During a recent press preview event that we at Wccftech were able to attend, Bethesda Game Studios has outlined the next year of Fallout 76, beginning with the episodic Slasher mystery (already out) and moving through the December World Pets update, Spring 2027’s Hideouts, and a Summer 2027 expansion toward the Capital Wasteland.

The studio also discussed a longer technical roadmap that goes beyond the recently added PS5 Pro support with further console upscaling options and PC rendering upgrades, although those planned enhancements haven't been dated yet.

Bethesda's Exciting Yearly Roadmap

Setting the stage, Creative Director Jon Rush described the team's desire to "thicken" Fallout 76 by adding more to the activities and places players already visit, while continuing to make room for substantial new regions and stories. World Pets turns C.A.M.P. animals into traveling companions, Hideouts expands the bounty hunting endgame, and Raven Rock will extend the map toward territory familiar to Fallout 3 players.

In The Slasher, Bethesda is telling a mystery across multiple Fall updates. Players investigate killings attributed to followers of the Pint-Sized Slasher, track down victims hidden across Appalachia, and search unmarked graves for further clues. More than 100 victims have been placed around the map; finding a handful progresses the quest, while a more thorough search earns better rewards. Slasher fanatics also appear in various in-game activities, including Daily Ops, Mischief Night, and Spooky Scorched encounters, before a confrontation with a four-star legendary foe in Headhunts, leveraging the bounty system introduced last year.

The presentation continued with the first look at December's World Pets update, which is set to expand the existing C.A.M.P. Pet system. Dogs, Cats, Radhogs, and Deathclaws will be able to leave camp, follow players across Appalachia, help in combat, and level up. Players will select, swap, and heal them through a new Pets section under Stats in the Pip-Boy. The existing command wheel will separate Emotes from four Commands: Stay, Follow, Attack, and Defend. Every player will receive a German Shepherd variant when the update launches.

Pet progression is based on species rather than individual animals. Each species has an activity-oriented passive bonus: Dogs can find Stimpaks and extra Legendaries on Bounty Hunts; Cats can find Improved Baits and extra Fish Bits; Radhogs can find Toxic Goo and High-Radiation Fluids; and Deathclaws can find Black Titanium and extra Legendaries during an Infestation. All four species deal the same melee damage, though. Moreover, pet armor is cosmetic, and pets cannot join Raids or enter Shelters.

The World Pets patch will also bring bounty hunting from Burning Springs into Skyline Valley, with new contracts, rewards, and a new host: Marshall Canton, a Robobrain who has adopted the persona of an Old West lawman. Bethesda is additionally refreshing the region’s forests, terrain, and weather effects.

Next on the roadmap are the Hideouts, which are scheduled to enter the Public Test Server in October 2026 ahead of a Spring 2027 release. These are brand new interior locations in Burning Springs and Skyline Valley, occupied by dangerous gangs. Players can bring up to three friends, but must first obtain a Hideout Lead through exploration, Public Events, Head Hunts, or other activities. Combining Leads at a Tinker's Workbench creates a harder challenge.

Hideouts will vary between runs: players could face different factions, area-wide hazards, time challenges, or mutations that strengthen a gang leader. At higher difficulties, a rival bounty hunter called The Drifter may appear. Bethesda describes him as a Raid-level encounter; using a Marked Hideout Lead guarantees that he will show up. Rush said Hideouts are meant to help players progress toward Raids, though the hardest versions may challenge even well-equipped teams.

The yearly roadmap's final and largest destination is Raven Rock, planned for next Summer. Rather than an instanced Expedition, it will extend Fallout 76's main map toward the Capital Wasteland, with no loading screen required to enter the new region, in which Fallout 3 players will see familiar locations, including an earlier Megaton, but Rush said the devastation around downtown Washington makes that area too dangerous to explore. He estimated the new region would be comparable to or larger than Burning Springs in size. It will support C.A.M.P. building and include new environmental mechanics reflecting the region's especially hazardous post-war conditions. As for the story, Rush only teased that it will center on the Enclave faction.

