GamesRPGBecome a “fierce berserker” ghoul in Fallout 76 and you can KO a Mirelurk Queen with a single punchWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesRPGBecome a “fierce berserker” ghoul in Fallout 76 and you can KO a Mirelurk Queen with a single punchWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Bethesda)
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.
“I know people don’t necessarily want to hear this, but we do have data on people who engage with PvP and played Nuclear Winter and take over workshops,” lead producer Bill LaCoste says. “No one ever challenges a workshop. No one does. They never go in and do it.” Then the statistician in him kicks in: “Okay, I shouldn’t say never. I would just say there’s a non-zero percentage, that’s really low, of people who actually do that.”
That’s good news for the vast majority who come to Fallout 76 for questing, because a) they’re not having to fend off players with plasma cutters whenever they settle down in front of a nice green-screened terminal, and b) they’re not competing for Bethesda’s attention when it comes to new features. “I think we’ll probably have some stuff in the future that gives at least that utility to expand on the PvP element,” LaCoste says. “But right now, most of the stuff is really just for the core group of players, which are mostly PvE.”
Going feral
(Image credit: Bethesda)
It’s with a healthy disregard for PvP balance, then, that Bethesda is introducing playable ghouls to the game in early 2025. As every longtime Fallout fan knows, ghouls are the great adapters of the wasteland – those who have not only survived but soaked up enough radiation to start benefiting from it.
“We want to [allow] play as a ghoul, but we’re not going to give players just, like, an outfit that makes them look like a ghoul, so that they can run through the world the same way as they did before,” LaCoste says. “We want them to have a real ghoul experience where new loadouts are created.”
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With that goal in mind, Bethesda has added 32 ghoul-specific perks to Fallout 76, which can be layered on top of your existing loadout. Many of them draw on a new resource, Glow, which builds as you absorb excess radiation in the world. “We’ve got a dozen new playstyles here,” says creative director Jon Rush.
(Image credit: Bethesda)
In the character build I was handed at a preview event last month, the impact of Glow was fairly straightforward. Eagerly clambering atop a truck piled with leaky radioactive barrels outside the Poseidon power plant, I began exchanging potshots with Scorched on the roof. Pretty quickly, I noticed that Glow was reducing the damage I took from incoming shots – while increasing the damage output from my guns. Handy, if not especially ghoulish.
Yep: you’ll need to Walton Goggins your way through the wasteland. Or embrace ferality, accept a severe drop in your hitpoints and weapon accuracy, and be compensated with a powerful hand-to-hand boost – “which can turn ghouls into fierce berserkers”. They’re not kidding. I’ve seen a player ghoul bring down a Mirelurk Queen, one of Fallout 4’s boss creatures, with a well-placed haymaker.
The road
(Image credit: Bethesda)
Speaking of tradeoffs, Bethesda is leaning into the social cost of going ghoul. To become one, you’ll need to travel to a remote outpost in the far north-east of West Virginia. There, a peppy ghoul scientist named Parthenia will happily offer you an experimental inhaler and dose you up with a potentially lethal level of rads. 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. Her goal is to transform as many people as possible, in order to usher in a new kind of wasteland resistant post-human – a “lean, mean, radiation-eating machine”. It’s an uneasy echo of The Master’s rhetoric in the original Fallout, with the super mutants swapped out for ghouls.
(Image credit: Bethesda)
That wasn’t yet fully apparent in the early alpha build I played. After becoming a ghoul, I made a beeline for Brotherhood HQ, Fort Atlas, to confront the metal men with my newly melted face. Out on the doorstep, Brotherhood recruiter Russell Dorsey said it was nice to see me again – studiously ignoring my new aesthetic. When I reached the front door, though, it wouldn’t open. Classic smoothskin behaviour.
While the hardcore roleplayer in me rails against consequence-light character choices, LaCoste knows his players, and I suspect he’s right. The next time I see a player ghoul basking in the strange sunshine of a mushroom cloud, I know I’ll appreciate the bold swings Bethesda is taking with its MMO – whatever the compromises.
Want to jump into a wasteland adventure? We’ve got ourbest Fallout gamesto take a look at! We’ve also got the latest on all thingsFallout 5if you’d rather look ahead at what the doomed future will bring next.
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5
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