The Fallout 76 teaser released shortly before E3 this year generated a lot of buzz, while the larger reveal had quite a few promising innovations in store for the series. As Todd Howard, the Game Director for every Fallout game so far (as well as Skyrim), talked about in Bethesda’s press conference, Fallout 76 is an open-world, online multiplayer, softcore survival game set roughly two and a half decades after the nuclear apocalypse of 2076.
Obviously, we’re excited for the release. The game engine has been redesigned to make the post-nuclear world of West Virginia look as realistic and vivid as possible. The map is supposed to be four times larger than Fallout 4, and exploring that world with real-world friends has been something we’ve wanted for years. Settlement building seems more fun this time around too. Teaming up with our friends and family to build a base we can personalize for our own characters sounds a lot more fun than the settlement grinding from Fallout 4.
One of the more divisive aspects of the game we’d like to address is the inclusion of nuclear weapons. To catch everyone up, Howard stated there would be nuclear missile silos in game and players could team up to find the launch codes.
At its core, we don’t think that’s a particularly good idea, considering the chaotic, mean-spirited mentality of the most visible internet people. The same people that bullied poor Kelly Marie Tran off Instagram are going to violently rip up West Virginia in search of the codes, then cackle about it.
But we don’t think that’s exactly how it will play out. Enough Fallout players took the series’ lessons to heart. Namely, nuclear weapons are bad. We’d venture to guess that every group of nuke-hoarding jingoists are going to have to contend with a separate group of benevolent, well-armed vigilante disarmers.
Not only that, but good-hearted players are fiercely defensive of Fallout (again, not in the Instagram bullying kind of way). There’s a lot of discussion in the community about how to work together to build the best game experience possible, with or without direct influence over Bethesda’s development process. What that means is, right off the bat, you have an asshole deterrent in the form of other players. Then add in whatever Bethesda does to mitigate griefing.
Besides, Bethesda is the kind of company that would take nuclear disarmament into account when building this game. Missiles could be launched harmlessly into space or completely dismantled, two pursuits we could definitely see ourselves looking into once the game comes out.
So stay optimistic for Fallout 76. There have always been a lot more people interested in not getting nuked than nuking.
Fallout 76 comes out November 14, 2018.
