Fallout 76 (opens in new tab) may still be a fair few months away, but that doesn’t have to stop you enjoying the nuclear wasteland with a handful of make believe friends in Bethesda’s RPG franchise. The Fallout 76 Experience (opens in new tab) is a recently released mod for Fallout: New Vegas, and is designed to give players “the full Fallout 76 experience” promised by Bethesda’s first multiplayer title in the series to date.
Full disclosure: this mod doesn’t actually bring multiplayer to New Vegas – as I’m pretty sure Bethesda would sue the hell out of it otherwise – but instead recreates Fallout 76’s social dimension using some clever, and frankly rather hilarious tricks.
The Fallout 76 Experience adds “players” to the game in the form of NPCs rigged with audio ripped straight from the loudest streamers and YouTubers you can imagine. The end result is a world populated by other characters endlessly screaming and mic spamming in your ear, just like in a real multiplayer game! Check out the trailer below, and make sure you’ve got the sound turned up to truly appreciate its horrendous glory.
These NPCs will also have playertags hovering above them to make the faux online illusion feel even more realistic, and the trailer appears to show them all acting mega aggressively to everything in sight which, lets face it, is probably how players are going to behave in Fallout 76.
The Fallout 76 Experience more of a joke mod than something worth bearing with throughout your whole playthrough of New Vegas, but it’s a pretty spot-on satirisation of the darker side of online gaming. One can only hope that Fallout 76 isn’t quite as barmy or chaotic as this approximation, but the fact that Bethesda is giving players the ability to decimate each other with nuclear missiles doesn’t leave me too hopeful about that…
For more role-playing fun, click over to our list of the best RPG games (opens in new tab) that you can play until Fallout 76 finally hits store shelves.