“You can’t see it on [the device this interview was recorded using], but my smile is very big,” lead producer Bill LaCoste says, when I ask him how he feels about the year Fallout 76 has had, in what’s generally been pretty historic 12 months for the Fallout series as a whole.

He shouts out a whole bunch of the things the Zenimax/Bethesda team has brought to Appalachia in 2024, from June’s Skyline Valley map expansion – which I was visiting the studio to play the last time I interviewed him – to the latest addition, the Gleaming Depths update, complete with giant snake boss battle.

“All of this together is really an amazing experience and I’m super excited, because we even have stuff we’re not even talking about today that goes into 2025,” LaCoste says, “so we’re super excited for not only what we’re doing now, but also the future of Fallout.”

One of those 2025 additions the 76 has already revealed is the playable ghoul, which is what I’m here to get a hands-on with this time, prior to its public testing and then release in March next year. “It’s not just like ‘Hey y’all, here’s an outfit that you can [use to] walk around in the world as a ghoul.’ ‘Hey, we’re done, thanks for joining, thanks for playing’, the developer says, “We really built this around a system of wanting the players to really truly feel what it would be like to be a ghoul at this early stage of the timeline within the Fallout world.”

Asked what he’s interested in seeing or getting feedback on in terms of the ghoul once it’s in the hands of players, LaCoste explains that it’s the loadouts and builds ghoul players will create that’ve got him curious. “A lot of players are bloodied characters, that’s not going to be as powerful with this with the ghoul. So, they’re going to have to balance and actually do some more loadouts, and actually figure out what types of armour they want to build around.

“Some of the four star [legendaries] are going to play into that a little bit, but what perks do they have for their loadouts now? For us, you know, you all are getting to see this first glimpse of it [as part of the preview event I’m at], so are we. We’re still in a very pre-alpha stage for this, and it’s actually in a really good state right now, but all of this stuff just came online for us to kind of check out and play. So, even myself, when people ask me like ‘hey, what are your favorite perks?’ It’s like, I don’t know if I have any yet. I have some that are kind of cool that I like, but I don’t know how that’s going to fit into my build.”

The feedback the team gets from how it’s implemented this Fallout series first isn’t necessarily just something that LaCoste and the 76 team will look at either – it’s something that might be passed on to other teams at Bethesda who end up working on single player Fallout games.

“That’s always possible,” the developer says in terms of this, Yeah, absolutely. I think anything that we do, you know, whether it’s in a Starfield or an Elder Scrolls, I think there are other reasons that we do them and a lot of times it’s really to kind of test out ‘How does this system work?’ ‘Does this feel good, does that feel good?’ And then other games kind of take a look at that and kind of bring them into their own. So, we’ve seen that a number of times across these games.”

With that potential for 76 to be the first Fallout outing for concepts like this acknowledged, I asked LaCoste if its developers would be open to considering making another iconic Fallout staple at some point down the line – the super mutant. “I don’t know,” responds the producer, “I mean, it kind of depends on how the ghoul plays over and how much people enjoy playing a ghoul. When you’re talking about super mutants, that’s also something that it may just be above my pay grade to talk about, in terms of the direction and where we go with that.

“But, if the ghoul is successful and we actually play that off the way it’s supposed to be, with kind of the system we’re giving [to] players and [if] it’s highly engaged with [by] players, that does give pause to talk about, ‘Okay, does it make sense for us to have anything else in this world that players can do?’ Honestly, for Fallout, it may be no. It may be only ghouls [are] the right thing to do for that.”

Before we get to the ghoul’s arrival though, we’ve got the Gleaming Depths update, the headline feature of which is a boss battle-packed raid with a giant irradiated snake waiting to battle you at the end. Naturally, this big scaly boi – dubbed the Ultracite Terror – attracted a lot of attention from all corners of the Fallout fanbase when it was shown off for the first time, proving a bit polarising. You know, some people thought it was cool, others questioned whether it’s the kind of thing that fits in a Fallout game.

“All of that stuff was expected,” LaCoste says of the reaction to both the snake and the difficulty of the raid, “but there’s a general plan here and a general story that I think as people start to do the raid and they start to understand what was going on in this facility, with all the research and everything, it kind of starts to make a little bit of sense, and also with Fallout, we try to also just have fun.

“Like, this is a fun element for people to go into, it’s like, ‘oh crap, that’s a huge ass snake’. And once people start playing it, especially if you play it on a giant screen or something, that thing’s massive, the Ultracite Terror is a massive enemy. Then also just the mechanics behind it are so much fun. So, I think that was really the core element, not really being too concerned whether or not the snake was [too out there], it was just more about how do we create some really fun, exciting, and engaging mechanics with a boss for this thing, and that one just made sense. So, it was like ‘yeah, we’re going with that, that’s really cool’. I think cool kinda overrode whether or not anybody cared about ‘does this even fit like that’, it does fit, and we’re making it to be a really cool experience”

While there might be a giant snake and some pets in Fallout 76 with this latest update, it doesn’t sound like LaCoste and co have their sights set on building on that by letting you ride around Appalachia on any big mutated creatures – as some modders have done in the single player entries – at current. “Some of it’s just technical for us, like even the run speeds that players engage in right now,” he responds, when I ask whether something akin to Elder Scrolls Online’s mounts is something that interests them, “From a technical level, there’s a reason why there’s a limit to how fast players can run in the world in terms of loading up the next cells and things like that.

“So, mounts, probably not something we will have on the roadmap anytime soon. I think it would be really cool. It just has to kind of fit within the scope and fit within what the world actually needs in terms of transportation, for that.”

One thing that will be coming to Fallout 76 are some crossovers with the second season of Amazon’s Fallout TV show, whenever that releases, but LaCoste says the developers likely won’t up the ante too much this time around, even though the show’s now cemented itself as a hit.

“I would imagine it would probably be along the same lines [as season one’s 76 crossovers],” he says, “Because we have an appreciation for the TV show, the story it’s trying to tell and the characters it’s trying to [portray], and we also have an appreciation for the story Fallout 76 is trying to tell. So, very, very limited amounts of crossover, where it actually makes sense, because again, we’re on extreme ends of the [Fallout] timeline as well. So, some of that crossover doesn’t make sense.

“We just want to make sure that it’s done in a way that is supportive of the TV show, but also allows us to just coexist within this story overall that’s being told. So we probably won’t go out of our way to add a whole bunch of stuff specific to the show, because we don’t feel like we need to. We feel like it’s great to let the TV show do its thing and for people to love the TV show for what it is, but also love our game for what it is, and not just give fan service for just the sake of doing it. We’ll do some things that make sense, [the] Vault 33 suit made sense, it’s something that exists in the world and you can have it, but yeah, we’ll probably keep that relatively light would be my guess.”

All in all, LaCoste says an ideal next year for Fallout 76 itself in his mind would revolve around “continued growth for the game”. “There are a whole bunch of systems there that we can reinforce and so I’d also like to see some technical upgrades as well,” he explains, “[We’re] trying to work on some of that right now for next-gen hardware, you know, things like that. Just giving people better optimisations, better frame rates, [a] better look of the game.

“Overall, I just see us in a position where we have a lot more players playing, some new, mostly like a lot of our older players who’ve come back and started playing, but again it’s more of a [thing of] you’re going to get something new every time we drop a new major update, whether again, it’s an expansion of the map and then Caravans, but then Gleaming Depths, and now you get the ghoul.

“I want us to really focus – I think Jon [Rush, creative director] does too – on new things that actually make this game better and better, every time we have a new big release like that.”