Fishing is coming to Fallout 76, along with your own Dogmeat and cat pets for your camp
Reel it in.
Fallout 76's waterways have typically never been places you want to spend any amount of time in due to, you know, them mostly being irradiated and all, but this looks set to change when fishing comes to Bethesda's online Fallout game in a future update.
Tonight's Fallout Day broadcast only included the briefest of teasers that fishing would be coming to Fallout 76, but I spoke to lead producer Bill LaCoste earlier this week to try and find out more about it. He says it will likely be "closer to the end of the year" before the team details how fishing will work in full, but he did reveal that you'll be able to fish "anywhere where there's a body of water that you can drink from" - and that includes interior and exterior locations.
While it's unclear at the moment whether you'll be able to fish up some of Fallout 76's more aggressive aquatic monsters - I'm not sure I'd fancy my chances if I hooked one of its enormous, four-legged Angler creatures, for example - LaCoste says it will "pretty much be guaranteed that we'll have common types of fish" to find, and that your catches will "feed into new recipes" you can cook up to keep your hunger levels at bay.
He also teased that the team plans to use fishing "in other ways", too, but that the details of this were under lock and key until that end of year announcement.
Sticking with the animal theme from the Fallout Day broadcast, though, another big reveal came in the form of Camp Pets, which will be arriving in December. There will be just two types to start with in the game's shop - the classic cat and dog(meat) combo - but more will be added down the line, including "some that are not so furry," creative director Jonathan Rush teased in the broadcast.
When I ask LaCoste about adding pets to Fallout 76, he says they've been one of the "most requested" features from fans, and not just because of the success of the Fallout TV show. "Players have wanted pets in their camps for a very, very long time," he says, and it's "been on our design roadmap for a good while, even before we knew about the show and when the show would even drop. I think the show itself just kind of helps that be more important for players now, especially now the show is out."
This will be good news for those craving their very own Dogmeat to welcome them home after a hard day's questing, and I ask LaCoste whether the dog in Fallout 76 is the very same Dogmeat model we might have travelled with in Fallout 4. He says there's "a little bit" of crossover in terms of the assets used to create Fallout 76's dog, but "we still have to go through the proper channels, like making sure that it's rigged properly and that it animates properly, and also fits within the world that we want them to fit in. There's a lot of new animation that had to be created to make these [dogs] work within the camps," but having Dogmeat as a starting point "certainly saves us on time, for sure," he adds.
Cat lovers will also be pleased to hear that Bethesda has been paying close attention to making its felines as accurate as possible, too. While the studio already had "some cats" in the game to work from, says LaCoste, "there were a lot of logistics and technical hurdles that we had to get past" to make sure that they, too, would pass muster for existing cat owners.
"Even when they're just rolling out and doing stretches and things like that, certain bones and certain elements stretch and look weird, so we have to pick that up," he says. "You want to try to capture all of the nuances and all of the personality of a cat, and that can sometimes be a little more difficult than a dog."
Fortunately, Bethesda had a ready bank of pet-owning playtesters and developers to check that all the individual behaviours and animations for dogs and cats were up to snuff, and LaCoste assures me they're both "looking really, really good" right now. Plus, if players want to get an early look for themselves, they can check them out on Fallout 76's public test server, where they're already available. Just don't expect the cats to always follow you around your camp, like the dogs might.
"That's actually on purpose," LaCoste laughs. "It's being a cat. It has its own little elements there, which is funny, especially for those people who do have cats and understand the struggles sometimes of having cats."