Bethesda is returning to the wasteland. Ahead of E3 next month, the developer officially announced Fallout 76 — though we don’t know much about the game aside from the name. The company did release a short teaser this morning, after teasing hundreds of thousands of gamers on a Twitch stream yesterday, check out that teaser below.
We can pick out a few clues from the trailer, like the giant sign advertising “Reclamation Day.” Or the conspicuous lack of weapons or gunplay. And while that latter doesn’t mean this game won’t have action, look at the Fallout 3 teaser, there are some interesting departures from the franchise as we know it in modern times.
The Vault-Tec terminal in the Citadel of Fallout 3 lists Vault 76 as a “control” vault, with 500 occupants. The vault was designed to open 20 years after a nuclear war, and was among the seventeen known control vaults, meaning that it was used as a baseline to compare to experimental vaults. Other lore also points to the vaults namesake being a reference to America’s tercentenary.
The last major entry in the series, Fallout 4 was released at the end of 2015, and it introduced players to a radiated version of Boston. That game was, just like many other modern games in the Fallout franchise, either loved or hated. Whatever Fallout 76 turns out to be, we expect it to land on modern consoles and PC, and to be a full-priced AAA game. The game is allegedly in development at two different Bethesda studios working in collaboration, so that would lend credence to the idea of this being a release with a lot of support and a large budget behind it.
Just please, not Fallout Shelter 2. Please.
Fallout 76 is just one of several major game reveals ahead of E3 in June. Bethesda also showed off the post-apocalyptic shooter Rage 2 ahead of the show, while new iterations of Call of Duty and Battlefield were revealed.
