Fallout 76 update roadmap reveals when you can leave West Virginia
Leave those country roads behind
If you’ve been growing tired of Fallout 76’s Appalachian region, you don’t have too long to wait until you’re able to break out and explore a whole new location. In its newly published Fallout 76 update roadmap, Bethesda Game Studios revealed that it plans to release Expeditions: The Pitt this ‘Fall’. Going off last year’s ‘Fall’ update, that likely means September time.
Expeditions will let you leave Fallout 76’s main map and join in a large, story-driven encounter in different parts of the wider wasteland. The first expedition Bethesda has been teasing is to Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. Pittsburg is now a raider-owned territory called The Pitt in Fallout’s apocalyptic world.
Whereas the world of Fallout 76 is open and unstructured, with a focus on your interactions with other human players and random events, Expeditions: The Pitt will be familiar to fans of the traditional Fallout games. There will be a main story running through the expedition, NPCs to interact with, and quests to complete. It’s Bethesda’s way of bringing single player-like content to the multiplayer world of Fallout 76, and something that should help suppress our hunger for Fallout 5.
While ‘Fall’ is only a release window, last year’s Fallout 76 Fall update - the Worlds Are Changing release - came out in September, so it isn’t a bad idea to expect a similar time for The Pitt’s release.
More to come
The Pitt’s release window wasn’t the only reveal in the Fallout 76 update roadmap. Last year’s delayed Winter update, Tales From The Stars, is back and releasing in March. It features the same content as before, with new extraterrestrial random encounters and the ability to earn SCORE, but it’s now called Invaders From Beyond. SCORE is Fallout 76’s ranking system; you can cash those points in for rewards as you earn in-game ranks.
Invaders From Beyond has already been added to the public test server (PTS), so it’s already possible to go and fight off the aliens. If you’re not a member of the PTS, you can expect to see the UFOs rock up in your Appalachian neighborhood in March.
Next up is the Summer release of Test Your Metal. The big sell of that update - which, going off last year’s release, you can expect around the start of July - is the automaton deathmatches. Who hasn’t wanted to load up with their best gear and step into an arena with a deadly robot?
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The final update of the year is the Nuka World On Tour update. Bethesda Game Studios describes it as “a traveling roadshow making a stop in the area, toting along a new Season, Public Events and region boss!”. Considering Nuka Cola is Fallout’s foil of Coca-Cola, all I can picture for this update are those Christmas ads with the red trucks rolling into a small town, though, with more radioactive mutations.
Bethesda will announce specific release dates for each of these updates throughout the year.
Julian's been writing about video games for more than a decade. In that time, he's always been drawn to the strange intersections between gaming and the real world, like when he interviewed a NASA scientist who had become a Space Pope in EVE Online, or when he traveled to Ukraine to interview game developers involved in the 2014 revolution, or that time he tore his trousers while playing Just Dance with a developer.