Bethesda Game Studios has unveiled Fallout 76: Burning Springs, the largest update to the online action RPG since 2020, and the headline feature is indeed the addition of Cooper Howard, also known as The Ghoul, straight from Amazon’s TV show.
The Ghoul is, as you would expect, voiced by actor Walton Goggins, and he serves as a sort of quest-giver. He is connected to the biggest feature of the Burning Springs update, Bounty Hunting missions. These can be found all throughout the new region (which brings Fallout 76 players, and indeed the whole franchise, to Ohio for the first time). New bounties will always be available, and the larger ones are effectively server-wide events that any player can join once they are triggered.
Burning Springs itself is a slice of arid, post-nuclear Ohio, not unlike the desert of Nevada – again, seemingly in another nod to the Fallout show’s upcoming second season. This new area features new factions, challenges, unique weapons (including The Ghoul’s own gun) and gear, and new fish to catch. Fallout 76 players can look forward to meeting new characters, such as the Rust King — an intelligent Super Mutant with whom players must collaborate across Burning Springs — as well as exploring new locations, public events, workshops, and finding a wild local menace called the Rad Hog. Those brave enough to tame it can make it a C.A.M.P. pet. Burning Springs is also home to Deathclaws and various Raiders.
The update will go live in December, presumably right on time with the show’s second season, which starts airing on December 17 on Amazon Prime Video. Following the remote presentation, Fallout 76 Production Director Bill Lacoste and Creative Director Jon Rush answered several questions fielded by various outlets in a roundtable format. You can find the whole transcript below.
Why Ohio?
John Rush: That’s a great question, and I usually don’t answer a question with a question, but why not Ohio? As to why Ohio, we wanted to expand the map again. We like to create updates that allow us to tell the next chapter in our story of Appalachia, but also give our players the opportunity to continue telling more of your own stories, both in the places you’ve adventured and then the things that you’ve built.
So, when we decided to do another regional expansion, which kind of satisfies all those criteria, we were looking at the map and we looked towards the east and we started to skirt towards the Capital Wasteland stuff. We were looking towards the West and realized, oh, we’re right up against Ohio. Not much has been done in that region with Fallout lore. So, why not, you know? We decided to rebuild the Point Pleasant Bridge and let folks cross over into Ohio and discover what’s happened to it post-war.
Since Ohio is full of Deathclaws and Raiders, will there be any baby Deathclaws?
Bill Lacoste: You’ll have to play through and find out.
Will there be new weapons and rewards?
John Rush: Absolutely, both new weapons and rewards. You’ll get new rewards for doing the bounty hunting feature. You’ll get new rewards for going through the new quest content, all sorts of new stuff for players, new mods, outfits, armors, and everything.
Do you have a favorite?
John Rush: I do. I actually really like running around with The Ghoul’s gun. I think that is my new favorite weapon.
How does The Ghoul fit into the timeline of Fallout 76?
John Rush: Great question. So, Fallout 76 is furthest back in time in the Fallout timeline, and the show is the furthest forward in time. And that’s where we were introduced to The Ghoul on the Amazon series. Lucky for us, The Ghoul has kind of preserved himself through Ghoulification. So The Ghoul existing in the 76 timeline makes sense, although what he’s doing in Ohio is still to be determined. I’m not one to question The Ghoul, I’m just gonna do what The Ghoul says.
Can you elaborate on the influences of Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and the Fallout series in Burning Springs?
John Rush: We all saw season one, right? We saw where that ended up. Kyle MacLachlan’s character staring out at New Vegas and then you’ve got the Deathclaw skull down on the ground. Once season one wrapped up, we immediately started planning for the content we wanted to make for season two.
Now, we didn’t know exactly when season two was gonna come out, but we knew that we wanted to at least start planning that content. And then once we found out more about dates, we started planning all the patches around that, too. What we wanted to do with the new region was to really kind of remind folks of what they came to know and love in Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas. And so when we set out to make this new region, the three pillars that we kind of gave to the team were, all right, it’s gotta have desert, Deathclaws, and Raiders. And to me, that captures the tone and the essence and the danger of those games. So we wanted that reflected in our map expansion in Burning Springs.
