The December update for Fallout 76 is going to be a big one – as well as introducing camp pets and the ability to earn descriptive player titles for your Vault dweller, Bethesda’s online Fallout game will also be getting a challenging new end-game raid called The Gleaming Depths, which will see co-op teams of up to four players take on a gauntlet of challenges that lead producer Bill LaCoste tells me amounts to “something completely new for 76”.
Located in Appalachia’s Ash Heap region, the Gleaming Depths was described as a “traditional MMO-style dungeon” in tonight’s Fallout Day broadcast, and LaCoste tells me it’s a “huge step up” from their existing end-game activities.
“The one thing we’ve always wanted to do was bring a little bit more challenge to the game, especially for a game that’s online and has people with each other in teams and actually doing something competitive,” he says. “We have a lot of events, we have bosses, we have things like that. But for something that’s specifically for your team of people to engage on something requiring teamwork and a good amount of gear and communication between teams is something completely new for 76.”
In The Gleaming Depths, players will have to fight their way through an abandoned Enclave research lab where scientists were studying a phenomenon known as Ultragenesis, which for Fallout lore heads is all wrapped up in the spreading of ultracite through the earth. There will be “several incredibly demanding encounters” to face inside, creative director Jonathan Rush said in today’s Fallout Day broadcast – including the game’s largest ever boss, the Ultracite Terror – and players will be locked in to the bitter end of the raid, too, once they begin, making it very much a do-or-die kind of challenge.
The idea came from an internal, week-long game jam at Bethesda back in January, LaCoste tells me. There was an inkling from the team of developers working on it that it could potentially be “transformative for Fallout 76,” but it was only “after people got a shot of it and actually played it, they were like, ‘Oh man, this is something the game absolutely needs,’ and I think everybody was really struck by how well it was executed.”
The jam build was then moved into pre-production to test out its ideas further – with a little help from Rush’s collection of hand puppets, of all things, to try and spec out what each encounter might look like in practice. “We do that pretty regularly with all our encounters that we build out,” says LaCoste. “We try to do those on paper and other props and things like that ahead of time because we can work out a lot of timing even in those cases, and Jon does a great job of doing that.”
Playtests came next, and only confirmed what Bethesda already knew: that yes, this is “exactly” what Fallout 76 needed, especially during a time when it was receiving so many other substantial changes alongside it.
“Historically we’ve had four major beats per year and there’s a lot of content spread within those,” says LaCoste. “But with this, it was just a different kind of feel, because we had just released legendary crafting with the previous update, and now we have something that feeds into raids even better.”
Handy, then, that December’s update will also see the introduction of four-star legendary rewards, giving end-game players even more powerful tools, weapons, armour and potential loadouts at their disposal to take on the Gleaming Depths’ tough bosses. Alas, you won’t be guaranteed a four-star reward for surviving the Gleaming Depths, so you’ll need to play it multiple times to get the best stuff out of it.
But four-star items are just one of several elements that Bethesda is hoping to “build on top of with this [update]”, as with new legendaries come new loadouts, new mod combinations for weapons and armour, and there will also be new perks to go with them, says LaCoste. “We have so many of these systems all coming together within this update that I think players are going to spend a lot of time at their job board, trying out new loadouts, and going through this game in a different way, which is good!”
That goes doubly for the playable Ghoul characters coming early next year too, which will give players past Level 50 the opportunity to turn themselves into Fallout’s radiation-loving corpses to receive extra special perks and abilities. First unveiled back in June, I wondered at the time whether there would be any new events to really put Ghoul characters through their paces, and while LaCoste says that The Gleaming Depths wasn’t specifically designed with the Ghouls in mind, “I will say that because we knew Ghouls were coming, [… and] the positives and negatives that come with being a Ghoul, some of that’s been taken into account.”
Ultimately, though, “this is its own raid,” and LaCoste looks forward to seeing what kind of impact Ghouls will have on the way players approach The Gleaming Depths when they arrive sometime next year.