Clubbing on a Tuesday night is not a good idea. The only places open on a Tuesday are named after sea creatures and bandits; The Dolphin or Copper Face Jack s , Sneaky Pete s or Mermaid Bar . Inevitably, you will tryst with a stranger. Primal urges will be satisfied. In the following days your nethers will begin to itch in a sinister way, as you both realise the existence of, and dither within, your own pathetic void.

At no point will you regret a dodgy Tuesday, but its events will never have meaning. They will hover, seeming like they were intended to mean something, but what that meaning was, other than drunken ramblings, will remain obscure. Far Cry 5 is like this.

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War may never change, but a lot can happen in a public beta test, and those braving Fallout 76‘s wasteland early have found some things in need of changing. Bethesda may have warned that there were “spectacular” bugs to be found, but few were expecting this laundry list collated on Reddit – client-side modding, unsecured connections and worse. Also the significant issue of player speed being tied to framerate, (thanks, Eurogamer) – players with uncapped framerates can zoom off by staring at their own feet. Bethesda have partially> acknowledged these issues in a statement to Eurogamer today.

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Good news, prospective vault dwellers! While Fallout 76 will let you play with nukes, the chances of being trolled by AtomicSlayer420 are extremely slim. While nukes are the game s most devastating weapons, they re not designed to target players specifically, says Bethesda, and are instead a way to alter the environment. Of course, altering the environment might also include wiping an enemy base off the map.

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Over on Reddit, prospective vault dwellers have been diligently constructing a map for Fallout 76. It pays to be prepared for the apocalypse. Despite the fact that the Fallout spin-off was only announced just before E3, the user-created map is already in its sixth iteration. It s all speculation at the moment, but thanks to West Virginians chiming in, it might also end up being pretty close to Bethesda s version. (more…)

It is looking like a very fine year indeed to be a Fallout fan. Even if you’re not on board with Fallout 76 taking the series online, we’ve got two full-game-length mods on the way, both due out before the end of 2018. Fallout: The Frontier is an unofficial expansion for Fallout: New Vegas, and has you heading to the frozen north to aid a crew of New California Republic deserters in a massive new map (as big as the editor allows) against a well equipped enemy force. Check out the dramatic and explosion-filled new trailer within.

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While the recently announced Fallout 76 might be diverging from series standards, it looks like fans of traditional dialogue and roleplaying-heavy Fallout adventures won’t be entirely left out this year. Originally announced in 2010 as Project Brazil, Fallout: New California is effectively a whole new Fallout game built on top of the New Vegas engine by modding crew Radian-Helix Media, and it’s due for release on October 23rd. Within, a quite dramatic announcement trailer featuring some decent enough amateur voice-work and a whole lot of shooting.

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Well, there we go: Fallout 76 is the answer you were looking for. Not Fallout 5, not Fallout 3 remastered, but ‘Fallout 76′, which on the face of things implies a sort Fallout 4.5, much like New Vegas was to FO3. It might not be that simple, however – more on which below.

’76’ refers, it seems, both to the number of the Vault you’ll start off in this time, and to the year 2076 (that being the year Vault 76 was built, and the year before the bombs dropped in the Falloutverse). I’m hoping it also proves an excuse to use more of a 70s than 50s aesthetic for this particular take on the end of the world, which may be backed up by the use of John Denver’s ’71 country classic, Take Me Home, Country Roads. That song’s reference to West Virginia probably ain’t no coinky-dink either.

Below: the trailer, and my best educated guesses about the timeline, setting, theme and release date of this new Fallout. (more…)

“War,” Ron Perlman will almost certainly growl during Bethesda’s E3 press conference. “War never changes,” he’ll likely continue. Then he’ll go on about some past wars, which were bad, and tell us about fictional future wars which are also bad. Bethesda are teasing some sort of Fallout announcement, see. New or old, original or remaster… we don’t know. But at some point soon we’ll get to see some marketing for a new Fallout thing. E3, E3 never changes. (more…)

Democracy is on the brink of collapse. Caesar’s Legion, the authoritarian slave state across the Colorado River, has launched a massive assault on the last, best chance for freedom in the post-apocalyptic world of Fallout. It’s a grim certainty in Old World Blues that the New California Republic will fight Caesar’s Legion: they’re the wasteland’s two superpowers, diametrically opposed ideologically, each expanding towards the other. I just thought I was better prepared. While Caesar was annihilating every ill-defended tribe to the west, I was rearming, inviting new states into the republic, and admittedly annexing a few tribes myself. With the game paused, I assess my options, reorganise my armies and ask, finally, does democracy die in 2279?

Old World Blues is a mod for Hearts of Iron IV which transports the World War II grand strategy game hundreds of years forward into the post-apocalyptic American west coast of the Fallout series. Players select a faction in the year 2275 and attempt to survive and thrive in the west coast wasteland. Structurally, it’s similar to Hearts of Iron IV, but the content and style has been transformed. Old World Blues is tremendously fun, comparable in quality to the standard Hearts of Iron IV game, and it does a terrific job of translating Fallout to grand strategy. (more…)

The world ended on September, 30 1997. Or, rather, that was the day we were first shown what would become gaming’s enduring definition of the end of the world. Interplay’s Fallout, a very different game from Bethesda’s Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 (not that this seems to bother anyone; no sirree, not a soul), was and is a landmark roleplaying game. It disrupted ideas that RPGs meant elves and kobolds; it disrupted ideas that RPGs were a straight march to the finish line; it disrupted ideas that RPG heroes should be heroic.

War never changes, but Fallout changed most everything else.

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