Will systems like fishing and camp building have options in Burning Springs?
Bill Lacoste: Yes, there’s lots of places to build your camp in Ohio. There’s gonna be a lot of really great vistas for people to build their camps in. And as we’ve talked about in the past, we wanna continue to expand on fishing. So there’s new fish, there’s new local legends, and new places to fish. And as I always say, anywhere you can swim, you can fish.
John Rush: And we have future plans for fishing as well. Fishing’s been really well received by the community. We’re fortunate enough that these new features that we’re making, we have built them up from the ground up in a way that makes them relatively easy to expand on later down the road. So yes, Burning Springs, new fish, new local legends, and we’ve also got plans for seasonal fish down the road, as well as improvements and additions to the feature overall.
When developing Burning Springs, how quickly was Walton Goggins folded in?
John Rush: When we started playing the new region, The Ghoul came about really organically. We’re like, okay, here’s the new region’s desert, Deathclaws, and Raiders. That’s the tone. What’s gonna be the Hallmark feature for that new region or that update? That was bounty hunting. In a kind of barren wasteland like that, there’s gonna be a lot of nefarious folks running around, so having a bounty hunting system would be a great addition for players, something fun to do. It’s also a feature that we had discussed doing for a little while as well. We were just looking for the right time. Who better to host a bounty hunting feature than The Ghoul? We started talking about that and Walton Goggins is a big fan, of course, of the franchise. He’s a big fan of the games. It came up sort of organically, really quickly. We had folks on our side working on the script, good folks on their side, working on the dialogue script and sort of came together. And of course, The Ghoul actually came out once Walton Goggins took the script and really made it his own, made those adjustments. It was cool to see him go from Walton Goggins to The Ghoul like that.
Bill Lacoste: He even brought the prosthetic with him to do the voice-over.
John Rush: Yeah, it was really awesome.
Do you have any tips for new players who are gonna be coming to this from the TV show, as you might expect with Goggins’ character?
John Rush: Don’t look them straight in the eyes. Yeah, that’s my tip.
Bill Lacoste: That’s a good tip.
John Rush: If you’re gonna engage in the new bounty hunting feature, take up some grunt hunts. Get a feel for what The Ghoul is looking for. And then if you’re lucky enough for him to give you a headhunt, or if you give him enough caps, he might give you one. He doesn’t have any qualms about taking caps from Vault dwellers. Just warm up into the feature and get a feel for it before you hop into the deep end with a headhunt.
Could you speak more about how the bounty system will work?
John Rush: This is a feature that’s unique to Burning Springs. Bounties can take place in, I think we’ve got 20 custom locations across the map, the Super Duper Mart being one of them, and in several other really fun thematic spaces to do bounties in. When you approach The Ghoul, you’ll be given the option to do these grunt hunts, right, which are kinda lower level bounties that he really doesn’t have time for. He’s got this huge stack of them on the table, so all of you out there need to help him out. After doing some grunt hunts, which can be done with one player, maybe two players. Once you get through some of those, lucky bounty hunters out there might come across a more prestigious contract on some of the targets, and those are called headhunts. A headhunt differs from a grunt hunt in that headhunts are much more difficult.
Think of a headhunt as a public event, which it actually is. Anybody on the server can join and help you take out the target, and you’ll need that help because the headhunt targets are tough. But they’re also really, really rewarding. There’s lots of new, unique rewards that you’ll encounter along the way, as well as lots of experience and caps. Per server, there can be one headhunt active at any time, while there can be as many grunt hunts as players want. You can do those till you’re blue in the face, but one headhunt at a time. But like I said, they’re public events, so despite there only being one at a time, everybody can hop on to help. I suspect there will probably be a steady stream of grunt hunts going on, and always at least one headhunt going on. There’s a whole bunch of named targets and they also have thematic gangs they’re with. Like you could run into a gang of Raiders, you could run into a gang of clowns, you could run into a gang of musicians, or even a gang of grannies. If you multiply that across the different types of locations and the different people coming to help you, you’ll have a lot of variety in these headhunt public events.
