From RPS: “When Bethesda Game Studios decided to bring human NPCs into their post-apocalyptic MMORPG Fallout 76, they wrestled with a kind of temporal dissonance. The new arrivals were a reflection of the year or so of real time that players had spent making West Virginia more habitable. Yet those first quests still remain, locked in their original time period.”
Source: N4G PC The making of Fallout 76: Wastelanders