Bethesda wants to make Fallout 76 "thicker" in 2026, and that's exactly what I was hoping to hear

I really didn't expect this to be the case a few years ago, but Fallout 76 is by far the game I've poured the most hours into across the whole series. Bethesda has evolved its multiplayer RPG a long way from that roughshod initial launch, and these days it's absolutely packed with all manner of activities and a bustling community. I recently sat down with creative director Jon Rush and lead producer Bill LaCoste to discuss how the Burning Springs expansion has gone so far, and what the team's big goals for 2026 are. As it looks to the future, the developer has one of the most notorious criticisms of Bethesda games in mind.

'An ocean wide but a puddle deep.' It's a refrain you'll hear about many of Bethesda's games, from The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim to Starfield, and Fallout 76 has certainly been labeled as such over the years. There's a real breadth of things to do, from myriad side quests to numerous factions, relentless checklists of daily tasks, and a bucketload of public activities. Yet dig into any one of them, and you'll find the rabbit hole never goes that far down. Looking to the year ahead, Rush tells me he hopes that the team can change that.

"We have had a couple of successful literal expansions of the map, you know, making the play space bigger," he remarks, referring to Burning Springs and Skyline Valley. "For this next year, I really want our gaze to shift from the outskirts to inwards - make the game thicker." He gestures at an expansion in depth with his hands. As for what that might look like, Rush mentions, "New systems or new ways to engage with existing content, those are all very much on the menu for this year."

Burning Springs took us across the river into Ohio, while Skyline Valley introduced a new region in the south of the map that was previously basically dead space. You could even make a case for expeditions, which let us temporarily hop across to other locations like The Pitt (in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania). It's tempting to suggest the map should keep growing in size, and Rush says it's a possibility, but notes that there are naturally limits.

"We'd love to," he responds, "we have talks about that, and there are technical considerations that have to be taken into account there, so we can't just continue making the map bigger and bigger. There is a lot of space left on the existing map in the game that is unused, that maybe down the road we could open up if it supports the stories that we want to tell, and if we think players would have a fun time exploring those regions and building there and whatnot."

The loosening of camp-building rules has also made it easier for players to set down wherever they feel most at home without constant clashes for space. "A lot of the time what you were searching for was a nice flat piece of area that everything would snap to, where you wouldn't have any issues with placement," LaCoste comments. "Now, because we've relaxed that and allow you to collide and have free placement of those items, even in the air if you want to, there's a lot more areas for people to build in. You can actually find that vista you were looking for and build on it."

LaCoste says the rollout of these camp updates combined with the relaxation of build rules were designed "to allow people to get to engage with the world in more ways than they could before." He notes that it's "had a huge impact on our players, and the things that they want to do in the world."

Despite the vast majority of the new Burning Springs activities taking place in Ohio, such as the public group bounties known as Head Hunts, LaCoste says the team is happy that the rest of the map hasn't been forgotten. "We still saw a really good amount of world bosses being engaged with, and a lot of events in the non-Ohio region still being engaged with." He adds that it hasn't detracted from the existing space, which is good to hear for anyone who's picked up the game for the first time due to the Fallout show on Prime.

After hundreds of hours spent in Appalachia, having somewhere completely new to visit has felt like a breath of fresh air, and I wouldn't say no to more such map expansions. But I would certainly love to see Bethesda find a way to tackle that age-old criticism of each individual piece feeling shallow, and I'm curious to learn what that looks like as 2026 rolls on.