Fallout 76: Burning Springs Hands-On Preview

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by Joey Brown

This December, Fallout 76 is gearing up to release its most substantial update in the last five years, with Burning Springs opening up a vast swath of the map's western edge and introducing a bounty hunting system as a new form of repeatable content. According to Bethesda, the Fallout 76 update is heavily inspired by Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 3, with its environments and quest beats occasionally harkening back to our time in the Capital Wasteland and the Mojave Desert.

I recently attended a hands-on preview of the upcoming Burning Springs update, where I was given several hours to progress through the main quest, dabble in the new bounty system, and explore many of the dusty corners throughout the Burning Springs region. Between bounties and quests, I also took the chance to dive into several public events that popped up in the Burning Springs, including one memorable event that involved defending a friendly Deathclaw from an onslaught of enemies.

Burning Springs Is Fallout 76's Biggest Update in Years

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This update introduces the Burning Springs region of post-nuclear Ohio, a Deathclaw-infested desert landscape that a horde of psychotic raiders call home. The desert biome lends this region a Fallout: New Vegas feel, with surprising diversity in environments and set pieces. One moment, I was stepping through a roadside dinosaur park, while in another, I was in a chaotic firefight with raiders amid a town-sized trash heap that brings to mind Megaton from Fallout 3.

This new western region of the map is dotted with workshops, public events, and a wide variety of POIs to plunder, brought alive by Bethesda's usual striking level of detail in environmental storytelling throughout. Prospective desert dwellers can also put Fallout 76's recently overhauled building system to good use here, as there are plenty of open spaces to get creative.

Fallout 76's Burning Springs Quests

The quest begins with discovering the local settlers' struggle in dealing with brutal harassment from raiders led by the Rust King: a highly intelligent Super Mutant who has gathered an army of bloodthirsty bandits from across the wasteland. This kicks off more free-form than typical Fallout quests: to proceed, I had to complete my choice of several Tests of Might and Tests of Dominance — varied challenges that encourage players to explore or try new equipment. One Test of Might asked me to kill a number of enemies using fire damage, while a Test of Dominance had me hunting down a Deathclaw.

These challenges brought me out of my comfort zone on a few occasions, taking me to less-visited areas to eliminate specific creatures or using weapons I'd normally scrap. Along the way, I assembled a crew after solving whatever problem each of them faced, and it appears that there may be a handful of branching outcomes depending on the player's actions. This storyline had some surprising twists and turns, making it one of Fallout 76's more standout main story quests.

Read the full article on GameRant

This article originally appeared on GameRant and is republished here with permission.

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