Fallout 76 is something of a rags-to-riches story, having been released in 2018 to a woeful reception but then hitting its stride a year or two later following copious updates from Bethesda Game Studios. It’s now a gem of a game, even if a lot of the die-hard Fallout fans in the community refuse to acknowledge its existence.
However, despite being a multi-platform multiplayer title with plenty to see and do, it’s missing one key feature: crossplay. For years, fans have cried out for Bethesda Game Studios to implement cross-progression, cross-save, cross-platform mechanics… Cross anything.
Phil Spencer, the Head of Xbox, is the latest Fallout fan to stress his irritation at the lack of these mechanics in the game.
It Drives Us Crazy!
In an interview with Polygon, Phil Spencer was talking about handheld gaming devices, and as part of that conversation, he was discussing the concept of having all your games in one place – saves and all. He then went off on a tangent, explaining how Fallout 76 ‘drives him crazy’ because it doesn’t have cross-save functionality:
Are all of my games there? Do all my games show up with the save files that I want? I’ll tell you one game that doesn’t right now — it’s driving me crazy — is Fallout 76. It doesn’t have cross-save.
That means that if you’re playing Fallout 76 on Xbox Series X and then you boot up your PC – or in this case, your handheld device – you’re loading into a different save because there’s no crossover functionality.
It seems like a staggering oversight for a game that’s supposed to be the sole Fallout experience Bethesda Game Studios is offering for the foreseeable future. It’s a no-holds-barred multiplayer adventure set in a vast post-apocalyptic world, but players are locked into their chosen platform and rendered incapable of exploring the wasteland with their friends if they’re on a different platform.
Is it easy to implement? Probably not. Is it something that would help fuse the Fallout 76 community and remove those digital borders? Definitely.
For more Insider Gaming coverage, check out the news about Phil Spencer’s dream handheld console
