After a couple of teases and some inside information, we just got our first real look at Fallout 76, an upcoming survival RPG from Bethesda. Advertisement As we told you last month, this isn’t a traditional Fallout adventure. While in the most immediate sense it looks like one, with its iconic visual style and first-person perspective, Fallout 76 isn’t a singleplayer RPG played offline. It’s an online multiplayer experience, pitched as what Todd Howard calls a “softcore survival” game, where death never means a loss of progression or character. You’ll play on servers, with each only holding a few dozen players at a time. You can join your friends at any time, and all your current progression is taken with you when you do. A video played by Bethesda showed four friends playing together. Howard stresses that you can still play these quests solo, but playing together and teaming up is definitely encouraged. Building plays a big part in Fallout 76. You can not only build homes like you could in Fallout 4, but also work together and share them to...well, hang out like pictured above. Here’s how the nuclear missiles work. With dozens of players on each map, there’s scope for alliances and rivalries to emerge, and to keep that interesting there are nuclear missile silos scattered around the countryside. These can be found, infiltrated then employed to raze sections of the world, from nests of monsters to other people’s camps and constructions. Advertisement Fallout 76 will be out November 14.<doc-sep>Screenshot : Fallout 76 teaser trailer When Bethesda announced Fallout 76 with a teaser trailer this morning, promising more information at E3, it was easy to assume that the new game would be a traditional single-player role-playing game. But Fallout 76 is in fact an online survival RPG that’s heavily inspired by games like DayZ and Rust, according to three people familiar with the project. Advertisement Those people, speaking anonymously so as not to damage their careers, confirmed that Fallout 76 is an experimental new entry in the longrunning post-apocalyptic series. When Bethesda first teased the game on Tuesday morning, fans and pundits speculated that it might be a Fallout 3 remaster or a New Vegas-style spinoff in a new location, but as Kotaku reported that afternoon, it is in fact something completely new and completely different. The teaser might lead Fallout fans to believe that this is a traditional entry in the series, but according to our sources, that’s not the case. Originally prototyped as a multiplayer version of Fallout 4 with the goal of envisioning what an online Fallout game might look like, Fallout 76 has evolved quite a bit over the past few years, those sources said. It will have quests and a story, like any other game from Bethesda Game Studios, a developer known for meaty RPGs like Skyrim. It will also feature base-building—just like 2015's Fallout 4—and other survival-based and multiplayer mechanics, according to those sources. One source cautioned that the gameplay is rapidly changing, like it does in many online “service” games, but that’s the core outline. The game is named after the series’ Vault 76, which has been mentioned in both Fallout 3 and Fallout 4. According to Fallout lore, Vault 76 was meant to open just 20 years after the nuclear war, allowing for a far less civilized setting than previous games. Fallouts 3 and 4, which are full of cities and settlements, both take place over 200 years after the war, after much of the population has had time to reconstruct human civilization. Fallout 76 will feel very different. As the narrator of the trailer says: “When the fighting is stopped, and the fallout has settled, you must rebuild.” Fallout 76 is in development not just at Bethesda Game Studios’ main office, in Maryland, where the likes of Skyrim and Fallout 4 were made, but also at the company’s newest branch, in Austin, according to our sources. That Austin studio, formerly known as BattleCry Studios, had been working on an online hero combat game called BattleCry before that game was canceled. “We have concerns about the BattleCry game and whether it is meeting the objectives we have for it,” Bethesda told press in the fall of 2015. “We are evaluating what improvements the game needs to meet our quality standards. The studio remains busy during this process on multiple projects.” In March, Bethesda announced that BattleCry Studios had become part of Bethesda Game Studios. Bethesda did not respond to a request for comment. We’ll see more of Fallout 76 at the publisher’s E3 press conference on June 10.