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Case Study #296 — 300 Software Failure Case Studies

Fallout 76 buggy launch

Bethesda's online survival game Fallout 76 launched riddled with bugs, from game-breaking glitches to duplication exploits, drawing widespread criticism and refund demands.

2018-11
When it happened
Technology
Sector
#296 of 300
Ranked by documented impact
01 — What Happened

The damage was public. The root cause was preventable.

Bethesda's online survival game Fallout 76 launched riddled with bugs, from game-breaking glitches to duplication exploits, drawing widespread criticism and refund demands.

Technology
Sector affected
2018-11
Date of the event
#296
Rank in the 300 Software Failure Case Studies
2
Distinct root-cause clauses identified below
02 — The Root Cause

What the software actually got wrong

The game reused and adapted an aging engine and codebase not originally designed for the persistent always-online multiplayer world Bethesda built on top of it, and inadequate testing let numerous serious bugs, including ones letting players duplicate items or break the game's economy, ship in the release version.

01Root Cause

The game reused and adapted an aging engine and...

What Happened

The game reused and adapted an aging engine and codebase not originally designed for the persistent always-online multiplayer world Bethesda built on top of it

How Requs AI Catches This

Requs AI Edge Case flags this exact pattern at the requirements and architecture stage — before a single line of code implementing it exists — so the assumption behind it gets challenged while it is still cheap to fix.

02Root Cause

Inadequate testing let numerous serious bugs, including ones letting...

What Happened

inadequate testing let numerous serious bugs, including ones letting players duplicate items or break the game's economy, ship in the release version

How Requs AI Catches This

Requs AI Software FMEA traces this failure mode back to the system-level hazard it feeds, tagging it against the Common Defect Enumeration so it surfaces in review instead of in the field.

03 — How This Gets Caught Before It Happens

Beyond code coverage and "shall" testing

Root causes like this one rarely show up in code coverage or requirements-compliance testing, because nobody wrote a requirement anticipating the specific edge case that broke. Requs AI Edge Case and Requs AI Software FMEA are built to surface exactly this class of overlooked failure mode — before the software is written.

Requs AI Edge Case

Surfaces this before code exists

Identifies edge cases like this one at requirements and architecture time, using the Common Defect Enumeration to catalog failure patterns seen across hundreds of real-world software failures — including this one.

Requs AI Software FMEA

Connects the failure mode to the hazard

Traces this class of root cause directly to the system-level hazard it can produce, so a defect pattern like this one gets flagged during design review instead of after it ships.

Find the overlooked root causes before they ship.

Schedule a demonstration, or explore how Requs AI Edge Case and Software FMEA use the Common Defect Enumeration.