For the 64th time since its release, Fallout 76 is expanding. (Yes, that’s a real stat!) This December, the post-apocalyptic MMO will receive a massive update in the form of Burning Springs. It will add new weapons and quests, take players to Ohio, include references to Fallout 3 and New Vegas, and even tie into Season 2 of Amazon’s Fallout TV series. What was once an outlier in the Fallout universe has slowly become its centerpoint.
Ahead of Burning Springs’ release later this year, I sat down with production director Bill LaCoste and creative director Jonathan Rush about the MMO’s next transformation. The team broke down how it’s able to seamlessly slot new elements and outside references into its Appalachian Wasteland without losing focus.
There once was a time where the idea of Fallout 76 receiving an update as significant as Burning Springs seven years after launch would have seemed like a total fantasy. When the MMO launched in 2018, it was panned by critics and players alike who felt the initial release was buggy and conceptually half-baked. It seemed dead on arrival, bound to suffer the same fate as live-service experiments of the era like Anthem. Instead, it’s still going strong in 2025, something that LaCoste and Rush chalk up to the team’s ability to stay the course.
“We’ve just always believed in this game,” Rush tells viraltrendingcontent. “Our launch was kind of like the first chapter to the stories. People come out and they don’t see anybody there, and they become familiar with their surroundings and their playscape. For us, it was just keeping our heads down and continuing to make the content that we know our fans are gonna love, and that we’re gonna love as players ourselves. Just very consistent with our updates and unwavering with our belief in the game for all this time.”
Burning Springs is the game’s largest content drop to date. The biggest piece of it is its map expansion, as players can now cross the border into Ohio and see what’s going on over there. (Spoiler: Nothing good!) For the team, venturing into a new state after so many years in West Virginia offered an opportunity to play around with an untouched location in the Fallout universe.
“We hadn’t really explored it in the Fallout lore too much,” Rush says. “From our map, you go east, you start getting into Capital Wasteland. We’ve explored that quite a bit. Ohio hasn’t really been touched on too much. So, Fallout 76 being the furthest back in time from the whole series, including the show, provides us a lot of creative opportunities. Let’s see what’s going on in Ohio!”
“There’s only four or five references to Ohio in all of Fallout,” LaCoste adds. “It’s usually a character talking about a family or their family. Whatever it is, it’s very, very light. So this is almost like a blank slate.”
There was a time where we didn’t think there would ever be an update 76.
What’s immediately surprising about Fallout 76’s take on Ohio is that it’s a desert wasteland. That’s not exactly what I expected to see, but there’s a good reason it’s like that: The design was inspired by Fallout 3 and New Vegas. That would bring more Fallout DNA to the MMO, but would require some smart implementation. After all, it wouldn’t make sense to fill Ohio with abandoned casinos and opulent megastructures. Instead of filling Ohio with direct references to old games, the team focused more on bringing the ethos of them to Fallout 76.
“It wasn’t so much that we wanted to look at those games and say, we want this thing, this thing, this thing,” Rush says. “What we wanted to do was take the tone and the feel of those Fallouts and have that represented in Burning Springs. What I had communicated to the team when we had started working on the new region was: It’s got to have desert, Deathclaws, and a lot of raiders. To me, that’s what Fallout 3, that’s what New Vegas is. Those are the main elements that carry the tone of those games, and so I wanted that mirrored here. Sure enough, Burning Springs is desert, Deathclaws, and raiders. In a much different way, but still there.”
I asked Rush if the team had the chance to speak with the developers at Obsidian to pick their brains about New Vegas when working on Burning Shores, but he says there was no direct communication between the studios. Instead, the Bethesda team got its inspiration from playing the game and dissecting its general vibe. That might fuel some longstanding fan theories that Bethesda harbors secret resentment for Obsidian for creating what many fans believe to be the best 3D Fallout game, but LaCoste laughs off that idea.
“I think sometimes players want there to be more friction than there really is,” LaCoste says. “We love all of the Fallout series.”
That doesn’t just extend to other games, but Amazon’s TV series too. The show’s first season was a major moment for Fallout 76, with the game seeing a “six or seven” times player increase, according to Rush. The team knew it had to capitalize, but didn’t have the runway to pull off a full crossover right away. Rush says the team watched Season 1 alongside everyone else and started planning a potential tie-in built around the last episode’s New Vegas-flavored Season 2 teaser. The goal was to align it with the next season’s release date, without yet knowing when that would be.
Working other games into Fallout 76 is one challenge, but how do you bring in a TV show that takes creative liberties with the lore while still staying true to the MMO? Rush and LaCoste praised the show’s writers for their ability to keep the show so visually faithful to the games, but the team would have to find a place where it made sense for the two pieces of media to naturally intersect. They found that link in The Ghoul, the show’s noseless antihero played by Walton Goggins.
“We were figuring out what this new region is, what the tone of it was, and then what the kind of hallmark feature of the new region would be, that’s bounty hunting,” Rush says. “So who better to host bounty hunting than Walton Goggins as The Ghoul? Him being a huge fan of the games too, he was very eager to work with us and get this done as well. So it wasn’t planned from the onset, but it came about through organically developing the feature.”
Having played a bit of Burning Springs, The Ghoul doesn’t feel out of place in the world of Fallout 76. He’s a sensible choice for a vendor rather than a shoehorned bit of cross-media synergy. That’s a testament to Fallout 76 and the team’s commitment to staying true and consistent to its vision of Appalachia. They can reference New Vegas and the TV series naturally, without diluting the MMO’s world. That’s perhaps part of why Fallout 76 players have remained committed to the game despite its rocky launch.
Burning Springs won’t be the MMO’s last update. The first big 2026 update is very much in the works and the team is planning out as far ahead as its 72nd update at the moment. When they say that, I realize Fallout 76 is likely going to get a 76th update at this rate. That’s very much in the works right now too, says Rush and LaCoste. Even if it’s still a ways off, the team sees it as a significant moment on the horizon — one that speaks to the MMO’s unlikely success story.
“There was a time where we didn’t think there would ever be an update 76,” LaCoste says. “Now we’re at a point where things are so great, for the show and the game. It’s actually kind of amazing to think that there’s an update 76 that then is going to coincide with, you know, who knows!”
