Fallout 76 Ghoul Within Q&A – ‘The Game Is Thriving and We Have No Plans to Stop’

In just a few hours, Fallout 76 will be updated with the long-anticipated option to choose a Ghoul as your playable character, featuring 30 Ghoul-dedicated Perk Cards and an all-new mechanics called the Feral Meter. As you might remember, Bethesda Game Studios first revealed that this was coming over nine months ago, leaving players a long time to salivate over the opportunity.

The wait is almost over, though, and to tide you over in these last few hours, we have an exclusive interview with Creative Director Jon Rush and Senior Producer Bill Lacoste. In this conversation, we dived into the specifics of playing as Ghouls, the origins of the feature, and the potential balance issues, and we even asked a few general questions about Fallout 76 and its future. Keep scrolling to read the full transcript. By the way, players will have the chance to get a level 50 character boost when this patch launches in case they want to make the Ghoul right away as an alternate character.

The big news is obviously the new playable race, the Ghoul. When was the first time that you discussed this possibility within the team? Was it before the Amazon Prime TV show, which obviously made it very popular thanks to the character played by Walton Goggins, or later?

Bill Lacoste: Yeah, I get what you're saying. I think all of us secretly have always wanted to play as a ghoul in the Wasteland. This is a kind of idea that's been floating around for a while, but we really only put pen to paper on it last year and started executing on it. It just so happened that the show really kind of helped that grow. The popularity of The Ghoul made it a much more impressive and also recognizable feature that players wanted to engage in.

We started off going through this process of understanding what it would be like as a player to be a Ghoul in the Wasteland. Some of the things we started off with were basically that this wasn't going to be a very simplified system of just like, hey, let's give players a disguise or some mask or whatever it is that they can run around and look like a Ghoul.

We didn't want that to be the case. We wanted to actually present a new way to play Fallout 76, and that's what the Ghoul brings with it. As you've seen, we've got Legendary perks and regular perks (there are 30 total across both groups) available only to Ghouls, and a wide range of loadouts.

Those systems affect typical gameplay. But this idea of wanting to play as Ghoul, I think it has been something on players' minds for a really long time, even our own minds. We started executing it last year and we are right around the corner from getting this out for players to engage with.

As you said, of course, there are quite a few differences from playing a regular human. Did you consider giving your Ghoul different reactions when going through the main Fallout 76 story via dialogue or something like that? If not, is it maybe something that could come in the future, possibly?

Jon Rush: For existing content, no, there was not a desire to go back and touch existing content. For future content, absolutely. Ghouls will be taken into consideration for current content. What's going to be taken into consideration is also how the different factions react to Ghouls. If you're a Ghoul and you go to Fort Atlas and visit the Brotherhood of Steel, it's not going to be a very warm welcome.

Can you discuss the disguise system and how it evolved internally? I also read some comments saying it may be a bit too complex. How do you feel about it? Are you going to tweak it further?

Jon Rush: The sole requirement of being a Ghoul is that you're level 50. So, if you are a level 50 player who hasn't done some of the main story content in Fallout 76 and you decide to become a Ghoul, let's say you haven't done the Fort Atlas Brotherhood of Steel stuff, you're not going to be able to do that now, right? The disguise system was a way to allow players to be able to still do that content. There's a Ghoul who can apply a disguise to your character for a cost, and while that disguise is applied, you can go and do quests like that that maybe you couldn't have as a Ghoul. You can interface with the Brotherhood of Steel and you're disguised enough to where they're not really worried about or even thinking about if you're a ghoul.

When you're done with that, you can't take the disguise off yourself. This is administered by a specialist, so you have to go back to that same person and that same NPC will take the disguise off, returning you back to your normal Ghoul form. That's essentially how it works. It's to enable players to be able to do content that they may have missed out on and not regret their choice of becoming a Ghoul because they can't do it.

Are you going to add any kind of variations to the mask?

Jon Rush: Yeah, possibly.

On some level, I'd say, with all the perks and radiation healing you, it almost sounds like it's going to be better as a player to play as a Ghoul. How are you going to balance that? Are you a bit worried that a lot of players will just turn into Ghouls and never look back? How are you going to approach it from a balancing standpoint?

Jon Rush: It depends on how the player wants to play. If you're in Power Armor, you're at a real disadvantage because Ghouls benefit from having radiation. So, if you're a player who wants to play in Power Armor, you would probably want to rethink playing a Ghoul in that sense.

