Fallout 76's playable Ghouls are a "meaningful gameplay choice, not just a visual change"

Bethesda has done an amazing job at effectively saving Fallout 76 and turning a game that had a very troublesome debut into a project with millions of active players who frequently return to the Wasteland to complete some quests and generally cause trouble.

But keeping fans interested is a challenge in and of itself. While there have been a multitude of expansions in the past and still more to come, one feature Bethesda will be exploring eventually is a playable Ghoul class. This will be launching sometime in early 2025 and will be a series-first for Fallout, so with that being the case, how is Bethesda going about implementing it in a meaningful way?

We spoke with creative director Jonathan Rush recently, we he told us all about how the Ghouls are being designed and balanced for Fallout 76.

"Yeah, so Ghouls was... We talked about Playable Ghouls for quite a while, and what we were looking for was an opportunity to make it a really meaningful gameplay choice, not just a visual change. So... where we were noticing player feedback and player trends, it seemed like a really good time to bring in an option for our later game players, the one requirement for being a Ghoul is that you have to be level 50 or above. And so to bring in Ghouls and to kind of pose an alternate way to play through endgame content.

"So one of the big things that differentiates a Ghoul from a human is that Ghouls are not adversely affected by radiation. As a matter of fact, it helps them. Like if I'm a Ghoul and I've taken damage and I start scooping up some radiated water, it actually heals me, right? And if I find other radiation sources, I can actually absorb radiation and use that in various ways through the 32 new Ghoul-specific perk cards that are going to be coming out with the update. Ghouls also don't... They're not affected by hunger and thirst. They have no hunger and thirst meter, but they'll have a feral meter, which they need to keep a close watch on, which could very much skew gameplay as well.

"So when you have a character that's completely immune to radiation and don't have to wear power armor anymore, that frees up a whole bunch of perk points that you can use for all sorts of other stuff, which is a new play style all on its own. But when you add the 32 new perk cards on top of that, it's dozens of new play styles. So it'll be really interesting to see how our players use those and how they pick up on what the stark differences between a human and a Ghoul are and how that factors into how they want to handle tougher challenges like the Gleaming Depths."

You can find the full interview with Rush below to hear about how the Fallout series helped Fallout 76 and also what's next for the Wasteland of Appalachia.