Bethesda thanks the community for Fallout 4, outlines schedule for updates

If you have been living under a bridge near a river full of radioactive water, you might not have realized a small title called Fallout 4 dropped last week. Wait, maybe that means you have. Anyways, the folks at Bethesda are extremely grateful to the gaming community for making Fallout 4 their largest launches and one of the largest ever in the industry. They have posted an open letter on Bethesda.net thanking the community and outlining some details on how updates and patches will work going forward.

It looks like most of the love will be for the PC crowd, as the plan for future updates will follow the usual Bethesda plan of beta patch on Steam, full release on PC and then full console releases. This has served them well I the past, and means that everyone will get theirs in a timed roll-out. They did say that they expect to utilize more frequent, smaller patches rather than large more spaced out updates. The first beta patch will be on Steam next week, so expect to see the details starting to come out soon.  Read the entire letter after the jump...

Thanks and Updates
Thank you! We can't say it enough- thank you for the amazing support you've given us. We're incredibly blessed to have so many incredible fans. You've made Fallout 4 not just our largest game launch ever, but one of the industry’s. It's beyond anything we hoped for.

Seeing and reading your stories has given our whole studio immense joy. It's amazing to see what you've done with the game, what you've discovered, and what you've built! We know there's even more to come; the game is full of hidden gems and ways it can be played.

For some, the freedom the game offers can be overwhelming. We know the game throws a lot on you at once, so take your time. There are many moments of “How does this work? What do I do to survive?” and that’s how your character should be feeling as well. Those that push through should be able to look back at who they were when they stepped out of the Vault and say, “I made it. I understand this world now and it’s mine.”

It's true that the freedom our games offer you can lead to unintentional consequences that are sometimes bad, when the game combines too many unexpected elements at once. Given the scale and complexity of the systems at work, especially when allowing you to build your own settlements, we're happy that Fallout 4 is our most robust and solid release ever, and we'd like to thank our amazing QA staff who worked as hard as anyone to break the game so we could fix it during development. But a hundred testers will never replicate the many millions playing the game now, and we're hard at work addressing the top issues.

Our process for updating the game will include releasing a beta patch on Steam, followed by full release on PC, then release on the consoles. This process has worked well for us in the past and allows us to get more fixes out faster. Expect to see more updates, that are smaller and more frequent, than a few big ones. This allows us to make sure each fix is working right, as any change can have unintentional side effects in a game this huge. We expect the first beta patch to be up next week.

If you have feedback or issues to let us know about, contact our support staff here.
Thanks again for everything. We look forward to our continued journeys together.

Bethesda Game Studios