<doc-sep>Fallout may be one of the biggest AAA gaming franchises around, but over the last few years the post-apocalyptic series has found itself in turmoil. What started out as a gritty narrative-driven role-playing game has, with the release of 2016’s Fallout 4, transformed into more of a silly action game. And with the reveal of Fallout 76 at E3 this year, some fans are convinced the series has fully lost its way. As Bethesda announced last night, Fallout 76 is an online survival game where you will interact with other vault dwellers who hope to rebuild the world. Todd Howard, Bethesda director and executive producer, mentioned that while it’s possible to play 76 on your own, the game will be easier with buddies. Actually, based on the footage shown off by Bethesda, it doesn’t seem like the world of Fallout 76 has many survivors beyond other players. There were seemingly no non-playable characters to speak of during the trailer, only teammates, rivals, and hostile creatures. This makes sense, of course: within the game’s lore, vault 76 opens before most of the others. There aren’t many people roaming around the wasteland during this time, period. Fans are nonetheless worried that no Bethesda-authored characters means that there will be fewer opportunities for the kinds of narrative choices or meaty storylines that the franchise is known for. Sure enough, most of the gameplay shown during the keynote was multiplayer. The most controversial aspect of last night’s gameplay demo was Fallout 76’s nuke gameplay. As Bethesda explained, the game’s locale will be dotted with nuclear sites that players can raid for launch codes. Codes in hand, players will be able to attack others with nuclear missiles if they want to, meaning that you and your creations can be a target. Veteran fans are disappointed with this news, because they’re used to playing meaty, narrative-driven single-player RPGs without being harassed by other people. Given that Bethesda introduced these new concepts by stating that “some of your fellow survivors may not be neighborly,” it sounds like they’re expecting Fallout 76 to be a chaotic experience, rather than an introspective one. Already, the reaction to Fallout 76 leans negative within more hardcore circles. On the Fallout Reddit, one of the top threads is titled “‘You can play solo, but you SHOULD play multiplayer!’ will ruin the franchise.” On Twitter, fans are debating back and forth whether or not Fallout 76 will “ruin” the series, too. And on the ResetEra forum, posters seem split on whether or not online will make for a good Fallout experience. “I’m fairly certain this new title won’t take story or lore very seriously,” one fan in the Reddit thread lamented. “The sad part is that 95 percent of us won’t be bombing each other,” another wrote. “It’s the stupid ass five percent which will ruin the game for us.” Players have good reason to worry about some elements of Fallout 76, based on how similar mechanics have played out in other games in the genre. Multiplayer survival games like Rust, Ark: Survival Evolved, and Conan Exiles are all notoriously harsh experiences where dedicated players can wipe the floor with people who don’t spend as much time in-game grinding out resources and gear. Base-wiping super weapons, along with unpleasant experiences like getting enslaved by other players sometimes drives people who enjoy multiplayer survival games to play on private servers. “There’s a similar mechanic [to nukes] in similar-looking survival game Conan Exiles where you drop a God on other people’s bases,” said video game fan Phil Hartup on Twitter. “It’s not as catastrophic gameplay wise as it sounds, [but in] games like this getting your base eradicated by people who play 24/7 is fairly standard. It’s going to be a colossal culture shock for people going from Fallout 4’s comfy towns to getting obliterated and teabagged by gangs of gibbering randos though.” Obviously, much of the anxiety surrounding Fallout 76 is based on partial information. We don’t fully know how the game will work, so people are fearing the worst: a stripped-down version of Fallout where assholes reign supreme. The wariness didn’t fester in a vacuum, though. As I wrote back in 2016, Bethesda has steadily been stripping away some of the role-playing elements that have defined the series. Fallout 4 featured fewer character-building RPG options, and dialogue choices are often summarized with a word or two. The overall tone of the series since Bethesda has taken it over has also gone from stark and serious to campy and absurd. Worst of all, most situations in Fallout 4 could only be resolved through violence. Fallout, in short, has been becoming more of a meathead series as time goes on... or at least, that’s the popular narrative driving some of this uncertainty. What many fans missed was that while the base Fallout 4 game was disappointing when compared to older games, some of the DLC was terrific. Far Harbor in particular was a story-rich addition that explored the mysteries of the synths — and it did so while giving players real options beyond murder. Choices mattered, factions mattered. The story left me thinking well after I was done. Far Harbor was classic Fallout, through and through. This is to say: Bethesda is certainly capable of delivering the rich RPG that fans want, especially when it does not have to worry about making a ton of new assets. Fallout is becoming more of a meathead series as time goes on... or at least, that’s the popular narrative. The discourse around Fallout 76 doesn’t take this into account, and it’s likely due in