Fallout 76 to be the First Fully Online Entry in the Series

King of the meme Todd Howard, an ever present figure for Bethesda, was present once again at E3. As one of the company's longest running staff, he has been to most of the E3 conferences, including the very first one. After giving us all a little spiel about how the show has changed, he revealed another port of Skyrim, but more on that elsewhere, we're more interested in the next part of his speech, where he gave us info on Fallout 76.

The new title is a prequel to the earlier games, and lets us see where it all began. With a trailer illustrating the first of the vaults to be created already being out, we got a brief refresh of what we might have missed, but it was the update on what we can expect to see when the game releases that we were all most excited by.

You will be one of the initial inhabitents of vault 76, awiting the fabled "reclaimation day", when the vault opens for you to rebuild the world. Of course, this being Fallout, we know it won't run that smoothly. Cue a new trailer, and the revelation that Fallout 76 is going to be completely online.

Every character is set to be a real person, with the world inhabited by other players rather than NPCs. It's not an MMO, so if you don't want multiplayer, you can just play solo, but if you want to experience the world with friends, then you can do that too. It'll be a persistant world, where you can create your own stories, and you decide exactly what happens.

There were a few other important announcements. Firstly the special edition content, which looks pretty swanky. More importantly though, that release date. In keeping with Bethesda's tradition of announcing games shortly before they're ready, it'll be out before the end of the year. With a beta coming shortly, we can expect to see the full version of the game to be avilable on the 14th of November.