Fallout 76, the first multiplayer entry in the post-apocalyptic RPG franchise, is almost upon us. While the official launch isn’t scheduled until November 14th, the Fallout 76 beta will be available for those who’ve pre-ordered starting tomorrow on Xbox One and a week later, on October 30th, on PlayStation 4 and PC. What’s more, in a significant departure from the norm, progress attained in the beta will be kept in the full game.
Bethesda Game Studios recently talked about the game with The Official Xbox Magazine (December 2018, issue 170) and they’ve revealed that there will be a huge amount of content to match the map (which is four times bigger than Fallout 4’s). In fact, besides the main quest, there’ll be over 150 hours worth of side content at launch. That and an ‘aggressive’ post-launch schedule for new content should keep even the notoriously insatiable Fallout fans busy for a good while.
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Jeff Cardiner, Project Lead on Fallout 76, also went on the record to explain why the game won’t feel chaotic all the time once people hoard more ammunition and weapons.
Remember it is a survival game. So we found early in play-testing that people were like, his character’s going to go away in three hours, so I’m going to use all my Stimpaks and ammo,’ but when you’re playing ‘for real’, you’ll make very different decisions. Do I really want to kill this guy with my one Fatman shell, or do I want to save it for the Scorch Beast, because it took me hours to get it. You do make different decisions when your characters are ‘real’.
Development director Chris Mayer then stated that accessing the story will be even more thrilling with the constant threat of possibly being attacked.
You play this game 30 hours, 300 hours; sometimes you’ll play in a group, sometimes you’ll focus on certain activities but sometimes you’ll play solo. And those are the times when you’ll have time to delve into the fiction and listen to the holotapes and read all the monitors and really get into the story. But there is more of a tension there, you can’t pause the game to read a terminal. When you’re reading a terminal something could sneak up behind you and eat you. And it often does. The more we’ve play-tested, the more we’ve realised how viable that is, and it supports the idea of how dangerous and how lonely it is out there.
Are you hyped for Fallout 76? Let us know in the comments.
