Michael ‘Shroud’ Grzesiek says Fallout 76’s new battle royale mode, Nuclear Winter, is his “new main game” and that he will be practising today.
He might even be serious. Shroud is a Fallout fan: he was pretty into Fallout 76 when it first came out, and his reaction to Nuclear Winter’s announcement during Bethesda’s E3 stream last night (see 04:11:15 in this video) was unironic enthusiasm: “I’m down! This is gonna be better than fuckin’ Firestorm! For sure!”
Firestorm, of course, is Battlefield V’s battle royale mode, and, well. Ouch. You can almost hear the burn sizzling at developer Dice, a studio known for making some of the best gunplay in the business whereas Fallout developer Bethesda – for all its other strengths – is not. Shroud doubled down on Twitter, saying he would practise Nuclear Winter today – it’s available to play now as part of Fallout 76’s week-long free trial, before being added permanently to the game in a free update at a later date.
Here’s hoping Shroud isn’t too disappointed. The streamer is a former CS:GO pro who has made his career streaming shooters and battle royales with deep gunplay, such as PUBG and Apex Legends. Even if you’re a Fallout 76 apologist – and Bethesda wheeled out its most popular exec Todd Howard to acknowledge that there haven’t been many of them since the game’s disaster of a lunch – you probably wouldn’t argue that combat is one of the game’s main strengths.
new main game… fallout 76 br lets prac today
— Michael Grzesiek (@shroud) June 10, 2019
Still, it has come a long way since then, when we and many other critics were pretty underwhelmed, and we learned last night that Fallout 76 will receive its biggest-ever update in autumn.
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Named Wastelanders, it will also be free to all owners of the game, and add human NPCs with dialogue trees, quests, and opposed factions – all staple Fallout features that were missing from the base game. Maybe it’ll actually be pretty good when that update lands.