Fallout 76's Big Human NPCs Update Delayed To 2020

Fallout 76's Wastelanders update, which was to add human NPCs with dialogue and quest-lines more like a single-player Fallout game, has been delayed. In an post on its website, Bethesda explained that the update is turning out to be rather ambitious, and as a result it's being pushed to Q1 (January-March) 2020.

"We're excited about how Wastelanders is coming together but it's going to need more time to be the best, most polished update it can be," the announcement states. "Wastelanders is turning out to be one of the largest expansions we've ever done, and it changes the entire world with human NPCs returning."

The announcement goes on to lay out a roadmap for future plans. Those include reworking the Atomic Shop and Challenge and reward systems, while maintaining a careful approach so that players can't buy a competitive advantage. Bethesda says it is also working on quality-of-life improvements for 2019, along with more new events, the perk loadouts, Legendary Player system, and public test server.

Coming much sooner than all of those will be the addition of private servers. The company says this is the top-requested feature, and it's coming next week. The ability to mod your private worlds will be added in a future update.

Fallout 76 had a rocky launch and was met with largely negative reviews, including GameSpot's review which awarded it a 4/10. One chief criticism was that the lack of NPCs made the world feel sparse and inconsequential, which the Wastelanders update aims to fix. In the meantime, Bethesda has been releasing updates fairly regularly, adding features like a battle royale mode and raids.