Bill Lacoste: I think the one thing we’ve created here, especially with Highway Town, is a hub for players to gather. We haven’t really had a space like that before, other than the boss events. When somebody launched a nuke, you went to kill the Scorch Beast Queen. But now, you have players going into an interior cell. They’re in the last resort with each other together, so they can find public teams to join, and go out and do these hunts together. It’s a really cool addition, and I don’t know if it was by accident or on purpose, but that’s what it’s created. And I think that’s a really cool aspect of what we’ve got there.
John Rush: Bill, it was on purpose.
Bill Lacoste: Ah, got it.
John Rush: But it is very unique. I think it’s probably the hallmark unique feature of this new update, Burning Springs. I can’t think of another space in the game that’s like that, perhaps maybe top of the world, but even so, that’s not really a community gathering space. It kind of feels like Diamond City from Fallout four, except, of course, Fallout 4 isn’t multiplayer, but it’s just kind of that big, expansive community gathering hub. We’d like to bring in vendors in that space down the road, unique vendors and really, really play it up as a place where players go to meet and talk about wasteland stuff.
It kind of feels like Diamond City from Fallout four, except, of course, Fallout 4 isn’t multiplayer, but it’s just kind of that big, expansive community gathering hub. We’d like to bring in vendors in that space down the road, unique vendors and really, really play it up as a place where players go to meet and talk about wasteland stuff.
Is there a finite number of bounties from The Ghoul, or will it repopulate?
Bill Lacoste: There’s an infinite amount of people in the Wasteland who need to be taken out and The Ghoul does not have time to do it himself.
Is there a recommended level to start Burning Springs?
Bill Lacoste: There’s not really a recommended level. We’ve always said that we wanted players to play Fallout 76 exactly how they wanted to play it. Even if you’re a new player coming out of the Vault, you’re gonna get some directions towards Burning Springs immediately, right there. But the first thing I usually tell people is to join a public team, see what those people are doing, take advantage of the XP boost from the intelligence, but take it slow as well. Just enjoy the game for what it is. As we’ve always said, Appalachia is the main character of this whole game. There are lots of notes, there are lots of holotapes, there’s lots of characters now, especially after Wastelands, tons of NPCs in the world. Tons of new quests, tons of new regions now, and now we’re in Ohio. Enjoy it. Take your leisurely stroll, explore. Especially if you’re a new player, my only guidance is that if you see a headhunt on the screen, don’t immediately jump into it. I would say go to Point Pleasant, take a nice stroll across the Buckman Bridge. Make your way up to the compound. Just really kind of understand the story a little bit and get into it. It’s gonna be really cool. And the vista, the reveal you’ll get at the end of that quest, is cool too.
John Rush: What we really strive for with new players and what we’re really building towards with all of these updates that we’ve been doing, like letting players choose loadouts and revisiting the workshop UI and the free build rules, is that we’re really trying to encourage players once they come out of the Vault to choose their own path. You wanna do the main quest, go ahead. You want to go explore, feel free. You want to take your new shotgun and go blow the heads off of Ghouls, have at it. The Ghoul is going to be in more places than just Highway Town. People who have never even gone to Highway Town in this update will encounter The Ghoul. In some instances, new players coming out of the Vault will encounter The Ghoul. If those Vault dwellers are brazen enough to take The Ghoul up on his offer to do some bounty hunting up in Highway Town and they run into some trouble, so be it. I’m not gonna stop ’em.
Bill Lacoste: No, not at all.
Is Highway Town Hub the only non-hostile town, or are there others in Burning Springs?
Bill Lacoste: I mean, the Wasteland is pretty hostile in general…
John Rush: I wouldn’t say that Highway Town is safe. There’s some nefarious folks there. Nowhere is safe. Keep your eyes on your caps, folks, when you’re walking around Highway Town.
