Welcome To The Post Nuclear Family

OXM travels to West Virginia to get hands-on with the post-apocalyptic MMORPG. Is bringing falloutsworld online and inviting your friends along a blast, or is it a mutation too far?

- Chris Burke

It’s like waiting for a bomb to drop. A moment of lung-bursting anticipation. The familiar cog-edged blast door pulls out of its frame with a rush of air and dust-smoke, and we finally emerge, blinking into the sunlight of a West Virginia morning.

What can we expect to find on Reclamation Day, the day decreed by the dwellers of Vault 76 to be safe enough, 25 years after atomic devastation, to leave the fallout shelter and repopulate the world? And, more importantly, as fans of the Fallout series, what can we expect, stepping for the first time into a post-apocalyptic world with – groan/cheer/delete as appropriate – other gamers?

With Fallout 76, Bethesda is taking the beloved post-apocalyptic survival RPG into the realms of a persistent online multiplayer world. We have spent many, many hours in the Wastelands of the previous Xbox Fallout-ings, and we have some doubts that this ambitious new undertaking will do justice to our beloved Fallout world. After all, letting a bunch of randoms trample all over our previously very personal Fallout experience, and grief us relentlessly like it was Sea Of Thieves, is filling us with more terror than being stalked by a Deathclaw. Nestling in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia, The Greenbrier is a very exclusive spa resort built around health-giving sulphur springs, and is inspirational to the nuclear-age game lore of Fallout – even appearing as a location in 76. Below this luxury resort is an actual nuclear fallout bunker, completed in 1962 and intended to shelter members of Congress in the event of nuclear war.