head hunts could evolve over time. As for whether they’ll spread to other regions, he says it’s possible. “Burning Springs really works because there’s just a lot of really awful people running around. So other places… maybe. If there’s a narrative to support it, I could see that working out, but time will tell.”