Fallout 76's next update has finally been announced, and boy, do these just keep getting bigger and better. Blood and Rest will release around early December and introduce Burning Springs as a new area of the map, a bounty system, and Walton Goggins' beloved ghoul from the Fallout TV show.
"Burning Springs is in total tonal tandem with Fallout season two, featuring desert, deathclaws, and raiders," creative director Jon Rush says. "It is poised to be our biggest update ever, and will coincide with the timing of the premiere of the Amazon Fallout series season two that's coming this December."
Fallout 76 didn't have any tie-ins with the first season on launch, which I always thought was a missed opportunity given how much hype the show managed to generate. But it seems like the devs weren't ready to let lightning strike twice. "Once Season one wrapped up, we immediately started planning for the content we wanted to make for Season two," Rush explains.
But the series isn't the only inspiration for Burning Springs—while there'll certainly be some links to the show, the whole vibe of the next update lies in some of Fallout's older games.
"The new region is terrifyingly beautiful and will feel very familiar to fans, drawing its main influences from Fallout 3 and New Vegas," Rush says. "We wanted it to remind folks of what they came to know and love in Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. And so when we set out to make this new region, the three pillars that we gave to the team were, 'It's got to have desert death claws and Raiders', and to me, that captures the tone, the essence, and the danger of those games."
It'd be hard to impose all of this on any part of the existing Fallout 76 map, although up North by the Baily Family Cabin could've worked on the desert side, but still, expanding the map to accommodate this new vision is the obvious way forward.
"When we decided to do another regional expansion, which kind of satisfies all those criteria, we were looking at the map, and we looked towards the East, and we started to skirt towards the capital. But then we looked towards the West, and realised, 'Oh, we're right up against Ohio', and not much has been done in that region in terms of Fallout Lore. So why not?"
Similar to how Skyline Valley was added to the bottom of the map, Burning Springs will get tagged onto the West, and see players travel over the newly fixed Point Pleasant Bridge over to Ohio.
"There's only a handful of references to Ohio throughout Fallout, and so it's really great to have a blank slate in a region that we can kind of establish some early lore for the game," lead producer Bill LaCoste adds.
Burning Springs will be a similar size to Skyline Valley and will have "two new exciting public events" that will present greater challenges and rewards to players, along with new raider enemies, and the bounty hunting hub Highway Town, where players will be able to gather, relax, and get new missions. The Blood and Rest update will also include a new camp pet, the Radhog, which is apparently a "real regional menace" as it's something of an invasive species. But they're also cute, so I don't mind them sticking around.
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