Fallout 76's Creative Director Jonathan Rush & Lead Producer Bill LaCoste Talk Milepost Zero Update (Exclusive)
ComicBook was able to interview Fallout 76's Creative Director Jonathan Rush and Lead Producer Bill LaCoste about the game's upcoming update - Milepost Zero. Get ready to slap a brahmin.
It seems that every time it's asserted there's never been a better time to join the Fallout 76 community, Bethesda doubles down on improving the experience further – the team of developers who are seemingly constantly working on the live-service game are on a hot streak of content updates for the game, with the map's first full expansion Skyline Valley launching in June and now Milepost Zero on the horizon for September. Fallout 76: Milepost Zero adds several new pieces to the game's experience – from tasking players with setting up and defending their own Brahmin Caravans, building out highly customizable outposts, and introducing brand new Legendary Crafting methods, the game's next update is one that I feel fully embraces the spirit of the Fallout 76 community by celebrating the creativity players continually display.
All of these features have been undergoing their testing period in Fallout 76's Public Test Server, where reactions thus far have been fairly consistently positive to the changes. ComicBook had the chance to interview 76's Creative Director Jonathan Rush and Lead Producer Bill LaCoste about Milepost Zero's new content, where we started the conversation with the upcoming ability for players to craft their own Caravan Companies.
"Adding Caravan seemed like a pretty natural fit, because Caravan goes all the way back to Fallout, and 76 has its own unique Caravan company, the Blue Ridge Caravan Company," Rush states. "A lot of players probably noticed back when Skyline Valley was on PTS or even maybe close to when it just came out, "Hey, we can't build on this road!" That was on purpose because we were saving that whole Skyline Drive that circumnavigates the new region for the Caravan route. That's one way that it geographically impacts the new region, but it also adds a bit of strategy for players that want to do a lot of Caravans over and over, and they can build their camps near that road and maybe arm it with turrets to help out."
As for the part of the Caravan experience that both Rush and LaCoste are looking forward to Fallout 76 players experiencing the most, both of them agree: "Slapping the Brahmin."
The Caravan feature isn't all that's coming to Fallout 76 in the near future – the current PTS also allows players to test out the changes being made to the game's Legendary Crafting, which it's noted to me has been met with positivity by players on Discord and has already seen updates and changes to the new system to provide a better experience, as well as general combat rebalancing. Regarding these two points, Rush states, "I think it's going to positively impact the player experience. The combat rebalancing is really cool – I think it makes the combat feel a bit more snappy. It makes it feel a bit more clear as people can see those damage-over-time effects. I think it's going to embolden players to try out different builds just because they have a much better view on what's going on with the combat."
"The end goal of that, of course, is to be able to give players just a little light at the end of the tunnel so they're not completely relying on RNG for specking out their gear. So if they have a little bit more agency over what their gear is, for one, it'll let them make their build more effective. And two, it'll also maybe embolden them to try different builds since it's not so prohibitive to get to that piece of gear or that loadout that you want."
"I think the other element here too is because it's not as reliant on RNG, that's going to allow a lot of our newer players who come in who may not also have a lot of time to play, sometimes be able to earn and get the weapons that they've been looking for, at least the armor they've been looking for," LaCoste adds, further contributing to the assertion it's never been a better time to join the game's community. "We've also added the ability for you to actually scrap some of the legendary weapons this time around. You get a little bit of Scrip back, but you also have the potential to earn one of those recipes for one of those stars. So that again, gets into the point of where you're trying to roll for your own legendary weapons. You may get two of those stars that are really good, but one of those stars is kind of like, I don't really want that one."
"But if you've got the recipe and you find that recipe, you can roll into it now and it'll lock the weapon for you, but you've now given yourself a little bit better chance of getting the weapon that you were actually looking for or striving for. And like Jon said, this also opens up the opportunity to explore and try new load outs, because you're not so focused a lot of times on just having to like, 'Okay, I'm just working on my bloodied weapon and I just can't get that.' You'll get a lot more opportunity to explore and again, use your job board too to build out new load outs for your character."
My personal favorite feature currently in the PTS is Best Builds, a new social update that implements a system allowing players to submit, visit, and rate submitted C.A.M.P.s. Circling back to my earlier comment about Milepost Zero as a whole embracing the creative spirit of its players, it's this feature specifically that I feel encompasses this sentiment and reflects Bethesda's love of its players adding their personal touch to the map. When speaking about Best Builds, Rush notes that "It's exciting because it's like our first big feature that's a nod to our building community."
"The vast majority of our players are builders, and so giving them tools to be able to show off what they build to other players within the game was at the front of our thinking while talking about Best Builds. As a player, I build a cool camp and if I want to submit it into the best builds pool, I submit it and I add my imagery and that goes into the pool and Best Builds C.A.M.P.s on the maps are marked by a unique icon, so the players know when they go to the most is the Best Builds C.A.M.P. Somebody comes by your C.A.M.P., they like it, they can give you good old fashioned thumbs up," Rush continues. "C.A.M.P.s that get a lot of thumbs up will be featured on various worlds as Best Builds C.A.M.P.s, so that top tier list will fluctuate continuously as people make more and more C.A.M.P.s and visit more and more C.A.M.P.s. It should make the worlds feel a bit more populated and with really interesting C.A.M.P.s that people can check out. For the future, we've got a lot of things that we've been talking about ways we can continue to build off of this feature – adding favorite builders and whatnot. So we've got some plans in early talks, but nothing really ironed out to where we could go into it in much detail here."
"If I could expand on that just slightly. The technology behind building Best Builds was meant to be expandable, meaning we could venture into other designs and features that we thought would be suitable for this," LaCoste adds to Rush's response. "So it's not just isolated to what you're seeing right now. There's a lot of ability for expansion into allowing Best Builds to do things that we are not going to talk about right now, but certainly for the future that we want to put out."
Fallout 76: Milepost Zero is releasing in early September, leaving plenty of time for players to utilize the updates to create the perfect spooky experience in Appalachia ahead of Halloween, which Rush notes is his favorite time of year and that he looks forward to seeing C.A.M.P. builds for the holiday every year. "I consider July 5th onwards Halloween season, so hopefully I start to see those start popping up in the next couple months or so."
And because I simply couldn't help myself, I brought up the fact that players will be able to play as a Ghoul sometime in 2025 – because every day that passes on the calendar is just another day closer to Ghouldom for me. While this specific feature is, of course, still very much so in-development, Rush did give me a little nugget to hold onto until the next time I'm able to bring it up: "Ghouls are looking pretty awesome."
Fallout 76: Milepost Zero releases September 3rd.
