Fallout 76 Shares Developer Preview of Massive Skyline Valley Update

09.05.2024 - 20:51 / gamerant.com / Dominik Bo

Bethesda has shared a new developer preview of Fallout 76: Skyline Valley. With a runtime of nearly three and a half minutes, the new video has plenty of time to go over the biggest highlights of the upcoming Fallout 76 update.

After being teased in late 2023, Skyline Valley was officially announced alongside the Duel with the Devil seasonal content roadmap in March 2024. The massive update is set to debut after Fallout 76 Season 16 comes to an end in early June.

With Skyline Valley now only being about a month out, Bethesda has released a new video overview of the upcoming expansion featuring former Fallout 76 Art Director Jonathan Rush, who was elevated to the position of Creative Director in January 2024. The May 9 clip sees Rush walk fans through some of the novelties included in the upcoming update, the biggest of which is a new region to explore. While Fallout 76 has already introduced several new locations—Pittsburgh and Atlantic City—via its Expeditions, Skyline Valley will mark the first-ever expansion of the base game's map.

The new area will be added to the southern part of Appalachia, with the titular Skyline Valley being based on the Shenandoah Mountain region in West Virginia. The May 9 developer preview also goes over some new types of enemies, including giant mutated North American turkeys called Thrashers and a trio of coordinated Robobrains with an aptly unified name of Storm Goliath. Skyline Valley will also feature the Lost, a new type of electrified ghouls that can be both friends and foes, much like their regular counterparts. One of them is Hugo Stoltz, the overseer of a mysterious Vault 63 found in the center of the titular valley's violent electric storm. Rush indicated that players will be able to choose between befriending and betraying this NPC over the course of the main Skyline Valley quest.

The creative director has also suggested that the upcoming expansion may not be solely geared toward high-level players, which has been the case with the majority of the game's post-launch content released to date. Instead, Rush has framed the update as part of Bethesda's efforts to continue rolling out content for all players, «regardless of level.» A preview version of Skyline Valley has been available to Steam users via the Fallout 76 public test server since April 2024.

Aside from this video overview of the upcoming expansion, Bethesda also dropped another Fallout 76 update on May 9. The new release is a minor hotfix that addresses a trio of issues, including a bug that would sometimes lead to Fallout 76 crashes following the April 30 patch. Various weapon visual effects have also been improved, with the update also fixing a problem that prevented repeatable daily S.C.O.R.E.