Can we expect to encounter any new cryptics in this region?
John Rush: No brand new cryptids at this time, but you’re gonna find cryptids that you’re familiar with that are a bit different because of the new region and the unique elements in that space.
Can we expect Burning Springs to bring new information to the canon of the Fallout universe?
John Rush: Yes, absolutely. Like I said, we’ve never explored this part of the map. Even just the small sliver of Ohio being added does influence the lore of Fallout as a whole.
Bill Lacoste: Yeah. As most people know, there’s only a handful of references to Ohio throughout Fallout, so it’s really great to have a little bit of a blank slate in a region that we can kind of establish some early lore for the game.
Can we cross to Ohio at any point, or is the Point Pleasant Bridge the only way to get there?
Bill Lacoste: I think there are certain parts that you can cross the waterway into Ohio. But yeah, I would advise everybody to just go across the bridge. But there are small points along the way you can swim, though most of it is closed off.
How many locations are in Burning Springs?
John Rush: It’s like, if this is Skyline Valley, it’s bigger. I think there are over 20 new points of interest. Tons of new locations.
Bill Lacoste: It’s very similar to Savage Divide ’cause it’s also long across that area.
John Rush: Savage Divide is long. You gotta add up the square footage and wrap it all together.
Bill Lacoste: It’s a pretty big space.
With Fallout 3 and New Vegas as major inspirations, would you say that this new expansion is darker or grittier than past content?
John Rush: It kind of depends on who’s experiencing the content. I would say tonally it’s very similar. Whether you think that’s dark or not is more of a character call.
How does it feel to see just how far Fallout 76 has come so many years after release?
Bill Lacoste: Oh, absolutely fantastic. I know John’s been here from the very beginning. I got into Bethesda a little bit before Wasteland. So, being able to see that whole integration of NPCs and then also that was what, update 18, and now we’re on 64. It’s been an amazing trek to be able to be part of some of the development of those features and bring all these new features to players and new regions and also just new systems within the game to be able to bring to players.
Something that doesn’t get talked about a lot is that we have always been very much open to revisiting systems and rewriting them and actually making them better for Fallout 76 players, which we’ve done over the course of this last year. Even adding The Ghoul into the game, adding Gleaming Depths into the game, doing all of our combat rebalancing. Trust us, it’s going in the right direction. The gunplay is a lot tighter than it used to be. You have LMGs now that you can actually aim down sights and shoot around.
All the things we’ve been building up to towards this Burning Springs update and everything we’ve done since, even before Wastelands, has been a real treat and an amazing experience to be part of. We’re very, very proud of this game. John and I both have over a thousand hours plus playing as our own personal characters, not just in the office as we do as devs anyway. We are invested in multiple characters, so we are just as much fans of the game as you all are. That’s why whenever you all send us feedback, we’re in alignment with you most of the time, you know, ’cause we wanna see those things too. We do our best to try to bring those to you. The journey has just been amazing and so very happy to be part of this along with John and the rest of the team. It’s been great.
Do you think that the Burning Springs update will make it easier for new Fallout 76 players to get started, or is it more aimed at veterans?
John Rush: I would say that the last several updates will make it easier for new players, right? That’s something we are always keeping our eyes on, ways to remove the friction so players can just hop in and start doing things and having fun. Things like the combat rebalance, the Workshop UI, and the free builders update are all being done in an effort to make it easier for new players, as well as the loadouts they can choose from when they leave the Vault. And we’re talking about ways down the road to make it even easier for folks to get in. Some small things, small adjustments, and some really big, but you’ll have to stay tuned in for those. Burning Springs specifically, things being done to make it easier for new players? Well, it’s gonna be really easy to find Burning Springs. It’s gonna be really easy to find Highway Town and The Ghoul for those who want to hop into bounty hunting early.
