For the last 24hrs rabid gamers have been watching a Twitch stream of a Fallout bobblehead and a “Please Stand By” title card waiting to see what Bethesda Game Studios were about to announce… We now have the answer – ‘Fallout 76’… Before we get the “but I haven’t played Fallout 5 to 75 yet” gags, the 76 refers to the vault number.
For the uninitiated, the ‘Fallout’ series of games first started in 1997 by Interplay Entertainment, however, it was Bethesda’s first full 3D version of the franchise with ‘Fallout 3’ which really saw it take off. Set in an alternate timeline, where a worldwide conflict has turned the planet into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, the surviving humans have been hiding away in bunkers, known as Vaults. However, the owners of the vaults, the Vault-Tec Corporation, tended to have a rather loose moral code, which involved them experimenting on a lot of the inhabitants…
What is interesting about Vault 76 is, according to Fallout canon, it’s one of the few vaults where Vault-Tec decided to leave the population alone as a “control” baseline to compare to experimental vaults. It apparently houses 500 occupants and debuted in 2076.
As to exactly what ‘Fallout 76’ will entail, all we can do at the moment is guess. Some people are suggesting it could all be set within the Vault system, or it may be an online/multiplayer game. We’ll just have to wait and see.
See more about ‘Fallout 76’ during this year’s Bethesda E3 Showcase happening on Sunday, June 10th at 6:30pm PT in Los Angeles, CA or live on Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, F
