Hackers Have Already Found A Way To Cheat In The 'Fallout 76' Beta

Credit: Bethesda

It's a beta test, even if it's a beta test for a game that comes out very soon. But Bethesda warned us about all sorts of problems that might crop up in the Fallout 76 beta, and we're not short on them so far. One particularly interesting one straight-up deleted the entire beta file for PC players, forcing them to re-download the massive file and hope for the best. This one here isn't a bug so much as an exploit, though it might even rise to the level of "hack." Whatever we call it, it's clearly an early issue here.

It's called "speed hacking", and it essentially has to do with the way the game engine ties the speed of its physics systems to framerate. Essentially that means that by unlocking your framerate and playing on a powerful computer, you can get the game to move much, much faster than it normally does. Watch this Youtube video to see how it works:

It's not hard to see how this could be a major problem in all sorts of ways going forward, though it's a little unclear to me how it works server-side. If it impacts online gameplay in the way it appears to, it could theoretically mean that some palyers could zip around like superheroes while the rest of us are stuck in the mud.

Bethesda told Polygon that it's aware of the problem and that it will be fixed for launch. 

A normal Bethesda game is a kind of open book--a playground for modders as much as it is a playground for normal gamers. That means players have spent a whole lot of time figuring out how the game engine works, and how to change it. This is the sort of tweak that people have been doing for ages, and the sort of tweak that doesn't matter at all in the context of a single-player game.

Fallout 76, however, is Bethesda Softworks' first attempt to translate its traditional open-world gameplay to a semi-competitive online environment, mictrotransactions and all. And that puts a huge pressure on technical performance, bugs and general balance: things that Bethesda games haven't always excelled at. The developer is going to get a quick crash course on how to manage an online game, and it's going to be interesting.

This isn't the first of these hacks or cheats that we're going to see in Fallout 76, mark my words. The problem is going to be worse on PC but not absent on console, and it's going to be worse if some of the gaming world's more ambitious cross-play concepts come to fruition. At the less extreme end, it just means that things will get weird. At the more extreme end, it will mean that some fundamental systems don't really work. There are mechanisms in place meant to discourage griefers, but those could theoretically be made irrelevant by high-powered hackers. We'll see, I suppose.