Bill Lacoste: I mean, I think it’s got something for everybody. Even the grunt hunts are something you could do at a much earlier, you know, level. Even headhunts, I would just say don’t try them solo, they are actually similar boss battles that you have to take on, but if you start one up, I guarantee you most of the server is going to immediately jump in and help out. There’s a lot for everybody, especially explorers and then also builders and adventurers. There’s something for everybody across this whole patch.
John Rush: Yeah. I think if anything, a new player is going to find a wide array of things they can reasonably do fresh outta the Vault.
Considering that The Ghoul will be central to this expansion, can we expect any changes in how the world deals with us when we are Ghouls?
John Rush: Yes. More specific to The Ghoul. Big changes to players playing as a Ghoul are being talked about and planned for later. However, in this update, you will find specific choices that somebody playing as a Ghoul will have to make, as well as some of the rewards for headhunts include mods that benefit specifically Ghouls, so there is content in there for Ghouls.
Bill Lacoste: The one thing we talked about when doing the Ghouls update was that content going forward needed to consider the Ghouls, and sometimes that adds a little more work to our plate, but we didn’t wanna leave that out. That is a major part of continuing on that story and making sure that characters in the world and other parts of the game recognized that you were a Ghoul, and this is definitely one of those steps.
John Rush: When we start out on a new big feature, one of the first questions that we’ll ask ourselves is, how does this benefit Ghouls? Specifically, how does this support players who’ve made that decision? For instance, if we were ever to make a raid 2, we would definitely take Ghouls into consideration in how they interact with the raid.
How far in advance was the new expansion content planned, and how far ahead have you planned for the future?
John Rush: I’ll answer the second one first. We’ve got stuff planned for years down the road. Everything that we’ve done in the past couple of years or so on Fallout 76 has been great in shaping up the game, giving our early, mid-level players hundreds of hours of stuff to do, and that is not even counting the building and exploring. And we’ve been giving our elder players challenging experiences to tackle with raids and of course with the headhunts coming up. So, stuff for down the road is just gonna get bigger and better for everybody.
As for Burning Springs, once season one hit, we had our updates coming out around that time and they were kind of more cosmetic, right? Seeing how awesome season one was and how much everybody loved it, including myself, we started immediately planning for season two. Again, we didn’t know the date that season two was coming out. We just knew that when season two hit, we wanted something that was totally in line and big. That’s where Burning Springs came in.
What will happen to the remaining Milepost Zero content, and will there be more to Skyline Valley and the Ghouls in Appalachia?
Bill Lacoste: So, we are gonna be shutting down Milepost Zero. We are moving windy over to Highway Town, so you’ll be able to gather a lot of the stuff there. I believe the number of Raiders and the volatility around Skyline Valley has caused Milepost to rethink their engagement in doing caravans around the Skyline Valley area.
John Rush: Skyline Valley’s become too hostile even for the Blue Ridge Caravan Company. There’s a lot of nefarious folks running around Skyline Valley, and as I mentioned before, Bounty hunting could be expanding to other places, but nothing official right now. You have to stay tuned.
Will there be any new recipes or mods specific to the new region that you can talk about?
John Rush: Yes, there will be. There’s several mods that you can earn from doing headhunts. Really good ones that I think players are gonna be using, both humans and Ghouls. There’s unique stuff when you nuke this new region. However, you cannot nuke Highway Town. Everywhere else, feel free and see what happens. I know Rad, radhogs have a, have a funny reaction to nukes, but as Bill mentioned, there’s new flora as well. And of course the nuke versions of that.
With Fallout known as a story-heavy game, but MMOs focusing more on gameplay content, how do you balance narrative versus content for different play styles, especially in an expansion like this?
John Rush: Some features will kind of vary to explicitly support the story and expand upon it, right? Skyline Valley and The Lost and the whole quest arc that was going on there. While other features may not directly impact a story like that, but they kind of indirectly impact it. For instance, the fishing update, right? There’s sort of these ancillary stories going off on the side that support other narratives going on in the world. So everything we put in Fallout 76, in one way or another, supports the story of our Appalachia, I guess just some to a larger degree than others.
