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Fallout 76is not a PvP game.
Don’t get me wrong: it could have been, if its players had wanted it to be.
Buried in Bethesda’s MMO is an elephant’s graveyard of mechanics dedicated to handling impromptu firefights between players.
There are resource-stuffed workshop locations all over West Virginia, designed to encourage strangers to scrap over territory.
At one point, there was even a battle royale mode: Nuclear Winter.
But who are we kidding?
This is the MMO beloved by Bethesda RPG lifers who show up to build corrugated houses with their friends.
If you want your wasteland brutal, you go to Rust.
Out in Appalachia, peace has already triumphed.
“No one ever challenges a workshop.
They never go in and do it.”
Then the statistician in him kicks in: “Okay, I shouldn’t say never.
“We want them to have a real ghoul experience where new loadouts are created.”
“We’ve got a dozen new playstyles here,” says creative director Jon Rush.
Handy, if not especially ghoulish.
But the longer-term effects Bethesda describe are more dramatic and intriguing.
“Ghouls aren’t subject to hunger and thirst,” Rush says.
“Rather, they have a feral meter that they need to manage through chems.”
Yep: you’ll need to Walton Goggins your way through the wasteland.
They’re not kidding.
The road
Speaking of tradeoffs, Bethesda is leaning into the social cost of going ghoul.
But even her guard, Asher, isn’t convinced of the benefits.
“The world will drop out from beneath your feet,” he says.
You’ll be “looking in the mirror at a corpse.”
There’s a discomforting edge to Parthenia, too, despite her surprisingly sunny disposition.
“This is very new to the wasteland, and how are people going to respond to that?”
Not well, necessarily.
Bethesda is using established Fallout fiction as its guide for how the world treats player ghouls.
That wasn’t yet fully apparent in the early alpha build I played.
When I reached the front door, though, it wouldn’t open.
By default, quests given by ‘aggro’ factions will be off-limits to ghouls.
But they’ll be accessible fairly easily by acquiring disguises a simple, costume-based way of bypassing faction stances.
“Because obviously you have to go into the Enclave bunker to launch your first nuke anyway.
We can’t really take away some of those elements.
That would have been bad.
People would have been like, ‘Wait, what?
I can’t finish off the main questline?'”
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