Fallout 76: Burning Springs is a massive new update to Bethesda's long-running living game. By expanding the map, adding new activities, and sprinkling in some Walton Goggins, will fans new and old flock to the Wastelands?
The longevity of Fallout 76 has been something to admire.
What is, essentially, the only non-Starfield game we’ve received from Bethesda in the last seven years continues to dazzle me. Since 2018, every major Bethesda or Xbox games showcase has included time dedicated to showing what Fallout 76–and Elder Scrolls Online, by association–has coming up and what the game has accomplished. Honestly, the dedication to continue adding content to the game felt akin to Ubisoft’s support for something like For Honor, which is still getting content since its 2017 release.
At launch, I played dozens of hours of Fallout 76 with a dedicated group of friends. One of my fellow Vault Dwellers was Michael Mays, who reviewed Fallout 76 for Digital Chumps. To this day, his review is one of the highest viewed pieces of content on this site because it was deemed relatively controversial.
Unsurprisingly, Fallout 76‘s existence as a living, live-service game caused friction for longtime Fallout fans who didn’t deem it to be a worthy successor to the legacy. Part of me understands the issue. Taking what has been a dedicated single-player, story-driven series and trying to incorporate a feedback loop of online features meant for the player to keep investing their time is definitely a gamble.
Seven years later, however, one might argue that the detractors were kind of wrong?
Regardless of any initial bugs, server issues, and lack of content, it’s hard to deny that a dedicated base of players has kept Fallout 76 alive. And even at launch, the game was distinctly something a large swath of players had wanted for years: a multiplayer Fallout game. Fallout 76 gave players the ability to roam a new Wasteland and engage in activities that were appropriately tongue-in-cheek. Bethesda made something that looked the part and played the part. And, after all, when haven’t the rough edges taken some time to smooth out?
I am by no means a dedicated Fallout 76 player. After the initial months following launch, my time with the game ebbed and flowed. A few hours spent scavenging and fighting mutated cryptids after a nuke dropped. Some minutes taken pretending I have any talent at designing a C.A.M.P. with any kind of visual appeal. Like many, last year’s Fallout series from Amazon reignited the itch and I spent a few days playing just to feel that hokey comfort.
But I’ve noticed Fallout 76 has had what may be considered a resurgence, if not a consistent growth of people spending more and more time with the game. Social media traction for Fallout 76 has gained and I’ve noticed numerous people posting about whiling away the hours in post-apocalyptic Appalachia.
Always best to strike while the iron is hot isn’t it?
Fallout 76: Burning Springs is the newest free update coming to the game, one that is promised to be the biggest update since 2020, and it shows. Recently, I attended an event where I was allowed hands-on time with Burning Springs, getting the opportunity to sample what this update has to offer returning and newcomer players. Before I played, the timeline of updates for Fallout 76 was displayed and discussed, showing a wealth of content both familiar and unfamiliar to me. It’s honestly shocking how much has been added in this game in the last seven years. And with a second season of the television show looming, it’s hard to imagine more and more players not flocking to Fallout 76, especially in lieu of any potential Fallout 5.
One of my favorite aspects of Fallout 76 is a decidedly personal one. The game is set adjacent to my neighboring states of West Virginia and Virginia, Appalachia to be less precise. Several of my friends lived in West Virginia at the time of Fallout 76‘s release and fell in love with Bethesda’s particular interpretation of the locations and vibe. One or two likely didn’t mind seeing the locale bombed out either.
Burning Springs adds a hearty chunk of new real estate to Fallout 76‘s map. This time, players are going to be taken to a desert-like slice of post-nuclear Ohio. As a resident of Kentucky, there’s a chance that in five years or so, Bethesda is going to include my state in its mutated grouping of Appalachia. Radioactive horse racing and tobacco? Mitch McConnell already looks and acts like an irradiated ghoul, he would be a perfect NPC.
While I wait with renewed confidence that Kentucky will get its place in the open-world gaming sun, I had to have myself a hearty chuckle when it was revealed that Burning Springs takes place in Ohio. Much like my other Appalachian friends, the ones I know who live in Ohio are going to be delighted at the prospect of traipsing around a charred husk of their home state.
During my preview of Burning Springs, I had a good amount of time to explore the new region. Located on the left side of Fallout 76‘s base map, Ohio takes up a hearty amount of space. Keep in mind, I was playing with a character kitted out with decent gear and loaded with caps enabling me to expedite fast travel and see as much as I could.
Burning Springs not only fits the aesthetic of Fallout at large, it works as an almost desert-like world on the East Coast of the United States. Where Fallout 76‘s original map tried to incorporate varying “biomes” in the confines of a burnt-out nuclear wasteland that had spent centuries trying to grow back, Burning Springs very much feels almost like a something out of Mad Max.
Craggy red rocks, a junkyard housing a loyal Deathclaw, an encampment made to look like a motorcycle saloon… it all has a vibe that’s instantly recognizable as Fallout while still feeling unexpected. Central to this new zone is the semi-hub of Highway Town, a bustling hub of activity filled with NPCs and interesting things to see. I spent around 20 minutes buzzing around Highway Town literally listening to chatter and seeing what potential vendors and friendlies I would spend time dealing with.