Bill Lacoste: Some of that’s just because of the style of the game. Like you said, we are more focused a lot of times on new systems, new things, new ways to engage, because a lot of that quest content can be just one and done. As you all know, it takes a good bit of time to create that and get the story, the dialogue, and the characters, all spun up, and then you’re done, that’s it. Now we really do focus a lot more on the multiplayer aspect of it. New systems, new events and engagements that everybody can be a part of. Narrative is still important to the game, of course, because we do have adventurers who love to read about the lore and find new holotapes and messages. Those are always gonna be a staple of what we do in the game. But sometimes in terms of like, what’s the balance? The balance will focus a lot more on the multiplayer aspect a lot of the time.
John Rush: There’s plenty of that in Burning Springs, the holotapes and the notes, and of course, the new quest arc you will find there. But then, if you look at features like bounty hunting, there’s a kind of narrative undertone there that is supported every time somebody plays the feature. It kind of lets them make their own story in Appalachia.
Speaking of the quest line, can you comment on how long the new quest line will take and if there are any new bosses?
John Rush: It depends on how you play. Some people zip through it.
Bill Lacoste: I don’t know. Like you said, it depends on how you play the game. Like, do you read through all the dialogue and listen to the voiceover and talk to all the characters, or do you press the space bar and blitz through everything, you know? It’s a substantial amount of content. There’s a lot of new characters, a lot of dialogue there.
John Rush: It’s never really anything that we set out to accomplish, like we’ve made x hours of content. What’s most important to us is creating an enriching, fulfilling experience for players that, again, supports our story of Appalachia and continues telling that and enables our players to continue being able to tell their own stories.
When will people be able to see Burning Springs on the Fallout 76 PTS?
Bill Lacoste: October 2nd. That is the planned date.
Any plans for cross-play or cross-save?
Bill Lacoste: Not at this time. We do get asked about it a lot. It is something we talk about internally, but it is just a huge technical hurdle, especially seven years into the game’s development. Those are things you have to determine at the very beginning, uh, uh, when you start making the game, and right now the technical hurdle just outweighs the need for it.
John Rush: But we do discuss it. We actually discuss it; we do frequently look for any sort of paths or solutions. It’s not forgotten. It’s not a hard no, but it’s definitely not a yes at this time.
Bill Lacoste: These things are never a hard no. It’s just that there are balances there that we have to take into account. Some of these things, especially this late in the game, are just much more difficult for us to pull off.
Taking a step back after 64 updates and years of content, how are you feeling about Fallout 76 and its outlook?
Bill Lacoste: I think we’re both feeling really amazing about this new region. It’s gone through its phases of concept and then getting into the game and getting to be able to run around the whole environment.
And then all of a sudden, weather got added into it. Now you have sandstorms that come through and you see debris flying across, and then you’re trying to do a headhunt, a grunt hunt, or even one of the public events, and all of a sudden there’s a sandstorm. It’s a really great implementation of this environment. It’s really well done. We have just a ton of new POIs to explore. The public events are great.
There’s so much fun to actually engage in, just so much content. I think it’s one of our best updates ever. It’s certainly one of our biggest in terms of map size. But yeah, I feel really great about this update. It’s gonna be a lot of fun and people are really gonna enjoy it.
Could you tell us if there are any Easter eggs within Fallout 76 that players still haven’t found?
John Rush: Yes, there are lots of Easter eggs in the game that players still haven’t found. I mean, this update aside, there’s stuff I can think of already. I mean, we could talk about C.A.M.P. Revamp’s main menu video. There’s some Easter eggs in that. I haven’t heard anybody mention those.
Bill Lacoste: Even in previous videos, there have been Easter eggs that no one has found and questioned.
John Rush: We usually like to try to sneak little things in there to give hints.
Bill Lacoste: Jump into the game now and watch that video all the way through and see what you can find.
Thank you for your time.
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