Fallout 76’s next update launches today, alongside the new season, Appalachia Under Siege. With it comes a new hostile encounter that sees different factions or forces claim up to “40 unique locations” only to be driven out by you, the player.
Instead of introducing a massive map expansion, new events, and NPCs like we saw in Burning Springs, Infestations seeks to “enrich the existing experience” by making the current map more rewarding and interesting to explore.
“I love seeing all the dots moving around, to me it sounds like the map is ‘sizziling’ there’s stuff going on on the map constantly,” Jon Rush, Fallout 76’s creative director says in a group Q&A. “And to me that tells me players are in the game, having fun. So Infestations is another one of those forays into adding another layer of experiences on our map.”
Infestations will appear randomly around the map with players having to sniff out the specific area for themselves. “The max number will be about five spawning every five minutes,” senior systems designer Fahad Khan adds. The infection won’t spread if no one manages to or bothers to clear it; it’ll just disappear after five hours.
Those who do find the Infestation and decide to take it on, however, will have their work cut out for them, because while this isn’t specifically end-game content, it’s as near as dammit. “If [players] left at a mid level, maybe wait until you start to see the Infestation get a lot more dots around it before you hop in,” Rush says. “These are hard, these bosses are hard, it is end game content to an extent, you do get four star legendaries from these bosses so they’re going to be challenging if you go at it alone or aren’t with the right people.” Welp, it sounds like I’ll need some help then.
But luckily, unlike Raids, Infestations won’t need to be completed in a group, you can just wait for anyone on the map to show up and help. Carl McKevitt, lead designer on Fallout 76 explains how it’s an example of Fallout 76’s “emergent social gameplay” and that because of this it “floats somewhere between end-game and casual friendly.”
So Infestations is a high risk event, but that’s ok, because it’s also high reward; “It is one of the easiest ways to get a four star,” McKevitt says. “Which is helpful because that’s a hurdle that has been hard for players that are in the late but not quite end-game to cross. So we’re hoping to see an improvement in players’ arsenals as a result of this.” Some of the new four star legendary mods you can get from this include: Hauler’s, Raging, Satiated, Tarnished, and Vector.
“We have something that we’re calling a ‘common pool’ for our four stars which is about half of what went out with the raids,” McKevitt adds. “We’re moving towards a system where things that drop four stars will at least pull from the common pool and then pull from an additional ‘exclusive pool’ to that content. We want to make sure that any new sources of four stars we introduce don’t necessarily invalidate the previous sources.
“In this case you’ll get the commons plus the newly created ones that came out of this update. We want to try and preserve Raids as where you get some of the top tier most highly desired four stars but getting any four stars is still better than having none.”
In terms of other rewards, while there won’t be any new Xbox achievements or trophies Khan does confirm that there are “rewards which are specifically geared towards finding and completing infestations both in quantity and type as well. And obviously that’s just the initial rollout of those as well, we’ll be adding more team based challenges and additional gameplay challenges.”
But you’ll be able to experience all of this for yourself today, so good luck and godspeed in finding and defeating these Infestations and let us know in the comments if getting four star legendaries is as easy as the devs say it is.
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