New 'Fallout' video game takes place in the hills of West Virginia
Bethesda Game Studios has announced that the next installment in its post-apocalyptic "Fallout" video game series will be a prequel based in the Mountain State.
At E3, the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo which brings some of the biggest video game news of the year, Director and Executive Producer Todd Howard confirmed what the studio had teased weeks before with a trailer featuring West Virginia's state song, "Take Me Home, County Roads."
The most recent game in the series generated more than $750 million within the first 24 hours of its retail launch in 2015.
The games all take place within a post-apocalyptic alternate timeline version of America, following years that people spent in fallout shelters after nuclear war took place in 2077.
The first games took place along the West Coast and midwest. Fallout 3 took place in the general region of Washington, D.C. and Fallout 4 took place around Boston.
But this is the first time the series has had a game set primarily in rural areas.
The trailer released to the public featured a number of landmarks familiar to West Virginians, like the New River Gorge Bridge, The Greenbrier, the State Capitol, Woodburn Hall, and more.
Interestingly, The Greenbrier, in real-life housed a fallout shelter meant for Congress if nuclear war were to break out. According to the official website, the 112,544-square-foot bunker is situated some 70 feet below the Greenbrier resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. It features a 25-ton blast door and a decontamination chamber.
However, its location was revealed by The Washington Post in 1992 and likely has not been used since then, although The Greenbrier is still used for GOP Congressional retreats.
"Fallout 76" is being touted as the largest world created in the universe. Some of the locations seen in the trailer span large swaths of the state, but it's likely the in-game map won't represent a 1:1 picture of the state.
Howard says the game is set 25 years after the nuclear strike that creates the post-apocalyptic landscape of the Fallout universe, making it by far the earliest game in the series.
That means players will get to see a West Virginia just a couple decades after nuclear devastation, as opposed to a Las Vegas or Boston hundreds of years later, like the earlier games.
Vault 76 has been mentioned in previous Fallout games as one of the earliest vaults to release settlers back into the world, which Howard confirmed, saying, ‘Vault 76, one of the very first vaults to open was built to celebrate America’s tercentenary, which is an awesome word by the way.’
‘You are one of the very special few selected to be an occupant and spend 25 years underground waiting for Reclamation Day — the day vault opens.”
The game launches on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC on Nov. 14.
Though Bethesda is known for its single-player games, "Fallout 76" will be an online multiplayer game, though single-player will remain an option.
