Earlier today, Bethesda finally stopped their night of teasing and indeed provided a reveal for a new Fallout game!

Today, Bethesda announced Fallout 76. They released no information about the game in the slightest. All they officially provided to the world is an announcement trailer and some screen grabs from the trailer. You can see those all at the bottom.

It looks like the trailer was intentionally vague. That is perhaps for good reason because sources have told Kotaku that Fallout 76 is an online survival RPG. With how coy everything about this announcement has been, this isn't entirely unexpected.

Fallout 76 is named after Vault 76, which has been mentioned briefly in both Fallout 3 and Fallout 4. Vault 76 was slated to open two decades after the end of the war. Compare that to the Vaults in Fallout 3 and 4, which opened over 200 years after the end of the war. That should give you some idea of just how totally screwed the world outside Vault 76 would be at this time.

Anonymous sources said to be close to the project told Kotaku that Fallout 76 will go the route of games like Rust or even DayZ. It's being viewed as an experiment, unlike most anything else in the franchise.

According to those same sources, Fallout 76 was originally created to be a multiplayer version of Fallout 4. The game has, obviously, evolved quite a bit in the years since the first experiment. As it currently stands, Fallout 76 will still include quests and a story. It will also include base building, a divisive feature carried over from Fallout 4. Other "survival-based and multiplayer mechanics" are included but many aspects of the broader gameplay are constantly changing as these games tend to do.

Fallout 76 has been in development both at the main location in Maryland and at their new Austin studio. The Austin studio was formerly BattleCry Studios. They were working on a game called BattleCry before that game was cancelled.