Because of its diselpunk aesthetic and gas-guzzling appeal, there is a kind of inherent danger to the look of Burning Springs that makes it quintessential Fallout. There’s less folksy “charm” from what I noticed and an emphasis on the vibe that this place is a deadly fight for dominance.
Not a lot of time was spent with story content but the one questline I followed was an attempt to usurp the current de facto leader of Highway Town, the Rust King. My quest featured backdoor, knife-in-the-dark politics and I was meant to travel to various locations to garner support and munitions for the eventual uprising. But the questline featured in Burning Springs will also continue the storyline of the main Fallout 76 narrative and I’m sure Bethesda has a lot of bizarre quests for players to encounter.
As expected, Burning Springs will introduce a bevy of content across the board in the form of public events, challenges, more armor, more weapons, new factions, and even new fish piggybacking off the recent fishing expansion.
Two public events I played during my preview were gloriously chaotic. One featured me having to face off against waves of radscorpions, destroying their nests as I fled from their noxious attacks and the broken terrain they were bursting from. But the standout was a relatively lengthy public event that required players to collect scraps of metal around a junkyard to help reinforce it in preparation of a raider attack. After the scrap was collected and loaded up, a gargantuan, friendly Deathclaw was released from its cage. And no, in a shocking twist the Deathclaw didn’t turn on us. Instead, players are meant to rally around this beast and help it destroy the onslaught of raiders and other Deathclaws attacking. It was laughably ridiculous in only the way that Fallout can pull off.
But the biggest point of focus on my time with Burning Springs was The Ghoul. Yes, that The Ghoul. Walton Ghoulggins. Sorry, Walton Goggins from Amazon’s Fallout series. Yeah, the guy is everywhere and now he’s in a video game (watch him be in the next Call of Duty).
Walton Goggins reprises one of his numerous recent standout roles and has made his way to Appalachia. And for those of you in the know, he played a character on the television series Justified, which kind of had a modern-day Western theme and was set in Kentucky. Maybe it’s all in the same universe?
Just as a note, during my time in the preview The Ghoul did speak but had yet to have Goggins’ voice incorporated into the game. Instead, a text-to-speech method was implemented, providing a few fascinating moments of a semi-robotic voice doing its best to commit to a southern drawl.
It’s clear that the team at Bethesda is laser-focused on using the mass appeal of the Fallout show to bring players into Burning Springs and Fallout 76. And for a free update it’s a smart choice.
The Ghoul is responsible for a new series of activities that players can engage with over the course of Fallout 76: Bounty Hunting. The Ghoul is the middle man between the player and those who put bounties on various inhabitants of Burning Springs. Starting out with a simple questline of conducting a few small hunts, the player will go from place to place across the area seeking out these targets and turning in any potential rewards they earn.
While The Ghoul’s signature gun is promised as a potential reward, there is a hefty amount of dialog and narrative incorporated into his existence in the game. Using Goggins is also a smart move because it gives Fallout 76 a standout (and well-known) character to constantly visit and warm up to.
As a quest-giving NPC, it’s expected that players will continuously have bounties on-hand to seek out and eliminate, providing another new activity to maintain engagement with the overall Fallout 76 experience.
Thankfully, the Bounty Hunting system is as simple as grabbing a bounty next to the table by The Ghoul and trekking out with death on your mind. But once a rapport is established with The Ghoul, high-value bounties become available. For the cost of caps, players can purchase one of these difficult bounties from The Ghoul. Right after, players can go to the nearby bounty board and pin that bounty, enabling it as a kind of smaller public event.
This elite bounty’s location will be pinged on the map and players can converge on the location to assist in taking them out. Most of the bounties I faced were humanoid opponents but a few were assisted by raiders, robots, and Wasteland creatures. And believe me, even with four or five others assisting, these bounties don’t go down easy. But they are meant to challenge players due to their high rewards.
Starting on October 2, The Ghoul will be available on Fallout 76‘s Public Test Server, featuring the likeness and voice of Walton Goggins, giving players a more polished idea of how the character will fit into the game.
While no specific release of Burning Springs has been revealed, players should expect it sometime in December–Game Awards shadow drop, anyone? Once available, other quality of life updates will be introduced. New mechanics for veterans, better ways for newcomers to ease themselves into Fallout 76, and a plethora of content meant for an update of this size.
Fallout 76 has seemingly been a successful experiment for Bethesda. Regardless of whether you felt that the launch was rocky, expected, or fine, the game has had numerous updates over the course of seven years meant to keep players engaged in the post-nuclear Wastelands of the United States. When Fallout 76: Burning Springs arrives soon, it’s impossible to imagine The Ghoul not being a chief reason for any player to dip their toes in. Being released so close to the December 17th release of Amazon’s Fallout season 2 is going to cause an even bigger flood of curiosity. And a wealth of new content makes that invitation all the more appetizing.
