Bethesda revealed loads of new content and information about Fallout 76 during its presentation at E3, the most divisive of which was the announcement that the game would feature online multiplayer. Naturally, this panicked many gamers that were concerned that the ‘age of single-player’ Fallout games was at an end. That is officially not the case, though it hasn’t stopped players from worrying about the online multiplayer components of Fallout 76 being ‘forced’ onto them. According to Bethesda, though, multiplayer in Fallout 76 won’t be what everyone expects it to be.

In a recent interview with GameReactor, Bethesda VP of Marketing Pete Hines discussed the multiplayer aspect of Fallout 76, stating that it isn’t at all what people are expecting it to be. “When I play, I’m not on the schedule of a lot of people that I work with or my friends or my kids, so I end up playing any kind of game that’s online by myself anyway,” Hines said. “I’ve played Fallout 76 almost entirely that way myself because that’s kind of my preference, and I sort of want to see what that feels like.”

But the truth is this game is not what everybody expects or immediately jumps to. I understand when you hear ‘online’ or you hear ‘multiplayer’ or ‘PvP’ that people jump to ‘well, it’s an MMO’ or ‘it’s a free-for-all where everybody’s just shooting each other’ or ‘I’m gonna get griefed constantly by other players’. And the fact is, this just doesn’t fit into the mould of anything else, because that’s what Bethesda Game Studios does.”

When the subject of single-player games came up in the interview, Hines revealed that he was comfortable with where the studio was in terms of said games. “Well, first of all, as a publisher I am extremely comfortable with where we are in single-player games, between all of the stuff that we did last year and all of the things we just announced, right,” he said. “We didn’t just announce Prey last year as a wholly single-player game, but then we just released brand new DLC for it and a ton of free updates for the game. Wolfenstein is a single-player game that we wanted to add co-op to because we figured with the twin sisters, rather than her just being AI, that would be cool […] Rage 2, Doom Eternal – all of these games are embracing and doing single-player, as is Fallout 76.”

So, it sounds like Fallout 76 multiplayer is absolutely not going to ruin Fallout as we know it. It’ll simply add some extra flavor, and players can put as much or as little into it as they want to. Fallout 76 launches for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on November 14, 2018.

So, thoughts on Fallout 76 multiplayer? Do you plan on spending a lot of time with it, or will you ignore it in favor of a single-player experience? Let us know in the comments section below, and as always, stay tuned to Don’t Feed the Gamers for all the latest gaming and entertainment news! Don’t forget to follow DFTG on Twitter for our 24/7 news feed!