During yesterday's Bethesda Game Days live stream from PAX East 2019, Bethesda Game Studios hosted a panel dedicated to Fallout 76.

　　Todd Howard, Executive Producer on the game, clarified that there were indeed lots of difficulties during the game's development (it was the first online game made by BGS, after all). Even so, the game sold very well and there are big plans for content updates in the coming years.

　　For us, Fallout 76 is a very, very new thing, for our studio. We knew we were going to have a lot of bumps coming out with the game, and we definitely had some, some of them much harder than even we anticipated. This was a very new and different project for us. We're still doing other things that are more traditional, as I would call them, Bethesda games.

　　But this one, to be honest, we had a lot of difficulties during development and sometimes those difficulties do show up on the screen. You never want them to. We grew the studio, we're four different studios now in North America, the one in Rockville, Austin, Dallas and Montreal, and this was a game that really took a ton of people across those four studios coming together to make work. And we knew launch was just going to be the beginning. We're really excited that the game actually did very, very well.

　　We have a huge, millions of players, a great player base in this game, we're getting tons of feedback. Our goal is to build kind of a Fallout platform. We have tons of ideas, it's been kind of a wild journey so far and we're excited, there's a ton of cool content coming.

　　[...] It's been an incredible experience. We will do anything we can to reward that, this year, next year and in the coming years we have big things planned.

　　Of course, the developers also talked more concretely about what's coming soon. The upcoming high-level Vault raids, due this Summer with the Nuclear Winter series of updates, have been confirmed to be instanced and meant to be completed by a party of four players.

　　Earlier than that, the Legendary 'Purveyor' vendor (currently scheduled to hit live servers on May 23rd) will allow players to break down Legendary gear to customize or reroll the stats. On the other hand, the Wastelanders series of updates is going to change the game dramatically, according to Todd Howard, when it ships in the Fall season.

　　On the horizon, the developers would also love to add some way for CAMPS to persist even when your character logs off the game, though there are engineering issues to be solved first in order to introduce such a feature.

　　In related Fallout 76 news, Bethesda also posted a blog article two days ago on what's coming in the very next update (Patch 8), chiefly a brand new questline.