Become a "fierce berserker" ghoul in Fallout 76 and you can KO a Mirelurk Queen with a single punch

Fallout 76 is not a PvP game. Don't get me wrong: it could have been, if its players had wanted it to be. Buried in Bethesda's MMO is an elephant's graveyard of mechanics dedicated to handling impromptu firefights between players. There are resource-stuffed workshop locations all over West Virginia, designed to encourage strangers to scrap over territory. At one point, there was even a battle royale mode: Nuclear Winter.

But who are we kidding? This is the MMO beloved by Bethesda RPG lifers who show up to build corrugated houses with their friends. If you want your wasteland brutal, you go to Rust. Out in Appalachia, peace has already triumphed.

"I know people don't necessarily want to hear this, but we do have data on people who engage with PvP and played Nuclear Winter and take over workshops," lead producer Bill LaCoste says. "No one ever challenges a workshop. No one does. They never go in and do it." Then the statistician in him kicks in: "Okay, I shouldn't say never. I would just say there's a non-zero percentage, that's really low, of people who actually do that."

That's good news for the vast majority who come to Fallout 76 for questing, because a) they're not having to fend off players with plasma cutters whenever they settle down in front of a nice green-screened terminal, and b) they're not competing for Bethesda's attention when it comes to new features. "I think we'll probably have some stuff in the future that gives at least that utility to expand on the PvP element," LaCoste says. "But right now, most of the stuff is really just for the core group of players, which are mostly PvE."

Going feral

It's with a healthy disregard for PvP balance, then, that Bethesda is introducing playable ghouls to the game in early 2025. As every longtime Fallout fan knows, ghouls are the great adapters of the wasteland – those who have not only survived but soaked up enough radiation to start benefiting from it.

Choose to become a ghoul when the questline unlocks at level 50, and the crackle of the geiger counter will start to sound like sweet music. The toxic valley that surrounds the former steel town of Grafton, once made oppressive and hazardous by its polluted lakebed, will become a soothing spa – restoring your health with ambient ease.

"We want to [allow] play as a ghoul, but we're not going to give players just, like, an outfit that makes them look like a ghoul, so that they can run through the world the same way as they did before," LaCoste says. "We want them to have a real ghoul experience where new loadouts are created."

With that goal in mind, Bethesda has added 32 ghoul-specific perks to Fallout 76, which can be layered on top of your existing loadout. Many of them draw on a new resource, Glow, which builds as you absorb excess radiation in the world. "We've got a dozen new playstyles here," says creative director Jon Rush.

In the character build I was handed at a preview event last month, the impact of Glow was fairly straightforward. Eagerly clambering atop a truck piled with leaky radioactive barrels outside the Poseidon power plant, I began exchanging potshots with Scorched on the roof. Pretty quickly, I noticed that Glow was reducing the damage I took from incoming shots – while increasing the damage output from my guns. Handy, if not especially ghoulish.

But the longer-term effects Bethesda describe are more dramatic and intriguing. Not only are ghouls effectively surrounded by healthpacks when they wander into nuclear disposal sites – they're also exempt from the soft survival mechanics that have defined Fallout 76 since launch. "Ghouls aren't subject to hunger and thirst," Rush says. "Rather, they have a feral meter that they need to manage through chems."

Yep: you'll need to Walton Goggins your way through the wasteland. Or embrace ferality, accept a severe drop in your hitpoints and weapon accuracy, and be compensated with a powerful hand-to-hand boost – "which can turn ghouls into fierce berserkers". They're not kidding. I've seen a player ghoul bring down a Mirelurk Queen, one of Fallout 4's boss creatures, with a well-placed haymaker.

The road

Speaking of tradeoffs, Bethesda is leaning into the social cost of going ghoul. To become one, you'll need to travel to a remote outpost in the far north-east of West Virginia. There, a peppy ghoul scientist named Parthenia will happily offer you an experimental inhaler and dose you up with a potentially lethal level of rads. But even her guard, Asher, isn't convinced of the benefits. "The world will drop out from beneath your feet," he says. You'll be "looking in the mirror at a corpse."

There's a discomforting edge to Parthenia, too, despite her surprisingly sunny disposition. Her goal is to transform as many people as possible, in order to usher in a new kind of wasteland resistant post-human – a "lean, mean, radiation-eating machine". It's an uneasy echo of The Master's rhetoric in the original Fallout, with the super mutants swapped out for ghouls.

"76 is the earliest game in the timeline, and we're the ones who are defining what ghoul life may be like, going forward," LaCoste says. "This is very new to the wasteland, and how are people going to respond to that?" Not well, necessarily. Bethesda is using established Fallout fiction as its guide for how the world treats player ghouls. "From a lore perspective, we need to abide by the way the factions respond," LaCoste says. "And so you'll see The Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave, they're very aggro towards ghoul characters."

That wasn't yet fully apparent in the early alpha build I played. After becoming a ghoul, I made a beeline for Brotherhood HQ, Fort Atlas, to confront the metal men with my newly melted face. Out on the doorstep, Brotherhood recruiter Russell Dorsey said it was nice to see me again – studiously ignoring my new aesthetic. When I reached the front door, though, it wouldn't open. Classic smoothskin behaviour.

By default, quests given by 'aggro' factions will be off-limits to ghouls. But they'll be accessible fairly easily by acquiring disguises – a simple, costume-based way of bypassing faction stances. "We didn't want to provide an experience that then blocked you from completing any of the Brotherhood of Steel questlines, any of the Enclave stuff," LaCoste says. "Because obviously you have to go into the Enclave bunker to launch your first nuke anyway. We can't really take away some of those elements. That would have been bad. People would have been like, 'Wait, what? I can't finish off the main questline?'"

While the hardcore roleplayer in me rails against consequence-light character choices, LaCoste knows his players, and I suspect he's right. The next time I see a player ghoul basking in the strange sunshine of a mushroom cloud, I know I'll appreciate the bold swings Bethesda is taking with its MMO – whatever the compromises.

Want to jump into a wasteland adventure? We've got our best Fallout games to take a look at! We've also got the latest on all things Fallout 5 if you'd rather look ahead at what the doomed future will bring next.