Fallout 76 has a hidden ‘developer room’, which as the name suggests is for the devs to test things – such as upcoming items for the game – and PC players have discovered and broken into this area.
Reports of the room first popped up on Reddit a week ago, and a video was subsequently posted on YouTube showing the room and its plentiful contents (as spotted by Eurogamer) – see the (re-uploaded) clip below.
The room contains a ton of items – apparently every single item in the game including the most powerful stuff – along with some goodies which haven’t even arrived in Fallout 76 yet. There’s also a human NPC by the name of ‘Wooby’ who is apparently there for the purpose of being a punch-bag (i.e. allowing developers to test weapons).
Plenty of controversy has erupted, as some unscrupulous players who have entered the room are allegedly selling some of the items they have pilfered on the likes of eBay.
Apparently Bethesda is now combing the player base searching for those folks who have managed to access the room, and is suspending such accounts. So be warned if you’re at all tempted to try and find out how to get into the area (we’ve seen hints of how to do it online, but we’re not about to share that here).
Room for improvement
The developer room is not a new concept, and has previously been a feature of Bethesda’s past games, such as Fallout 4, for example. But obviously there’s a big difference between messing with your own environment in a single player game, and cheating to get inaccessible items in a massively multiplayer title.
It’s one thing using some kind of developer room for testing in an MMO, but quite how Bethesda has managed to make it even remotely possible to be accessed by players is unclear.
At any rate, as you can likely guess, a fair bit of controversy has erupted over the matter. And Bethesda can ill afford any more of that when it comes to the MMO, which has recently been plagued with item duplication issues.
In the past, the game has also been dogged with accusations of it being too easy to hack, not to mention controversy over Bethesda’s refund policy.
In some more positive news, Fallout 76 was recently patched to provide both better performance and stability, with PC players receiving this host of fixes and tweaks before the console world.
Presumably some kind of patch will be coming fairly swiftly to seal off the method of accessing the developer room…
- Maybe you’ll play Fallout 76 on one of our best gaming PCs
