Fallout 76's art director "had to fight really hard" so Bethesda would make the MMO's map bigger than Skyrim's

In the Bethesda-era of the Fallout series, no game has had a bigger map than the MMO spinoff Fallout 76. While most didn't really like the game at launch (our GamesRadar+ review gave it a 2.5 back in 2018), it's grown in popularity over the years and now sits at a 'Mostly Positive' rating on Steam. And one of the reasons players are more fond of it now is partly due to just how damn big it is, with it only getting bigger with every new expansion. But even at launch the game was touted as being "four times the size of Fallout 4," but it turns out that almost wasn't the case.

At a 2025 Game Developers Conference (GDC) panel attended by GamesRadar+, Fallout 76 lead artist Nate Purkeypile revealed that they had to fight to make the map just as big as it was. "Fallout 76's map was huge; it's actually even bigger than Skyrim, and that was something I had to fight for really hard from the start," Purkeypile said, explaining, "I knew it was a game people were going to be spending a lot of time in, and I wanted to capture that epic feel of the West Virginia wilderness." Making a bigger map for a game designed to be played near-endlessly seems to be a given, but it's interesting to hear that Bethesda was originally in favor of a smaller version.

Purkeypile also talked about how he felt about the game's reception at launch, saying, "even though the game had a rocky launch, people liked the map. It was kind of nice to hear 'hey, that game sucks, but the map's pretty cool'. I did my job."

Speaking of open-world survival games, the Minecraft developers recently said that the game won't be going free-to-play, saying, "It doesn't really work with the way we built it."