We know that Fallout 76, the latest in Bethesda’s post-apocalyptic shooter series, will be an always-online multiplayer game set in West Virginia. Beyond that, how the game’s open world will be laid out and what exactly it will look like remains a mystery. But that hasn’t stopped fans from combing through every little detail currently available to create a speculative map of the game.
The primary sources for information regarding Fallout 76‘s version of West Virginia are currently Fallout 76‘s E3 trailers and the Noclip documentary about the game’s development released around the same time. At several points in the latter, starting around 8:30, the video cuts to mockups of maps to help illustrate the developers’ discussion about what locations will be in the game and how they will be spaced out.
Compiling the information from those pictures and comparing them to real world landmarks, dedicated sleuths on the game’s subreddit arrived at the following unofficial fan map for Fallout 76:
Now in its sixth iteration, the map has seen contributions from a couple dozen people, as well as lots of analysis by other Redditors in the comments sections about how likely certain landmarks are to appear in the final game and where they will sit in relation to one another.
Morgantown, situated in the northern part of the state and home to West Virginia University, is one of the confirmed locales for the game. As a result, it’s marked with a big yellow dot on the speculative Reddit map to denote it as a main point of interest, along with other towns like Charleston and Lewisburg.
Based on these spots and the icons on the Bethesda images, Fallout 76 fans have tried to specify other locations, such as placing Vault 76 just west of Morgantown or Vault Tec University, assumed to be the Fallout universe’s equivalent of WVU, along the eastern shore of the Monongahela River.
Other potential locations in the game rely on much less confident guesswork, including power plants, dams, and the state’s Etam Earth Station for receiving transmissions from orbiting satellites. All of these locations are marked with an orange dot and even have a question mark on their description if they’re particularly unsubstantiated.
The Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs, for instance, is a real place with a real life nuclear bunker buried 21.34m beneath it, but whether it’s that big white building east and slightly north of Charleston, or represented by some other icon closer to where the hotel would be on an accurately scaled map, remains unclear.
Bethesda has said Fallout 76‘s map will be four times as big as Fallout 4, putting it at around just under 16 square miles by some people’s estimates.
Given that the actual state of West Virginia is 24,000 square miles, this means the game will be taking liberties with how everything is arranged, making even the highly sophisticated fan map ultimately suspect.
Still it’s a lot of fun to try to play the game in our heads before it’s actually out and some 12-year-old kid is nuking our shelter for the lolz.
Comments
3 responses to “Fans Are Using Every Clue To Piece Together A Map Of Fallout 76”
As I understand the lore (and its not the greatest, so could be wrong), Vault 76 is somewhere near Washington DC. All good so far. But its mentioned as being in the Capital Wasteland, or something like that. Again, all good so far.
I wonder if Fallout 76 is going to basically be about us, as players, creating what the game comes to know as the Capital Wasteland. If so, theres plenty more out there adding info to the area, it just needs people to hunt it out.
It’s a bit all over the place, I guess because there’s so much speculation still. But since several West Virginia locations are named including Charleston, it seems like it’s set a long way from the Capital Wasteland area – Charleston is like 400km from DC. If Charleston is correct (it’s in yellow), then the river is either the Ohio river or the Kanawha river, which are both right on the west-most side of West Virginia, the opposite side to DC.
Oh definitely more to it, I just keep coming back to a Fallout 3 reference (or the Mothership Zeta DLC, cant remember which. FO4 establishes the 25 year opening) that puts Vault 76 square in the Capital Wasteland.
As it seems pretty clear that’s our starting point, its not going to be an irradiated mess at the time Fallout 76 is set, so how does it get that way? Rest of the map on top of that just extends out from that starting point, but the change from good conditions to nuked territory suggests we might play a role.
I have no problems with that, its one of the fun parts about prequel games.