Fallout 76 beta dates announced, along with a new video
Time bomb.
At long last, Bethesda has rolled back the vault door a little to give players a glimpse of Fallout 76. The developer has now revealed a new video showing the game's intro, and has also announced the beta's start date.
As we already knew, the Fallout 76 beta is arriving first on Xbox One, and the start date for this is October 23rd. PlayStation 4 and PC players will have to be a little more patient and wait an extra week to access the game on October 30th.
The "B.E.T.A." (a Break-It Early Test Application, as Bethesda has termed it) can only be accessed via pre-order - but according to Bethesda's FAQs, will provide access to the full game. Players who access the beta will also be able to carry their progress over to the full game, which officially releases on November 14th.
Although it seems players will be able to access much of the full game through the beta, the FAQs state not everything will be functioning at full capacity. Servers will not run 24/7, for instance, but "anywhere between four to eight hours" per day.
The video, meanwhile, gives us our first real idea of what the multiplayer aspects of the game will look like. Unlike previous Fallouts which have always been decidedly bleak, the trailer appears to show a fun party atmosphere - maybe vault living isn't so bad after all?
The vault dwellers shown bear a great deal of resemblance to the NPCs of Fallout 4, so there doesn't appear to be a huge difference in artstyle between the games. I do, however, really like that black-and-white segment - very edgy. Oh, and the whole game starts with that classic Fallout line, of course.
Fallout 76 will break from the rest of the Fallout series by being the first to introduce multiplayer gameplay. Bethesda recently revealed the name of the new map, Appalachia, which sounds surprisingly pleasant for what is undoubtedly a horrifically scarred landscape.
For more information on everything we know so far about the game, make sure to check out our Fallout 76 guide.