Fallout 76

After weeks of rumors and teases, Bethesda pulled back the curtain on Fallout 76, offering up a lengthy look at the game during its E3 2018 press conference.

Bethesda teased its Fallout 76 reveal earlier today during Microsoft’s press conference, announcing that it is a prequel to the previous Fallout games and is set in West Virginia in a world four times the size of Fallout 4. Todd Howard continued the string of new details tonight during its own press conference. Here are the big takeaways:

• Players will play as the first vault members to emerge after the bombs dropped.
• Vault 76 was built to celebrate the tricentenary, the 300th anniversary of the United States, and is even more patriotic than Vault-Tec’s other vaults.
• The survivors in Vault 76 have been waiting 25 years for Reclamation Day, the day the vault opens. The demo suggests the vault had a major party the night before Reclamation Day, and that the player woke up after everyone else had already left.
• Fallout 76 features all-new rendering, lighting, and landscape tools, which sport 16 times the detail of previous games.
• The engine offers so much detail that you can see distant weather systems in areas across the map.
• The Overseer of Vault 76 sends players on a quest through six regions in the world, each with distinct styles and rewards.
• Players will run into a host of different enemies not seen in previous Fallout games. The demo was filled with all kinds of weird creatures, including an enormous sloth and a crablike creature with a giant hornet’s nest on its back, and a huge bat called a Scorchbeast.
• Howard says Bethesda has always wanted to tell the story of the first people who left the vault. The difference is this time each of the characters is a real person. Fallout 76 is an entirely online game.
• That said, Howard assures the audience that you can “of course play [Fallout 76] solo.” Howard says single-player games have always been hugely important to Bethesda, and they aren’t going to change that.
• Howard says Bethesda got the idea for Fallout 76’s multiplayer four years ago.
• Howard referred to Fallout 76 as “softcore survival” compared to previous survival modes in other Bethesda games, and that death won’t result in the loss of progress.
• Contrary to other online games, you’ll never see any game servers while playing Fallout 76.
• Fallout 76 will have smaller player counts. “You’ll be in the world with dozens, not hundreds of players,” Howard says. “It’s the apocalypse, not an amusement park, okay?”
• Howard says you can play with your friends whenever you want, and all of your progression will travel with you.
• Howard says that by creating a world with very few rules, players will have more impact over the world than ever before. “You’ll decide the heroes and you’ll decide the villains.”
• Building is back in Fallout 76, but you can now build wherever you want. The demo showed custom camps complete with automated turrets, a variety of shelters and living space, and outhouses.
• Fallout 76 has multiple nuclear missile sites on the map. Groups of players can take down NPC characters guarding the areas to get snippets of the launch codes. Once they complete the code together, they can input them into the mainframe and then launch the missile to nuke an area of their choice on the map. Players can then go into the blast site and collect rewards – if they can survive the nuclear fallout.
• Fallout 76 runs 100% on dedicated servers.
• Bethesda is holding a B.E.T.A. for Fallout 76, which in Vault-Tec acronyms stands for Break-it Early Test Application. Howard also poked fun at Bethesda’s history of buggy games.
• Howard closed out the presentation with a surprise release date announcement: Fallout 76 is coming out November 14 of this year.  

You can watch the official E4 trailer for Fallout 76 below, and be sure to come back to gameinformer.com later in the week for our impressions from the showfloor.