Fallout 76 is getting its largest update since 2020 this December with Burning Springs. The new expansion to Bethesda’s MMO takes players to Ohio for a new suite of content inspired by Fallout 3 and New Vegas. It will also tie into Amazon’s Fallout series just in time for season 2 by adding The Ghoul to the game, fully voiced by Walton Goggins.
Burning Springs will be Fallout 76’s 64th update since the game’s initial release in 2018, and it’s set to be a significant one. Ahead of its announcement, Polygon attended a preview event where we got to learn more about what is getting added and spent a few hours exploring post-apocalypse Ohio.
While the update isn’t set in locations from Fallout 3 and New Vegas, Bethesda’s goal was to draw inspiration from those games by focusing on “deserts, deathclaws, and raiders.” The new area, which appears on the west side of the map, turns Ohio into a charred desert wasteland full of familiar monsters. The area doesn’t shoehorn in buildings from New Vegas, but I did at least find one nod to that game in the form of an abandoned minigolf course populated by dinosaur statues. Otherwise, the area centers around a central hub area called Highway Town, where players can access the update’s new bounty hunting system.
Bounties are the most significant piece of the new update, as they are tied to The Ghoul. The character, who is fully voiced by Walton Goggins with original lines written for the game, gives players bounty missions which will send them around Ohio looking for targets to kill. The basic version of these are called Grunt Hunts, but players can take down more powerful bosses in Head Hunts, which are larger public events that multiple players can tackle together. The bounties I tried were all fairly basic, tasking me with gunning down a tough enemy milling around somewhere in a crew of raiders.
The update will bring more weapons, gear, and fish to the game, as well as a new pig camp pet named Hog Meat. The area introduces new factions and characters as part of its story. In the few missions I played, I was tasked with stirring up a revolt against the Rust King. I had to complete a few checklists of challenges (killing raiders, getting fire damage kills, landing critical hits with VATs, that sort of thing) to gain favor with the villain first before recruiting some locals to my cause by helping them solve their problems.
New public events are coming with the update as well. In my demo, I participated in both the Gearing Up and Sinkhole Solutions events. The former had me and my teammates looking for gears in an arena full of enemies and slotting them into a machine before time ran out. The latter sent me into a dangerous pit full of mutant monsters and tasked me with wiping out waves of them while avoiding their poison.
Burning Springs doesn’t have a precise release date yet, but it’s scheduled to launch in December to roughly align with Fallout season 2’s Dec. 17 release date. The Ghoul, complete with Goggins’ likeness and voice over, will be added to the public test server on Oct. 2. The update will also coincide with season 23 of the game, dubbed Blood and Rust. While there’s no word on what’s coming after, a developer at the press event teased that 2026’s big update will “remind players why [Fallout 76] is the best place to adventure with your friends.”
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