Fallout 76

Fallout 76 is an upcoming online multiplayer action role-playing video game developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. It is the ninth game in the Fallout series and serves as a narrative prequel to the series. It is scheduled to be released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on November 14, 2018.

Gameplay
Fallout 76 will be Bethesda Game Studios' first online multiplayer game. Players may play individually or with a party of up to three others. All the servers for the game will be dedicated, with the player automatically allocated to one of them. While the game is expected to launch with public servers only, game director Todd Howard revealed plans for private servers to be introduced some time after the game's launch. These private servers will allow players to invite friends to play in order to prevent undesirable aspects of player versus player gameplay such as griefing from affecting an individual player's experience of the game. Howard described the delay as being necessary to allow Bethesda time to assure the stability of public servers. Elements of previous Fallout games will be present and modified to work with the real-time game. The V.A.T.S. system—a mechanic first introduced in Fallout 3 that allows players to pause the game to target specific locations on an enemy's body to attack—will be used in Fallout 76 as a real-time system, though it will still allow players to specify targets on an enemy's body.

The game will feature an open world four times the size of that of Fallout 4. The game world is called "Appalachia" and is a representation of West Virginia. It features recreations of real locations in the region, including the West Virginia State Capitol, The Greenbrier, Woodburn Circle, New River Gorge Bridge, and Camden Park. The game will also feature numerous new mutated monsters, several of which—such as the Mothman and the Flatwoods monster—were inspired by West Virginian folklore.

The game will include revisions to the SPECIAL progression system. Character attributes fall into one of seven categories: strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility and luck. As the player levels up, they will be able to spend skill points to boost their attributes on a scale of one to fifteen. Players will be able to choose perks, or passive abilities that offer gameplay bonuses. These perks fall into each of the SPECIAL categories and take the form of trading cards. Each card has a value and the player can adopt perks equal to their respective value; for example, if the player has a strength rating of five, then they may equip strength perks worth five points. The player can merge similar cards together to create more powerful&mdash;albeit more expensive&mdash;perks. The system is designed to encourage the player to recognise the situation they are in and choose perks that aid them rather than passively selecting them and having them for the duration of the game.

Fallout 76 will not feature any human non-player characters (NPCs) as all surviving humans will be other players. This required Bethesda to change their approach to storytelling as previous games in the series relied on NPCs to assign quests, engage the player in dialog and advance the overall narrative. Fallout 76 will instead use a combination of NPCs in the form of robots, recordings such as collectible holotapes, terminals throughout the game world, and environmental storytelling where the player uncovers fragments of a narrative by exploring locations that they then piece together themselves. Each of these elements had previously been used in the series, often to provide backstory for characters and the world of the game whilst remaining separate from the main narrative. According to Howard, this system allows Bethesda to tell a story whilst giving players a greater ability to create their own narratives.

The game will expand on Fallout 4's settlements by allowing the player the ability to build bases at any location of the map. These creations will be assigned to the player's profile and will be removed from the game world when the player is offline to prevent progress from being lost. While other players will be able to attack player settlements while they are online, the game will preserve player creations in some form to prevent players from having to start over if their creations and progress are destroyed.

Players will be able to use nuclear weapons to reshape the game world. After acquiring launch codes, the player can access missile silos and fire a missile at any point on the map. This will irradiate the area, which the player can then explore to find rare weapons, gear and items; however, it will also attract powerful enemies and the player will need to be sufficiently strong to survive.

Fallout 76 also includes a photo mode. The player has the ability to pose their character and choose from a variety of facial expressions and filters.

Setting
Fallout 76 is a narrative prequel to previous Fallout games. It is set in an alternate version of history, and takes place in 2102, twenty-five years after a nuclear war that devastated the Earth. The player character is a resident of Vault 76, a fallout shelter that was built in West Virginia to house America's best and brightest minds. The player character exits the Vault on "Reclamation Day" as part of a plan to re-colonize the Wasteland.

Development
Fallout 76 uses a modified version of Bethesda's Creation Engine designed to accommodate multiplayer gameplay. Work on modifying the engine was carried out by Bethesda Game Studios Austin. The modified engine also allowed the development team to incorporate new lighting models, rendering processes and more accurate terrain mapping. These allowed the development team to create a world with sixteen times more detail than was possible with previous iterations of the Creation Engine. The game also includes a dynamic weather system that allows for localized climatic conditions and greater draw distances mean that these weather events can be observed by the player from far away.

Release
The game was announced on May 30, 2018; the announcement was preceded by a twenty-four hour live stream on Twitch showing a Vault Boy bobblehead toy in front of a monitor with a "Please Stand By" test pattern screen, a signature image of the series. This stream was watched by a total of over two million people, with more than one hundred thousand people watching at any time.

Details of the game were announced by Howard during Bethesda's press conference at the Electronic Entertainment Expo on June 10, 2018, including its anticipated release date of November 14, 2018. As it is Bethesda Game Studio’s first experience with a fully online game, Howard confirmed that there will be an open beta phase, beginning on October 23, 2018 for Xbox One, and October 30, 2018 for PlayStation 4 and PC.

Reception
In response to the announcement that the game would only feature multiplayer, a petition was created by fans of the series which called for the game to include a single-player mode. The petition received thousands of signatures within a day.

Following the announcement of Fallout 76, there was a burst of interest in tourism in West Virginia. The website "West Virginia Explorer" reported an increase of fifteen times the visitors to the site in the days after the announcement, while management of the Camden Park amusement park said there was an increase in people looking to purchase park merchandise.

The teaser trailer shown at the Electronic Entertainment Expo featured a cover version of John Denver's song "Take Me Home, Country Roads". Fans of the series expressed interest in the song, prompting Bethesda to announce plans to release the song on digital musical services, with all proceeds from it being donated to Habitat for Humanity, assuring a minimum US$100,000 donation.