Bethesda released a 7-second video on Twitter of an interview at E3 explaining how the Fallout 76 stealth mechanic will work. Other players are visible on the game’s map, but once you enter stealth mode, your blip on the radar fades and then disappears completely.
On the surface, it seems simple enough. The map in Fallout 76 will constantly display the locations of other players to each other in order to make discovering other people a little bit easier, this much we knew already. But if you want to go undetected to ambush another party or sneak past a rampaging, murderous group, all you need to do is enter the stealth mode in the same way you do as the other Fallout games, and your ability to be seen on the map goes away. But it’s not that simple, as many have pointed out.
For those of you who like to play on the stealthier side. #Fallout76 pic.twitter.com/ZiaYZlE5K6
— Fallout (@Fallout) June 18, 2018
Perhaps the most straightforward response to the news came from Twitter user Cody Kerner, who said, “Gonna be walking around in stealth the entire time lol.” Therein lies the issue – no doubt countless players will use this mechanic to exploit the balance of the game, sneaking around everywhere and never coming out of a crouched position, defeating the purpose of the map markers altogether. That is, of course, unless Bethesda has come up with a workaround to this.
Despite being told quite a lot during Bethesda’s E3 conference, as well as in interviews and in the Noclip documentary about Fallout 76‘s development, there’s still a lot left unexplained. What little extra trickles we do get are also often large points of contention within the Fallout community, which strikes me as somewhat of a bad PR move. Perhaps Bethesda will add further clarification to how the Fallout 76 stealth mechanic works soon, and maybe even reveal more information beyond that. If not, we’ll just have to wait and see.