part to many players missing out on Fallout 4’s expansions. But in a way, this anxiety isn’t really about Fallout at all. The last few generations of consoles have steadily embraced more and more online experiences, and for a while, nearly every franchise under the sun was adopting multiplayer in some form. While many games do manage to make multiplayer work, some online fans are convinced that a multiplayer pivot tends to be a cash-grab from game developers, rather than something meant to enrich a game. Video game fandom online tends to operate from this assumption: if a game developer does something, they’re probably trying to rip you off or pull a fast one on you. To wit, gaming news websites have some version of “fans are angry at developer” stories nearly every day. Fallout 76 is operating within that hostile space. Bethesda in particular grapples with a fractured identity. It has created some of the most beloved series around, yes, but it is also the company known by some for things like downloadable horse armor, paid mods, and dumbed-down RPGs. Fans regularly make fun of how often Bethesda ports Skyrim, so much so that even the developer got in on the joke last night. And so when Fallout 76 turns out to be an online-only experience, it fits in perfectly with this perceived negative identity for the company. The irony is that while people bemoan the death of yet another single-player game, Bethesda keeps pumping out prime single-player experiences that people tend to ignore; games like Dishonored and Prey don’t sell near as well as the developer’s other offerings. Last year, Bethesda jokingly-but-not-jokingly begged fans to “save player 1.” Fans are convinced that a multiplayer pivot tends to be a cash-grab from game developers, rather than something meant to enrich a game. I consider myself a hardcore Fallout fan, and while I do worry about where the franchise is going, much of the anxiety surrounding Fallout 76 feels unwarranted. It’s one thing if we’re talking about a mainline game like Fallout 4, but Fallout 76 is an offshoot. It’s not fair to expect the same sorts of experiences from a spinoff as you would a main game. The best spinoffs reinvent or reframe things, make them feel new again, and potentially even bring new people into the fold. Last night, Todd Howard said that Fallout Shelter, a game that many hardcore fans brushed off as too casual, has attracted over 120 million players — more than any other Bethesda game combined.<doc-sep>
Fallout 76 was announced last week, and now Bethesda has pulled the curtain back on the next experience in the Fallout universe. While we've had our guesses about what the game could be about, we now have all the details about the new game set in West Virginia. Fallout 76 is 4 times the size of Fallout 4. This space is used by other players, because Fallout 76 is entirely online. This means the other people you experience while playing aren't NPCs. They are other real people exploring the wastelands in their own games. Despite the fact that Fallout 76 is an online game, it is still a Fallout game. Players will go on missions, experience a story, and level up. The difference is you can now do that with friends by your side. When joining up with friends, all your progression comes with you as well. This means you'll never be forced to be the "sidekick" when playing with others. Of course, if you want to play by yourself, it's entirely possible to go solo through the entire game. Also, dying in Fallout 76 doesn't mean a loss of progression or a loss of your character. It wasn't explicitly explained, but it's likely you'll reload in a different world at your last save point if you die. As for the world of Fallout 76, it will be a prequel, set before all previous Fallout games. The world is divided into six regions, each featuing a unique theme. There are new creatures, with many inspired by the folklore of West Virginia. Weapons appear more dated than previous Fallout games, as a gameplay sequence featured a single-shot pistol, complete with the player having to refill the gunpowder after every round. Base building from Fallout 4 returns, but is more flexible. Thanks to the handy new C.A.M.P. device, players can create a base anywhere in the world. Your friends can all join together into one world and work to create the ultimate shared base. However, because other players lurk around on your map, it's possible for your base to be attacked by both wildlife and humans. What's worse, a number of live nuclear missiles exist on the map, and can be used to target enemies. It's possible your base can be blown sky high. Fallout 76 will release for PS4, Xbox One and PC on Nov. 14. A beta for the game was also announced, but details about when it will happen were not shared. Typically, a beta occurs a month or two before release, so expect a Fallout 76 beta some time in September or October. So what do you think? Are you interested in playing Fallout 76 now that you know more about it? Do you wish it was a more traditional single-player game? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.