Trivia / Fallout 76

• Ascended Fanfic:
  • Quite a few of the new tracks for Appalachia Radio comes from the popular Fallout 4 "More Where That Came From" mod.
  • The Captain Cosmos power armor from Fallout 4's Creation Club, made by modders SovereignWalrus and fadingsignal was added to the game as a power armor skin.
• Blooper:
  • One of the voice lines in the "Harland's Up to No Good" holotape was originally mistakenly attributed to Frederick Rivers of the Order of Mysteries, who shares a voice actor with raider leader Harland McClintock (though this error appears to have been corrected as of the Once in a Blue Moon update).
  • The Wastelanders expansion mistakenly swapped the names of the holotapes "Rocco and Lev's Deal" and "To Meg and Crater Freaks".
  • The Pirate Radio ad for Appalachian Antiques mistakenly uses the post-war name of Fort Defiance for the antique shop's neighboring landmark, rather than its pre-war name of Allegheny Asylum.
  • The Grafton Mayor makes a couple; he mistakenly refers to Clarksburg as Clarksville in one of the Grafton Day event intros, and he also refers to the previous mayor as "he" despite the last human mayor of Grafton (Gloria McNamara) being a woman.
• Colbert Bump:
  • Following the confirmation that the game is set in West Virginia, interest in the state began to increase: one website advertising tourism in the state saw a sizeable increase in traffic. It provided such a huge boost to interest in the state and tourism therein that the governor of the state actually declared November 14th, 2018 as Reclamation Day for the entire state!
  • The song "Take Me Home, Country Roads" also got a massive spike in popularity, even among those who'd never heard of John Denver, after the awesome cover used in the trailer made people want to check out the original. It even became a meme!
  • The Fallout show included a free Fallout 76 copy to all Amazon Prime users. This helped, along with the show, to have the game reach a new all time high on Steam.
• Development Gag: The Whitespring recording of the Science Wing's briefing of Thomas Eckhart on the original Scorchbeast specimen has him initially mistake it for a mutant vulture. Scorchbeasts were originally going to be based on vultures before being changed to giant bats later in development. One of the development staff on the Wastelanders expansion would later pin an original vulture Scorchbeast model to Seneca Rocks as an inside joke.
• Dueling Games: A little under a year after 76 came out, Obsidian Entertainment (developer of Fallout: New Vegas and founded by refugees from original Fallout creator Black Isle Studios) showcased The Outer Worlds, a single-player questing/exploration RPG in a Crapsack World with a Raygun Gothic aesthetic, which also launched significantly more smoothly than 76 (or most of Obsidian's own previous games for that matter). Critical and fan response was initially far more positive pre-launch, but fell after the release of the game.
• Dummied Out:
  • The Deserted Mine and Raider Den unmarked interior locations (near The Crosshair and Freddy Fear's House of Scares respectively) were added to the game files in the Steel Dawn update, but remained unused until finally being implemented in the game as of the Expeditions: Atlantic City - Boardwalk Paradise update (with the Raider Den being renamed the Mirelurk Den for its initial public release in Boardwalk Paradise, then later given a map marker and renamed "Mire's Eye" in the America's Playground update.
  • Vaults 63 and 96 were originally going to be venues for Vault Raids before that mode was cut from the game in the Wastelanders update; Vault 96 would later be introduced in the Steel Reign update as Dr. Edgar Blackburn's original base of operations, whereas Vault 63 will finally be introduced to the game in the upcoming Skyline Valley update.
• Executive Meddling:
  • While the idea of a multiplayer Fallout game has been toyed with for some time, with 76 primarily being spun off from a ditched co-op mode in Fallout 4, Todd Howard later admitted that the game was mostly made because the executives wanted another online game in the vein of The Elder Scrolls Online, with recurrent player spending via microtransactions. Further pressure came from the perceived under-performance of the "Creation Club" monetization features in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 4.
  • A major reason for the lack of NPCs in the base game was the fact that Todd Howard and other development heads insisted on their initial vision of a multiplayer RPG where all human characters are controlled by an actual, human player, and vetoed multiple requests to add human questgiver NPCs for the sake of the story. Once this became one of the most criticized aspects of the game, this posture was quickly changed for the expansions, with Wastelanders and Steel Dawn introducing living humans as NPCs.
• Fake American: English-South African Gideon Emery as Thomas Eckhart, President of the United States. Although he had a predecessor in Malcolm McDowell as President John Henry Eden.
• Feelies:
  • The special edition pre-order of the game comes with a full-sized wearable T-51b Power Armor helmet, complete with working headlamp and voice modulator.
