Hands-on with Fallout 76’s next expansion: Yep, it has Walton Goggins

Summary

The Ghoul will give players repeatable bounty hunter missions of two types—one that you can handle solo and one that's meant to be done as a public event with other players. Walton Goggins voices his character from the TV show in Fallout 76. That must have been expensive! Credit: Bethesda I got to try both, and I found they were pretty fun, even though they don't go too far in breaking the mold of Fallout 76's existing public events. I also spent more than two hours freely exploring the game's post-apocalyptic interpretation of Ohio. Despite the new desert aesthetic, it's all pretty familiar Fallout stuff: raider-infested Super Duper Marts, blown-out neighborhoods, and the like. There is a very large new settlement that has a distinct character compared to the game's existing towns, and it's loaded with NPCs. I also enjoyed a public event that has players battling through a junkyard with a cyborg Deathclaw at their side—yep, you read that right. I'm told there will be a new story quest line attached to the new region that involves a highly intelligent Super Mutant named the Rust King. I didn't get to do those quests during this demo, though. Burning Springs doesn't do anything to rethink Fallout 76's basic experience; it's just more of it, with a different flavor. But since Bethesda has done so much work making that basic experience more fun, that's OK. It means more Fallout 76 is, in fact, more of a good thing. TV tie-ins don't fix a broken game, but they bring new or lapsed players back to a broken game that has since been fixed. If you don't like looter shooters, survival crafting games, or the very idea of multiplayer games—and some Fallout players just don't—it's not going to change your mind. But if the reason you skipped this game or bounced off of it was that you liked what it was going for but felt it stumbled on the execution, it can't hurt to give it another try with the new update. I don't think that's such a controversial opinion anymore. As a longtime ...