If you're somebody who wants to try to fulfill other roles within groups or on your own, depending on how you spec your loadout, then a Ghoul might be more appealing. So, yes, the balance is tricky, and I'm sure it'll be ongoing even after release. But I think for the first stab at it in the initial release, we've got a lot of good data off of our time on PTS, and I think players are gonna have a lot of options to play with, not necessarily 'I'm at a disadvantage because I'm not a ghoul'. In some cases, yes, and in some cases, no. It's kind of the whole part of the balance.

Bill Lacoste: Yeah, and I think specifically about the feral meter, what we have for the Ghoul is very similar to the older hunger and thirst system that we had for original humans in that it was subtractive, meaning now what you have as a human is additive. You don't really have to eat or drink, as a human, you don't get those negative penalties like you normally would originally.

But as a Ghoul, when the feral meter starts to drain, there's going to be specific thresholds where you will actually incur some penalties. Some of those will be to your Charisma in some cases, especially at higher levels, you'll have hit points, action points, and also endurance penalties as well.

So, there are a lot of penalties that you will incur as you continue to allow that feral meter to drop. Now, however, once you are fully feral, you also get a pretty big increase to your melee damage. So there are positives and negatives there, but as a Ghoul, you are going to have to manage that feral meter with chems more often than you would as a human with hunger and thirst.

With the new mods, especially the four-star legendary mods and the other changes, potentially fine-tuning the perks if you play as a Ghoul now, how are you going to address that potential for power creep?

Jon Rush: There might be some, but, you know, it's very much in line with plans that we have for our in-game content in the game. I think Gleaming Depths is a nice glimpse of what our plans are in that regard. So, if you think you're powerful now, just wait. We'll change your mind.

All right. Now that you've mentioned it, you released the Gleaming Depths update late last year when you introduced raids for the first time in Fallout 76. What was the community's reaction to it? Of course, the big question is, do you plan to add anymore like that in the future?

Jon Rush: Our community had a really positive reaction to it. We saw that there was a need. Our in-game players, those with character levels of 200+, were looking for something more challenging. Gleaming Depths was kind of our first offering, providing them with a more challenging in-game specific experience where they get in-game specific rewards. It was met really well. I think it's kind of emboldened us for future roadmap decisions. I'm not going to discuss any of that here today, but you could definitely tell players like that sort of content.

Yeah, I definitely do as well. I played a lot of Fallout 76, but it's been mostly kind of solo. I also enjoy playing MMOs with friends, grouping for dungeons and raids. So, more of that content, personally, would be great. It's very interesting content for me. On another note, do you have anything planned for PvP at all? I know right now the game is mostly just PvE-focused for the most part, but are you considering any more PVP content or features?

Jon Rush: Well, seeing how our players play and how they want to play the game, I do recognize that we have some players who are really into PVP games. It seems that the vast majority of our players just are not. They want to help one another; they want to group up with one another and adventure together. Efforts to sort of spur PVP initiatives along in the game have been kind of met with really middling results. So, as far as future Fallout 76 updates that are PVP-centric, I'm not going to rule out the possibility and say absolutely not, but it's not really what our players want.

Bill Lacoste: Just to expand on what Jon said, at the very beginning, we did have a lot of PVP elements in the game and we found out that people were just helping each other. So it's like, hey, we've given you this element here to engage with each other and all you're doing is helping each other. You're not actually attacking each other, which was kind of funny to see. It was pretty good data to kind of parse through and take a look at and see how the community was treating each other, and I think that just expands into what we have today. It's just a fun, loving, good community of folks who are willing to help each other get through this game. It's really fun to see.

Like Jon said, I don't think we would ever rule it out, but for now, the main focus for our players is doing more content, but also having additional ways to play the game and different ways to play the game, and that's kind of what we're focused on.

Some players feel that the trade system is a bit unsafe. It has some potential for players to get scammed. Is that something you feel is an issue and something that you could improve upon?

Bill Lacoste: Yeah, it's something we're actually looking at right now because the current system is a one-way trade system, which doesn't really do what we expected it to do. We are looking at that, and we hope to have some updates for players in the future on how we're improving that system.

Jon Rush: In the meantime, the wasteland is a dangerous place. Be careful who to trust.