  • Ordering through some retailers allows you to get a kit to build your own Pip-Boy 2000 MK VI.
• Not Screened for Critics: As is common for Bethesda titles, and since it was an online game, no review copies were sent out. That didn’t stop the game from getting mixed-to-negative reviews nearly a week later, however.
• Promoted Fanboy: Fallout London's lead technical advisor Ryan Johnson, as well as its lead writer Stephanie Zachariadis (who was also a quest writer for the Fallout: Miami mod) were hired by Bethesda to work on this game's ongoing development.
• Real Song Theme Tune:
  • The game's trailer used a cover rendition of John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads" by doo-wop group Spank, befitting the game's setting of West Virginia.
  • Likewise, the now-defunct Nuclear Winter battle royale mode was promoted with a cover of "Ring of Fire" by the same group.
• Schedule Slip: The third Pitt expedition, "Poke the Beehive", was originally supposed to release alongside the other two before being delayed; it was later announced for release in the America's Playground update (with its data files even being included, albeit Dummied Out, in the Public Test Server version of the update) before being delayed yet again, with no firm date for its release.
• The Other Darrin: Meg Groberg received a completely new voice acting by Mara Junot for her official appearance in Wastelanders, taking over for Dawnn Lewis, who previously provided her spoken lines for a holotape.
• Troubled Production: The game was made in a year and a half by Bethesda Austin, a studio that was originally bought by ZeniMax just to be another support studio for the big ones. They were given the code and assets of Fallout 4 and told to do an online open world RPG. Due to engine problems, lack of experience and rushed pre-production, they were unable to complete the game on time, forcing other studios to help with development as the Creation Engine was too unstable for multiple players existing in the same game world at the same time.
• Uncredited Role: Although the in-game credits are routinely updated for developers, the credits have not been updated for new voice actors since the Steel Dawn update. This means that characters introduced in Steel Reign onwards (including Expeditions: The Pitt and Nuka-World on Tour, among others) are completely uncredited. Some actors have announced their voice roles on social media or placed them on resumes, but the list is far from complete.
  • On top of this, many of the holotape-only characters from the pre-Wastelanders version of the game are not explicitly credited, only as part of "additional voices".
• What Could Have Been:
  • The Laser Musket from Fallout 4 was set to return, but was Dummied Out before release.
  • Part of the initial vision for the game as an experience where all human characters are controlled by a player involved events where Bethesda employees would drop into servers to roleplay as story characters, such as Vault 76's overseer, using special admin tools. This ultimately proved unworkable and was scrapped in favor of telling the story entirely through Apocalyptic Logs and non-human NPCs, which itself was more or less scrapped with the release of the Wastelanders update.
  • Datamined voice lines suggest that the Brotherhood of Steel's base game questline was going to have the player in direct contact with Roger Maxson and the Lost Hills bunker via Taggerdy's communications satellite, acting similarly to other NPC questgivers such as Rose and the Grafton Mayor. This was evidently cut very early in development, as only a few of the lines survived and the story with the satellite was rewritten.
  • A cut quest would have given players the opportunity to become the President of the Enclave via a series of regional ballot swaying and a presidential debate (read: bloody PvP fight to the death) at the Watoga Civic Center to score the highest amount of votes possible. The inaccessible Executive Wing of the Whitespring Bunker would have been made available to players who won the election, along with some exclusive cosmetic items. While the quest itself was cut, all of its assets remained Dummied Out in the game's files, some of which were later repurposed for season rewards. The would-be unlockable Executive Wing is still part of the Whitespring Bunker at large, only permanently locked with no legitimate way of accessing.^note It is possible to glitch through the walls and enter the Executive office by sitting on certain chairs in the nearby hall, and everything inside the suite is functional, though nothing can be bought from the included vendor due to them requiring the cut Presidential Seals to purchase According to a former level designer, the quest was cut due to its incompatibility with the final design of the game.
  • The inaccessible homesteads and interior suites on the Whitespring grounds (ostensibly locked for renovations) were originally intended as the players' residences and workshops before the C.A.M.P. system was introduced later in development.
  • At one stage during Steel Reign's development, Carl McKevitt proposed a third ending where Scribe Valdez, exhausted by Paladin Rahmani and Knight Shin's bickering, turfed them both out of the Brotherhood. However, this ending was not implemented as none of the other developers liked it.
• You Sound Familiar: Miscellaneous NPCs aside, those who have played Fallout 4 will likely find it quite odd that Conrad Kellogg is their Daily Ops Mission Control now, since Keythe Farley's distinctive gravelly voice is hard to mistake.

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