Beyond the four headline updates, Bethesda said it intends to keep improving existing features, including Expeditions, seasonal events, rendering, weather, fishing, and the new-player experience. The developers also discussed future Raids, possible C.A.M.P. building improvements, and whether the player cap on private servers will ever be increased, while cautioning that several of those ideas have no announced dates or confirmed place on the roadmap at this time.

You can read about all of that in the gigantic developer Q&A that followed the presentation, with Jon Rush and Senior Producer Bill LaCoste answering a lot of questions from the assembled press.

The Big Fallout 76 Dev Q&A

With up to 24 players bringing pets onto a Fallout 76 server, what has the team done to protect performance?

Rush: Taking a little peek behind the curtain with how these features are made: what they start as is, ‘Hey, I’ve got a great idea. Everybody should have a pet.’ From there, what happens is we want to make sure that performance isn’t impacted. So the very next step in getting that feature off the ground wasn’t making new pets. It wasn’t making emotes and skill trees and any of that. No, no, no. It was just simply doing a performance test. How does the game perform if we have 24 players in there and they each have a pet and, let’s say, they’re running Fasnacht, a notoriously game-intensive event? So we ran those tests. The results were good, and so that was the first stage in feeling very confident that this was not going to be detrimental to the performance or the experience of our players.

LaCoste: Just so players are aware, these aren’t going to be 24 brand-new creatures coming into the world. Whenever we set out to do C.A.M.P. pets originally, we made sure that there was a reserved creature count for each character to have a pet available to it. So, there really shouldn't be any impacts, since we’ve already got it reserved.

Rush: Even if everybody was hanging out outside of Vault 76 with their pets out, there should not be any detriment to game performance. This is one of the reasons why we go to PTS so early with a lot of these things. Part of this is verifying all the performance testing that we’ve done and making sure that servers are holding up, that events are holding up, that performance in general is holding up, and we’ve been able to verify that.

How many pet types will be available when World Pets launches?

Rush: We’ll have dogs, we’ll have cats, we’ll have Radhogs, and we’ll have Deathclaws. So we’ll have four pet archetypes. At the World Pets launch, there will be ways to earn new skins for those pet archetypes. Also, every player is going to get a new variant of the German Shepherd so that anybody coming in to experience World Pets will be able to do that from the get-go. In subsequent updates, we will also be making skins for the Deathclaw, as well as different armor sets and stuff that players will be able to earn, too. Not only that, you get more pet furniture for them to interact with in your C.A.M.P. There’s a lot of pet stuff coming with World Pets.

Will pet armor make pets stronger?

Rush: Pet armor, yes. To make them stronger, no. Anything that you put on your pet is cosmetic. As far as a cat running around in armor, probably not. But you have Deathclaws in armor, maybe some dogs with armor. But again, it’s for aesthetics. It’s not any sort of gameplay bonus or anything.

Rush: Any gameplay bonuses you get for your cat are going to be earned through the level progression with that pet archetype. So as you level your pet up, they will unlock new gameplay perks and benefits to your character.

How did you decide what niches each pet’s passive abilities should fill?

Rush: What we didn’t want to do was place combat at the center of their passives. I think we already do a lot of things related to combat. So what we wanted to do was have the pet choice be based on what the player is doing, what activities they’re participating in in the game, like fishing, things that players regularly participate in, or bounty hunting. We wanted the passive to be based on activities that players do, not necessarily additional ways to kill.

Will enemies have pets, too?

LaCoste: Sometimes you get some Raiders who have a Deathclaw, which you’ve already seen in Burning Springs. Maybe there’s more. There might be some more. Just have to wait and see.

Could C.A.M.P. Allies accompany Fallout 76 players into the world?

Rush: We’ve discussed that as well, turning your C.A.M.P. pet into a companion or turning your ally into a companion. I think that could be really cool. As for specific plans for that being on the roadmap, not at this time. But it is something that we have discussed. I would say it’s a very real possibility, but exactly where that happens, to be determined.

LaCoste: We’ve had so many Lite Allies come through the game over the past few years. We definitely want to find ways to make them a little more valuable to players, too. There have been discussions about how we do that and finding some ways to get them more involved.

Could more currently restricted areas become available for C.A.M.P. building?

