'Fallout 76' Gameplay: 4K Trailer Shows a Mysterious New Character

Bethesda is keeping the hypetrain going with a new Fallout 76 trailer. It’s an edited mash-up of the clips already shown during E3 2018, but this time, it’s in glorious, beautiful 4K that shows off some cool details you may have missed.

There’s a lot packed into just a few short minutes of video, but one of the first things you’ll notice is how green and alive everything looks. Bethesda previously noted that by setting Fallout 76 in West Virginia the studio could explore an area that wouldn’t be directly targeted by a nuclear attack (unlock major cities like Boston in Fallout 4).

As a result, the world of Fallout 76 is more than just dirt, rocks, and ruins. Compared to Fallout 3’s drab greyscale setting, the rugged beauty of West Virginia’s woods and hills is a welcome change to the franchise.

Finally a Fallout game with grass

This is something Fallout fans have been asking for a long time. Part of why older fans of the franchise were disappointed with Fallout 3 was because it seemed to move backwards. If you’ve played Fallout 2, then you know that it depicted a world that was well on its way to recovery. By the time the game starts, it’s already been over 200 years since the Great War, which is why large states like the New California Republic were capable of building cities that could support thousands of people.

By that logic, we should have seen plenty of trees in Fallout 3 and Fallout 4. After all, the nukes that hit the United States in Fallout lore didn’t glass the ground, so seeds should still be able to grow. In the real world, vegetation in Tunguska and Chernobyl recovered in a matter of decades. So after two hundred years, we should be seeing vegetation everywhere, including the ruins of bombed or abandoned buildings.

And then there’s this dude

The trailer may also have you reconsidering this shady character.

We know that there are no non-player characters in Fallout 76. Every person you encounter in West Virginia will be another human being you chat, barter, team up with, or kill.

So how does this character fit into the picture? Is it a ghoul? Some other sort of survivor? Perhaps the claim that there won’t be NPCs won’t be as strict as it seems, if “survivor” means non-ghoul humans or other vault dwellers from 76.