Alright. I don't know if you look much at the PC modding Fallout 76 community. There are several PC mods that players use. Aside from the visuals, but also for quality of life improvements. I wonder if maybe you have thought about potentially adding any of those features to the game. For example, the most important one, from my point of view, would be text chat, which there is a mod for, but it only works, of course, with other players that have the mod installed. Personally, again, coming from an MMO player background, it's something that I love as a way to interact with the community.

Bill Lacoste: We have some accessibility features that we've added recently with text-to-speech and speech-to-text. That's going to be expanded further in the future, but for us, there's also the safety issue and there is the element of needing to make sure that we are protecting players that are in the game when those things happen, because we want to make sure that people are safe from abuse both from text and from audio. When we build those systems, there are a lot more things that we have to go through in terms of legalities and also just protection of players so that they can report and our CS team can actually engage.

So, you know, outside the community, you all don't usually have to worry about those things, but when we have to build it out, we do. At the end of the day, we just want to make sure that what we're providing to players in terms of those features and systems is going to be beneficial to them but also provides them protection. It's just an unfortunate part of online games sometimes. Most of the people in Fallout 76 are great, but every now and then, you get somebody who comes in and is just trying to troll people and get in the way of them having fun. If that's gonna happen, we need to make sure that we have protections in place for folks so that we can action them when they're being out of line.

Can you talk about Big Bloom and how it has become a new seasonal event?

Jon Rush: Yeah. Our seasonal events are always really popular with our players, but what we had come to notice was we were having to repeat some seasonal events more and more throughout the year, largely to cover gaps in our seasonal event roster. Something we had noticed was that we were missing kind of really like a really solid Springtime event to sort of supersede Meat Week, which comes later in the Summer. so a nice springtime theming, that's how Big Bloom came about with the sort of springtime theming and we'll be running it at that time every year.

When it comes to Season 20 'Glow of the Ghoul', what's the thing that you're most excited about for players to see?

Jon Rush: I think players are going to like the goo tub or the spa filled with goo. That's kind of fun!

Would you consider making fast travel to other player camps free or cheaper at least?

Bill Lacoste: No.

Jon Rush: Yeah, probably not. They can spend them.

Bill Lacoste: If you're in a team, you can fast travel to your friends, even if they're not at their camp as well. There's a lot of ways for players to navigate around the map at a pretty cheap cost anyway. As you know, players run around in this game at 40,000 caps, most of the time, anyway. There's no real reason to adjust that for any time in the future.

Not long ago, you expanded the Fallout 76 map with Skyline Valley last year. That was the first time, I think, since the release. Do you think any more map expansion could be coming, or would you just go back to creating separate world spaces like you've done as well?

Jon Rush: Possibly. We would like to use that map expansion as kind of a continuation of our Appalachia story, so if there's more story we want to tell and it needs a new region, we know the players received it really well. They like getting the new stories, they like having the new space to build and tell their own stories with their friends through adventuring and whatnot, so it's definitely a possibility.

Before closing, I wanted to ask how the game is doing right now. I know that around a year ago, especially with the popularity of the TV show, there was a big increase in the player base. Are you able to share whether that's still happening and also maybe how that affects the team's ongoing efforts to support Fallout 76 in the future?

Jon Rush: The game continues to be a success. We definitely saw a lot of success last year with the release of the show and the show kind of casting a bit of a spotlight on all the Fallout IP. So, there were people hopping into Fallout 3, 4, 76. 76 is still thriving, it's still growing. We have more ideas than we could possibly ever do and have no plans to stop. We're going to continue supporting this game, continue supporting our players and telling the story. There's never been a better time to adventure with your friends in the wasteland.

From a technical perspective, would it be too onerous to add crossplay and potentially make it one big community, as several online games have been doing lately?

Jon Rush: We've had discussions about crossplay in the past. There's a lot of technical limitations with that. I wouldn't rule it out, but I wouldn't be waiting around for it, either.

A couple of months ago, you said there could be more crossovers with the second season of the Amazon TV series, but nothing too crazy, right? It doesn't seem like you want to push heavily on that.

Jon Rush: Well, it's a little tricky because Fallout 76 exists the furthest back in the timeline, and the show is the furthest ahead, so a crossover is kind of hard to do because of the huge time difference. Where there's an opportunity to do that, possibly. We've had discussions about it. Maybe some of that's coming, maybe it's not. You'll have to stay tuned and find out for yourself.

Thank you for your time.

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