'Fallout 76' Mods: PS4 and Xbox One Support Is Part of Bethesda's Plan

Modifications (or mods, for short) are a huge part of the experience when it comes to previous Bethesda games like Fallout 4 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but what about Fallout 76? Supporting mods in the online-only game is a new type of challenge, but at a hands-on press event attended by Inverse, the developer explained how it plans to bring the feature to its latest game on all platforms, Xbox One and PS4 included.

“It is our intention to allow console players to experience mods as well,” Bethesda development director Chris Meyer said at a roundtable discussion.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that it could be a while before mods actually become available in Fallout 76. Speaking to GameSpot, Bethesda marketing chief Pete Hines suggested that mods might not launch in the new game until November 2019 (that’s a full year after the game’s official release date).

“It’s going to be a lot of work,” he said, “but mods and private servers are definitely coming.”

At the press event we attended, Meyer offered a similar forecast for mods in Fallout 76, explaining that Bethesda will need to develop a new system in the future before anything official can be announced. However, he did offer some insight into how mods will work when the do launch.

Here’s the full quote we got from Meyer:

“The intention is sometime after launch and we’re not giving any timeframe for that, but we will allow players to run private worlds, and then doing that also allows us to introduce modding as well. With public servers, there’s really no effective way to do mods, but with private words, our hope is that we’ll let players be able to mod to their heart’s content and build whatever world they want to do and then have other people come and join them. We’d probably then silo them off so you can’t take a character there, gear them up, and then go back to a public world, but that is the intention in the future.”

So it sounds like once Fallout 76 mods do launch they’ll be limited to private matches hosted by players who want to explore the wasteland with a select group of friends, rather than a couple dozen random strangers. That makes a lot of sense since allowing mods on regular servers would pretty much guarantee total chaos.

Assuming that mods do hit Fallout 76 roughly a year after the game’s initial launch, it could also give the game a sort of second wind and convince any remaining holdouts to try it for themselves. But if you’re a die-hard Fallout fan you’ll probably still want to pick up the latest title as soon as it hits stores next month — or even sooner.

Fallout 76 launches November 14. Pre-order it now to check out the beta later this month.