Fallout 76 devs say mismanagement and crunch led to buggy launch

gamedeveloper.com:

Developers who've worked on Bethesda Softworks' Fallout 76 are speaking up about brutal working conditions on the game. In a report at Kotaku, current and former employees described not only a brutal culture of crunch that preceded the game's launch, but also mismanagement and aggressive oversight that left some employees emotionally brutalized by their work on the game. As a result, Fallout 76 launched to brutal reviews that criticized the final quality of the game.

The core employee complaints collated by reporter Sisi Jiang speak largely to how overworked QA testers were forced to catalogue bugs that weren't fixed in time for the game's launch, but also highlight specific management questions that now involve Bethesda parent company Microsoft. 

If reports about upper management's dismissal of the needs of online games are to be delivered, a brutal crunch period seems to have been inevitable.

"Crunch is a failure of project management" is a popular adage among game developers in the last few years, but allegations in Kotaku's reporting seem to go beyond the establishment of timelines. If former developers' stories are accurate, Bethesda and ZeniMax upper management apparently refused to acknowledge the realities of multiplayer game development.

The company most well-known for critically-and-commercially successful single-player games apparently recognized the business case for a multiplayer Fallout title after mobile game Fallout Shelter grossed $100 million in revenue over four years. But when Bethesda's primary Rockville studio was tasked with making that new vision of Fallout, it was already primed for key problems.

First, Bethesda was apparently not interested in hiring and training new developers with online