Well folks, there you go: Bethesda have confirmed – after a long, long livestream – that our next outing to the wasteland will be called Fallout 76.
They’ve dropped a teaser trailer for the game, which doesn’t really give us much info. It features panning shots of a standard-looking Vault which seems decked out for a party celebrating something called Reclamation Day. Logic dictates that particular holiday will almost certainly have something to do with when the denizens of the Vault come out to take back the Wasteland from the nuclear mutants who have claimed it.
The jaunty little tune which soundtracks the trailer is a version of Take Me Home Country Roads by John Denver, which very explicitly namedrops the state of West Virginia. Will that be the location of Fallout 76? We do not know – but we almost certainly will after Bethesda’s presentation at E3.
Obviously, rumours about what this game might be are flying thick and fast. One thing’s for certain: we probably shouldn’t expect a standard game in the Fallout 3 & 4 mould. Citing sources, Kotaku suggests that Fallout 76 is actually an online survival RPG more akin to something like Rust or ARK. The mobile game Fallout Shelter shows that Bethesda is keen to experiment with different genres within the Fallout universe, and The Elder Scrolls Online is incredibly popular, so it seems like a natural move.
Vault 76 has actually been mentioned several times in the lore in recent years. According to the previous games, it was one of the so-called ‘control Vaults’ which wasn’t conducting horrific scientific and psychological experiments on its denizens after the nuclear war. It was intended to open just 20 years after the Great War ended, which – unless Bethesda pulls a fast one on us – will likely situate the game far earlier in the timeline than any other series entry.
But again: we basically have nothing confirmed, and we won’t until the moment Todd Howard walks out on stage at E3. Two weeks!
