For years, Fallout fans have wanted to play as a ghoul in the main Fallout games. In early 2025, they will be able to realize this rather grim fantasy through an update coming to Fallout 76.
Technically, this won’t be a first for the Fallout franchise, as Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel allowed players to play as a ghoul named Cain, one of six playable characters in the 2004 PlayStation 2 and Xbox spinoff. And in 2001’s Fallout Tactics, characters can be in multiplayer any of the six races featured in the game, including ghouls. But this is certainly a first for the mainline Fallout games, which until now have forced players to create human characters before dropping them into the wasteland.
In the Fallout universe, ghouls are ex-humans so severely affected by radiation that they become unrecognizable and gain certain abilities, including immunity to radiation sickness. Some ghouls lose their remaining humanity and become feral ghouls that attack the player and other wasteland creatures that appear.
In a recent interview with IGN, Fallout 76 creative director Jonathan Rush said that, as you’d expect, ghoul players shouldn’t worry too much about radiation. The radiation actually heals you like a ghoul.
“You get hurt and you get some radiation, you go drink some dirty water, you get well,” Rush explained. “Radiation will also be positioned to have other very distinct perks, punctuated a bit more by the dozens of cards with ghoul-specific perks we’ll be adding.”
This is quite a departure for Fallout and actually the way players were trained to behave in the games. In Fallout, players try to protect themselves from radiation and take drugs that mitigate its effects. One of the benefits of wearing Fallout’s iconic Power Armor is that it gives the player extra protection against radiation. But as a ghoul, it’s in your best interest not to wear Power Armor because you want all the radiation exposure you can get.
Rush said that we hope this will support a playstyle we’ve never seen before in Fallout. “A player not wearing Power Armor has just freed up a lot of perk points that they can use in a lot of different ways,” Rush said, “which is a completely different playstyle in itself. And you layer all the perk cards and you’ll be fine.”
But don’t think you can just start playing Fallout 76 as a ghoul right away – it’s a level 50 requirement.
The addition of playing as a ghoul follows the breakout success of the Fallout TV show, which stars Walton Goggins as the Ghoul, a formidable wasteland veteran who has become perhaps the most popular character in the Prime Video series.
Rush said the development team had been talking about ghouls “for a while” but “wanted to take the time to figure out what it meant to play as a ghoul and how it would fit and how we saw players playing 76.” So this update doesn’t necessarily jump on the popularity of the Fallout TV show, but it will clearly benefit from it.
“It just felt like the right time because we have a lot of level 50+ players in the game who may want to experience different ways of playing through the more difficult content in the game,” added Rush.
One of the interesting elements of the Fallout TV show – which takes place after all the Fallout games and is considered canon – is that the ghouls must regularly consume a strange yellow substance to stave off the inevitable wild turn. We see Ghoul struggle to manage his addiction to this mysterious drug as he pursues his business of death.
So the inevitable question is, will Fallout 76 players who become a ghoul have to similarly consume the drug on a regular basis to prevent them from becoming feral ghouls? “Maybe…” Rush teased her.
In the short term, Fallout 76 will expand its Appalachia map with the release of the Skyline Valley expansion on June 12.
For more information, check out everything that was announced at the Xbox Games Showcase 2024.
Wesley is the UK news editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. Wesley can be contacted at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.