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Fallout 76’s upcoming winter map expansion, Burning Springs, wears its Fallout TV show trappings loudly and proudly, as you can read about in our full preview. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: many players rightly took issue with Bethesda providing very little fresh Fallout to jump into after they watched the show’s debut series last year.

However, Burning Springs, with its “total tonal tandem” with the upcoming season two, seemingly represents a U-turn for how Bethesda see their online survival-ish RPG meshing with the TV series – and how they might capitalise on the boom in Fallout popularity that it’s helped usher in.

Last November, while at a preview for Fallout 76’s playable ghoul update, I asked lead producer Bill LaCoste whether he thought he and his colleagues would opt to do more in terms of crossover with the second series of Prime Video’s Fallout series than they had the first. There had been some tying-in the first time round, but mainly in the form of standalone cosmetics and gear; only Fallout 4 got a major patch during the season one boom, and that was April 2024’s unenthusiastically received “next gen update”.

“I would imagine it would probably be along the same lines,” LaCoste answered at the time. “Because we have an appreciation for the TV show, the story it’s trying to tell and the characters it’s trying to [portray], and we also have an appreciation for the story of Fallout 76 is trying to tell. So, very, very limited amounts of crossover, where it actually makes sense, because again, we’re on extreme ends of the [Fallout] timeline as well.

“We probably won’t go out of our way to add a whole bunch of stuff specific to the show, because we don’t feel like we need to. We feel like it’s great to let the TV show do its thing and for people to love the TV show for what it is, but also love our game for what it is, and not just give fan service for just the sake of doing it.”

Image credit: Bethesda

Fast forward to now and, with Walton Goggins’ ghoul as the face of a 76 update – one that’s openly leaning hard into the single-player Fallout vibes that Bethesda believe show viewers would want – the crossover certainly doesn’t feel limited, for better or worse.

However, speaking at a preview for Burning Springs attended by RPS, LaCoste and Fallout 76 creative director Jon Rush painted this as having been planned ever since the first season found success. “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 going to come out, but we knew we at least wanted to start planning that content and then once we found out about dates, start planning all the patches around that.”

Rush said that looping in Goggins came about “organically” as the team fleshed out the update and decided to make his character, Cooper Howard a.k.a. The Ghoul, the face of Burning Springs’ “hallmark feature”: a new bounty-hunting system. Meanwhile, the pair alluded to Howard’s ghoulified nature as the only justification they were willing to divulge for his presence in Ohio during the time of Fallout 76, nearly two hundred years prior to the show’s setting.

Image credit: Bethesda

There are plenty of ways The Ghoul’s inclusion can be made less out of the blue, lore-wise, and being dogmatic with the particulars of lore to the point that it impedes the potential to do interesting things isn’t something I’d generally advocate. Besides, it makes sense for Bethesda to have switched things up, if that is what’s happened here, to capitalise a lot more on series two with 76. Like I said, it’s something lots of folks wanted to see the first time round. There’s also the matter of Microsoft’s mass layoffs in the past few years potentially pushing teams under the Xbox umbrella to go harder in acting on opportunities like the one the TV show represents for 76.

I just hope that in doing so, the 76 team are still able to stick to their creative guns as LaCoste alluded to in that interview last year. That said, there’s definitely a debate to be had as to whether 76 serving as the vehicle of choice for substantial TV show tie-ins is the ideal role for it at this point in its lifespan. Once Burning Springs arrives, we’ll see whether it’s possible to have the best of both worlds.

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