It is an installment in the Fallout series and a prequel to previous entries.Fallout 76 is Bethesda Game Studios's first multiplayer game; players explore the open world, which has been torn apart by nuclear war, with others. The game was the subject of several controversies, chiefly with regard to the quality of physical content. The servers for the game are public dedicated servers, with the player automatically allocated to one of them. Private servers allow players to invite friends and to prevent undesirable aspects of player versus player gameplay such as griefing from affecting an individual player's experience of the game. Howard described the delay as being necessary to allow Bethesda time to assure the stability of public servers. The V.A.T.S. system—a mechanic introduced in Fallout 3 that allows players to pause the game to target specific locations on an enemy's body to attack—is used in Fallout 76 as a real-time system, though it still allows players to specify targets on an enemy's body.
The game features an open world four times the size of that of Fallout 4. The game features numerous new mutated monsters, several of which—such as the Mothman and the Flatwoods monster—were inspired by West Virginian folklore.
The game includes revisions to the SPECIAL progression system. As the player levels up, they are able to spend skill points to boost their attributes on a scale of one to fifteen. Each card has a value and the player can adopt perks equal to their respective value; for example, if the player has a strength rating of five, then they may equip strength perks worth five points. This required Bethesda to change their approach to storytelling as previous games in the series relied on NPCs to assign quests, engage the player in dialog and advance the overall narrative.
