Fallout 76’s next expansion goes all-in on Fallout TV show season 2, bringing Walton Goggins and “New Vegas feel” to Ohio

“Deserts, deathclaws, and raiders”, alongside a “New Vegas feel” with Walton Goggins’ Ghoul as the face. These are the main ingredients for Fallout 76’s Burning Springs map expansion, which is set to arrive in early December this year.

In case you weren’t clear as to how Bethesda are pitching it, a hands-off preview attended by RPS saw 76 creative director Jon Rush introduce Burning Springs thusly: “Based on the success of season one of the Fallout Show, we can expect to see several million players returning to Appalachia for season two. People [who] have seen the show and want more of that storytelling, more of that New Vegas feel will get it all in Fallout 76: Burning Springs. Burning Springs is in total tonal tandem with season two.”

Going so hard on appealing to that Fallout show audience, with an update which has been deliberately timed to coincide with series two, is interesting – for reasons I’ve delved into a bit in this news piece – if not surprising. The question, though, is will this update to the multiplayer Fallout, which has gradually recovered from a very rocky launch to carve itself out a steady audience, be better for it?

Burning Springs is the largest map expansion 76 has had in a good while, outsprawling last year’s Skyline Valley update. It’s seen Bethesda carve out a strip of Ohio in the northtwest of the map for you to waltz into across the Point Pleasant bridge, something you can do right out of the vault if you fancy, as the new area’s got no level requirement attached. “We were looking at the map, and we looked towards the East [where] you start to skirt towards the Capital Wasteland stuff. So, we were looking towards the West, we realised ‘Oh, we’re right up against Ohio’, and not much has been done in that region in Fallout lore,” Rush explained.

It’s the blank slate that’s drawn the devs to Ohio, no doubt in part due to the creative licence it allowed them to take in moulding an Eastern US setting to be a bit more like the TV show’s Nevadan desert. Don’t take this as gospel, as I’m a Brit whose on the ground knowledge of US geography is largely limited to states which feature in American Truck Simulator, but Ohio’s not known to be that deserty as far as I’m aware. To be fair, it definitely does have plains and presumably a few children’s sandpits.

The main settlement featured in Burning Springs is Highway Town, a trading-heavy shanty town in which you’ll run into the Goggins. Getting there entails a trip across the repaired bridge, wrapped in branches and decorated by cultist trappings, and your first skirmish with Burning Springs’ raiders, the Rust gang. They’re ruled by an intelligent Super Mutant dubbed The Rust King, and are the ones taming the area’s Deathclaws.

The main quest involving them funnels you into the expansion and sets you off doing its many activities, including hunting bounties. To start off with, you’ll be given smaller-scale targets in “Grunt Hunts”, which are as simple as heading to location and shooting an NPC before a timer runs out. The timer only starts once you’ve found your target, who’ll probably be some ne’er-do-well generically dubbed “Stealthy Outlaw” or “Swift-footed Outlaw”. Things get more complex as you gain experience and progress on to bigger contracts, called Head Hunts. These are public events, meaning that you’ll be fighting alongside other players to take down tougher baddies with their own themed gangs (and actual names, like Chairman Max).

I’d prefer to have seen such a system introduced in a slightly less rigid fashion than ‘Head to one of 20 or so specific locations across the Burning Springs region and shoot person’, given its similarity to 76’s established boss battles. The option to bring in certain targets alive perhaps, or a bit of PvP battling over the chance to take in a target. Perhaps that’s something Bethesda can work in down the line.

Beyond the bounties, there are a couple of more standard public events in Burning Springs. One, Sinkhole Solutions, sees you battle waves of enemies culminating in a legendary boss at an dried-up lake. The second, Gearin’ Up, sends you to a scrapyard, where a Rust Raider beastmaster awaits. This one again sees you fight off waves of enemies, but builds up a nice crescendo as you smelt some armour for a friendly Deathclaw to then be unleashed as an ally in a battle against a powerful hostile Deathclaw Matriarch. It also got a chuckle out of me for the moment before the armoured Deathclaw emerges, where you’re given an optional objective to “Emote to cheer for the Deathclaw”, like it’s an antisocial cat you’re trying to coax out of a drawer hidey-hole.

The overarching narrative culminates in you being tasked with taking down the Rust King and eroding the influence he has over the region from his lair, the Rust Kingdom. Siding with him also looks to be an option, at least up to a certain point. I was glad to hear Rush say that there’ll be some unique choices and options on offer at various points if your character’s followed the arc of the playable ghoul update from earlier this year, and become all squidgy.

All in all, Burning Springs might have a chance of at least delaying the New Vegas re-run that Fallout season two will inevitably push me into starting. However, the thought which stuck with me throughout this preview was that in the long run, it will need to a lot to convince sceptics that it’s more than just a cynical, even soulless response to the Amazon series’ success. From the outside, it looks like a trip to Ohio without much in the way of unique Ohio flavour, leaning more into importing TV show vibes – regardless of whether they make sense – than relying on the unique local conventions of its setting for inspiration.

Yet, I’m fairly certain those may well not be concerns for many of the folks who’ll opt to play 76 after watching season two, rather than loading up another Fallout or just yelling at Bethesda on the socials about not having recently released a fresh entry in the series. I suppose this was always a potential outcome of the show taking off, having thus far only taken its characters to the western settings of Interplay’s original Fallouts and Obsidian’s Fallout 3 with blackjack and hookers. They’re among the games in the series least likely to get fresh updates from Bethesda to coincide with the show, even though they’d take the least amount of work in making such additions fit seamlessly, at least from a purely geographical or thematic perspective.

Such things don’t necessarily matter from the perspective of the bottom line, but as someone who firmly believes the Fallout series still has plenty to offer in terms of appealing fresh ground to tread both literally and narratively, I think I’d have preferred Bethesda to try something new here. Capitalise on the show by timing up a game or update, sure, but not one which so openly regurgitates elements the series has likely done better elsewhere, from a perch on Amazon’s coattails.