Fallout 76 playable ghoul hands-on preview – a rad expansion, especially if you’re keen for an undead dip

I emerge from the dodgy pool filled with dodgy barrels, geiger counter screaming like a white noise machine, and take it all in.

My skin and clothes are literally pulsating with a rather cartoonish lime green glow. My health bar has a sheathe of built-up radioactive energy instead of being 90% red. I pull out my gun, and I start blasting.

After tanking some hits from the Scorched I’m battling, my healthy glow dissipates, leaving me with just the regular health bar. Luckily, the area I’m clearing out is dotted with petrified corpses, which release little bursts of radiation when shot to bits. I use them to top up my health a bit as I run from vantage point to vantage point, raining down plasma fire.

Eventually, because I’m being very reckless with regards to finding cover, I start to inch towards death. It’s ok, though. I rush back to my irradiated pool, submerge myself once more, and ahhhhhhhhhhh, that’s better. Then, having re-supercharged myself with glow, I re-emerge, ready to take on the rest of the foes patrolling the power plant’s exterior.

This is the kind of thing I spent a lot of my preview session of Fallout 76’s playable ghoul doing, and I’m not ashamed. After all, it made answering the distress call that kicks off the short series of quests that sees you, Appalachia’s finest C.A.M.P builder, enemy killing squad member, and occasional map nuker, literally shed your skin and start looking like you’d fit in among the dwellers of Underworld or Necropolis.

Those quests themselves are an interesting mishmash of serious and kinda goofy, which, to be fair, has been the interesting cocktail that’s long defined a lot of Fallout. The devs had a simple mission – get you to suck on a dodgy inhaler and then take a nap next to a leaky nuclear warhead – and they’ve accomplished it in a way that’s decently intriguing, if a bit tonally all over the shop. After picking up that aforementioned distress signal, you head to Whitesprings and find an NPC that reminded me a bit of Forrest Gump being told that he’s gonna die from radiation poisoning without drastic help.

The two of you set off to find a radiation expert, who turns out to belong to a group of ghouls just doing what they have to in order to survive. There’s that mix – some gritty chatter about ghouls being persecuted and therefore living a hard life that you might not want to condemn yourself to on a whim, and some funny exchanges between you and a scientist who seems rather obsessed with turning people into noseless Neds. There’s some ok stuff in there, and some potentially interesting characters, but all in all it does well not to provide too draggy of a prelude to what’s clearly the main event.

While I didn’t have enough time to really dive deep into putting together the kinds of unique ghoul builds those who’ve already got thousands of hours into 76 already inevitably will through a bunch of experimentation, the basics that I outlined above are fun – if maybe not the cup of tea of those who prefer their Fallout experience to be a bit more serious and realistic. Plus, while healing via radiation might asrguably feel a little bit overpowered in places like the power plant I chose to clear out, not every dungeon in Appalachia is dripping with helpful radiation pockets you can dip in and out of at whim.

There are a bunch of new perk cards that add to your new glow powers to allow you to really lean into that aspect of your character and they’re nicely distributed across all of the S.P.E.C.I.A.L skills as you’d expect. The ones my character came with seemed to be more along the just a little bit ghoulish lines than anything really wacky or unique, but there are enough being added that Bethesda may well have some more out there stuff tucked away to discover.

My ghoul’s perks allowed them to do some rather run-of-the-mill stuff like not suffer negative effects from eating irradiated things, but they also had some designed around gun proficiency that looked based on their card art to be aimed specifically at allowing you to build a ghoul that’s inspired by Walton Goggins’s Fallout show character, which is cool. Plus, there’s one clearly built around encouraging folks to play in ghoul gangs by making you offer a glow boost to a group, which is good given 76’s other big new-ish thing is the uber-hard Gleaming Depths dungeon aimed specifically at teams of players.

Plus, I can confirm that the Brotherhood of Steel will not appreciate your new look – you literally can’t enter their base at Fort Atlas without a diguise once you’ve been ghoulified. However, at least in the build I played, you can still wander around the exterior of the fort without being shot at. I think I got one passive Brotherhood NPC dialogue line urging me to get something treated, but Russell Dorsey, the named BOS character standing outside seemed downright happy to see me, even quipping that it was nice to see a “familiar face”, a line that became a bit hilarious given the circustances.

As for the other high-profile potential drawback of going all-in on the rads, the new feral meter that replaces the player’s hunger and thirst gagues, I can’t say I really noticed it having much of a tangible effect on my character’s abilities or status post gunge bath. Then again, it could well be something that’ll factor more heavily into lengthier playing sessions where you can really rack up some prolonged rad exposure and see how it affects your ghoul long-term.

For better or worse though, the thing that really stuck out to me during my session was this thought – as someone who usually doesn’t spec heavily into endurance and therefore usually doesn’t take perks like Aquaboy/Aquagirl, this might be the first time I’ve ever really spent much time going for a nice swim in a Fallout game. Maybe it’s because the main other Fallout thing I’ve spent a lot of time playing through this year – Fallout: London – really dials up the danger factor of landing in water as part of its more hardcore, survival-focused take on things, that this stuck out so much.

But it’s cool, regardless. You never know, maybe Fallout 76’s ghoul update will have the strange side-effect of turning all of the game’s bodies of water into prime soaking spots, packed with unsmoothskins doing the breaststroke until they go feral. Oh, and making sure to head back to shore every few minutes so they don’t catch one of the game’s waterborne diseases, which are one of the few things a would-be ghoul swimmer has to be wary of.

Well, aside from the mirelurks that also love dodgy irradiated pools.