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Bethesda has appear the next iteration in the Fallout universe, and it's not a direct sequel to Fallout 5 or a remake of a previous title like Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas. The next Fallout title, Fallout 76, will revolve effectually Vault 76 — a "control vault" located in Due west Virginia that opened just 20 years after the Bully War in the Fallout universe.

Bethesda's launch trailer provides no clues as to the game's focus or construction, merely sources that spoke to Kotaku were willing to shed some light. Fallout 76 is an open-earth survival game, similar to DayZ and Rust, with Ark: Survival Evolved also mentioned as a possible influence. The game began every bit an open-world concept of a what a multiplayer championship based on FO4 might await like, and has evolved substantially since then. Information technology's also said to combine the base-building concepts from FO4 with quests and an overarching story, though it's not articulate how much of a resemblance in that location'll exist to the single-role player, narrative-focused campaigns of the earlier Fallout games.

As far equally setting, this is new territory for Bethesda. The primary games of the Fallout timeline have been set up no earlier than 2161, 84 years subsequently the Great War of 2077. That war — a nuclear exchange between the United states and China, for reasons that have never been explained and don't really thing — fundamentally reshaped the world. The post-Fallout 2 games have all taken place in the bombed-out ruins of an alternate-future, 1950s-centric version of America in which fusion-powered automobiles, home robots, and AI (at various levels of proficiency) were all commonplace, merely the transistor was never invented and electronics were never really miniaturized.

To safeguard at to the lowest degree some of the US population (and conduct hellish experiments on not-consenting individuals), the Vault-Tec Corporation built dozens of high-tech "Vaults" across the xiii Commonwealths that made up the United States. A scattering of these vaults, including Vault 76, were designed to office unremarkably and opened after a designated corporeality of fourth dimension had passed. The rest were designed equally social experiments of various sorts, in which residents were exposed to various toxins, denied disquisitional intendance or resources to measure how they coped with deprivation, or but used as lab rats in efforts to cure illness or measure human being responses to various drugs. Vault 76, equally a control vault, was one of just 17 vaults that were actually intended to save a modest number of lives. The Fallout universe, in case you aren't getting the picture, doesn't exactly take a vivid view of homo nature — at to the lowest degree, not prior to the Bang-up War.

In Vault 76'southward case, it was supposed to open merely 20 years after the bombs cruel (a screenshot from the launch trailer refers to a engagement of 2102, implying the vault actually opened five years belatedly). This is quite early in the Fallout timeline; the inhabitants of what would go Vault Urban center (a location you visit in Fallout ii, in 2241), but emerged and founded their town in 2091. By 2161 (the time of the primeval Fallout), the world had begun to rebuild, with new tribes, towns, and fledgling governments digging out from underneath the radiations. By 2287 (the date of Fallout 4), nations like the New California Republic are the size of modern states and travel by airship is possible, if rare. By jumping all the way dorsum to the earliest days of the Fallout universe, Bethesda has freed itself to tell stories unencumbered by questions of what'south happening elsewhere effectually the United States.