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Fallout 76 is an online-only survival game coming out on November 14th, 2018

Fallout 76 is an online-only survival game coming out on November 14th, 2018

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The first full-fledged multiplayer Fallout game

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Image: Bethesda Softworks

Bethesda revealed more details about its upcoming Fallout game, Fallout 76, confirming this evening at its E3 press conference that the title is an online-only multiplayer experience arriving on November 14th, 2018. The developer stressed that the game can be played on your own, but that a core component of the experience will involve building a base with friends, cooperating to take down large monsters, and working together to fend off hostile enemy players. Preordering the game now will grant you access to an open beta later this year.

In a new gameplay trailer, you can see the interior of an abandoned Vault 76 and the remnants of what looks like some type of celebration, prior to the vault opening ahead of the original Fallout’s timeline. Bethesda says it’s using new rendering and lighting technology that help make the world bigger and more detailed. Earlier today, the developer confirmed Fallout 76 will have a map four times larger than the one in Fallout 4.

The developer also made a series of faux-instructional videos in its fictional Vault-Tec series that showed off some actual multiplayer combat and exploration. The game looks to be full of a number of horrifying-looking monsters to slay cooperatively, and the competitive multiplayer combat looks more like a traditional first-person shooter. We don’t yet know if the turn-based V.A.T.S. mechanic will be present in Fallout 76. Bethesda confirmed that dying does not rob you of all your gear, and it looks like being aggressive against other human players might result in a bounty placed on your head. The developer also teased a very interesting feature in which nuclear missile sites around the map can be raided by you and friends and used to arm your base and wipe out other human players.

Bethesda showed around two minutes of Fallout 76 gameplay earlier today during Microsoft’s Xbox press conference. But beyond that short snippet of largely environment stills, the developer had revealed pretty much nothing else about the structure of the game until tonight. After Bethesda first announced the game late last month, Kotaku reported that the game would likely be an online multiplayer survival game in the spirit of DayZ and Rust.

That makes sense, given Fallout 4 has only been out for around two and half years now and Bethesda open-world games typically have longer development cycles. And now, Bethesda has confirmed these reports, with the developer saying it has wanted “to bring multiplayer to our worlds for a long time.”