Randomly yesterday Bethesda’s Twitch started broadcasting a monitor in the style of Fallout “Please Stand By” messages and a Vault Boy bobblehead standing in front of it, with the Fallout twitter account following suit. As the stream went on all day yesterday and into this morning, random happenings kept people guessing what was going on (someones helpfully compiled a list of things that happened here on Reddit) till at last Bethesda spilled the beans.
Yes the hubbub was all for a new spin-off game named Fallout 76, introduced via a trailer containing reveal mainstays like Ron Perlman and upbeat music that will no doubt prove a fair contrast to the nuclear hellscape. For myself I was a bit let down but that was down to my own expectations and those were based on little but the hope for a Fallout 3/NV remaster so I’m mostly to blame there. As some have noted, this games named after a showcase vault referenced in 3 and 4 that was to serve as a control study that opened up 20 years after the great war, which sets it before Fallout 1.
There is some interesting potential here, but we know very little about the game until more is said at Bethesda’s E3 showcase on June 10th. However, there are some rumblings via Jason Schreier of Kotaku that this games going to have some online functionality, going so far as to cite sources claiming that this is an online survival RPG thats been cooking for some time-and given Schreiers track record, there’s a lot of credence to this being legit.
From what I've heard, Fallout: 76 is an online game of some sort. Developed by BGS in both Maryland and Austin (formerly Battlecry) https://t.co/gUmNYtDXDS
— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) May 30, 2018
If true this might be a big turn off or boon to various people-for myself I don’t know how a Fallout game with online components would operate and if that would hurt the experience of loneliness the games are quite apt at providing. Especially if it turns out to be another online survival game in a crowded pool of them, its just going to be moving Fallout further and further from what I liked about Fallout 3. Still like I said, we’ll see at this years E3 where things go.
