Bethesda Announces Online Survival RPG ‘Fallout 76’
Ahead of this Summer’s E3, Bethesda has announced their latest Fallout game in development: Fallout 76. This is the studio’s first big game in the post-apocalyptic game series since 2015’s Fallout 4. A teaser trailer was released earlier today, and recent word tells us this newest instalment will be an online survival game.
At first most people assumed the game would be another single-player RPG in the same vein as previous instalments but we’ve very recently learned that’s not the case. According to anonymous leaks from three people who worked on the game, Fallout 76 is set to be an online survival game inspired by the likes of Rust and DayZ.
The sources also claimed that the game was originally a prototype for a multiplayer version of Fallout 4 and an experimental look at what an online Fallout game might be. 76 has apparently grown and changed a lot throughout the past few years.
The cryptic trailer doesn’t suggest much, with slow pans over the pristine interior of a vault, and the back of a jumpsuit telling us that this is Vault 76.
For those unfamiliar, all the Fallout games are peppered with numbered underground vaults built by the sinister company Vault-Tec. While the official intention for them was nuclear protection, their real purpose was for biological and sociological experiments, many with disturbing and tragic outcomes.
Vault 76, according to the lore, is one of the few control vaults that had no experiment, with doors that were designed to open to the world twenty years after the Great War. So in terms of the upcoming game, 76 is a blank slate.
The trailer could be hinting that the entirety of the game is set inside the vault but that would be unlikely, as well as a waste. The series’ unique brand of 1950s apocalypse is rife with opportunities to make the perfect survival setting. The games are known for their harsh wilderness and mutated, hostile creatures, although it’s not certain if they’d make an appearance. Hopefully the radioactive storms of Fallout 4 make a return as they’d be a great environmental feature to have in a multiplayer survival game.
As of yet it’s all speculation, as we still know very little about the game. If not sooner, we’ll get more Fallout 76 information on June 10 at Bethesda’s E3 press conference.