Rush: Possibly. A lot of those locations are blocked off for performance reasons. We have been reevaluating the cost of C.A.M.P. assets and the spaces that non-buildable areas occupy to see if there is room to skirt that. I wouldn’t promise anything, but it is something we’re always looking at because we recognize our builders as such a big part of our wonderful community. We certainly want them to have as many options as possible.

Is a search function coming to the C.A.M.P. build menu?

Rush: Exact plans? No. However, it’s on our list of things that we would love to work into the C.A.M.P. system for improvements, even a 3D gizmo type of thing so you can rotate stuff. We’ve got lots of talks on improving C.A.M.P.s, even talks about improving the C.A.M.P. budget. Expanding on that, we’ve talked about a bigger C.A.M.P. radius. Filtering or search, a search function, we’ve discussed that too. It’s just a matter of finding where that fits on the roadmap and making sure that we have the proper resources.

Could the number of players allowed on a Fallout 76 private server increase?

LaCoste: Still investigating.

Rush: It’s not off the table, for sure. It’s something we would love to do, but like pets, like the addition of pets, we want to make sure that it’s not something that destabilizes the game or jeopardizes the experience for folks.

How large is the Raven Rock expansion compared with Skyline Valley or Burning Springs? Will it cover the whole Fallout 3 map?

Rush: This takes place close to a couple of hundred years before the events of Fallout 3, so this is really close to right after when the bombs dropped. D.C. was notoriously one of the worst places to be as far as radiation and how much of it was destroyed. So what players get is a look at the Capital Wasteland at that time, a couple of hundred years before Fallout 3. That said, downtown D.C. is too dangerous for players to go to. You’ll be able to get real close, but you’re not going to be able to quite get there.

Players are going to see a lot of familiar locations from Fallout 3. Megaton comes to mind, right? What did Megaton look like a couple hundred years before that huge settlement we discovered in Fallout 3? As far as the size of the region, I would say the size of the region is comparable to or larger than Burning Springs. Raven Rock is story content, quest content. It is Enclave content. This is an Enclave story that takes place in the Capital Wasteland, which sets the stage for what players experienced in Fallout 3.

How much more will players learn about the Rust King in Raven Rock?

LaCoste: We’re still hashing out some things with the Rust King, but I would say this is going to be, like John said, a lot more focused on the Capital Wasteland for Raven Rock and all the stories that surround that.

Rush: Not much. However, it doesn’t mean we don’t have plans for the Rust King. We absolutely do. This is an Enclave story, and although the Rust King may have some ties in his backstory, it’s not going to be focused so much on him.

Will Raven Rock have more environmental hazards?

Rush: Absolutely. There are going to be some new mechanics, which I will not detail here, but there will be new mechanics specific to this region in regard to the state that it currently is. And they will dictate gameplay in some ways, with considerations that players have to make when they’re exploring that really highlight the toxicity and the danger of this area right after the bombs dropped.

Will players be able to build C.A.M.P.s in the Capital Wasteland?

Rush: Yes, of course. We wouldn’t cut that out of there. That’s going to be a hot place to build some great C.A.M.P.s. Players will find some really great vistas. They’ll find some really great spots and build some very thematic C.A.M.P.s in that region.

Is Raven Rock an Expedition or an open region?

Rush: Raven Rock is yet another mutation of the Appalachian map. It is an expansion of the map. It is a new region to explore that’s going to look very familiar to folks who have played Fallout 3. Very familiar and yet kind of different, too. So it is not an Expedition. There are no loading screens to get into the Capital Wasteland. It is a part of the map.

Will Raven Rock have exterior and interior locations?

LaCoste: It takes place on the open map, so a large part of it is the exterior cells, because you’re out on the map with everything else. It’ll have a lot of interior cells, too. A lot of these locations that we’re able to go into in Fallout 3, and some new ones that players are going to discover. So, best of both, I suppose.

Will Raven Rock receive a PTS?

LaCoste: Yeah, of course. That’ll be coming up probably in the next calendar year. We want to give players a shot to take a look at this content, but also go through it, give their thoughts and feedback. That’s really why we go to PTS a lot of times, too: to get the feedback from players.

Will Raven Rock have only one entry point, as Burning Springs does?

Rush: Mostly open. Depends on how good at rock climbing you are. There will not be, like how Burning Springs has that swath of land by the Ohio River that you can’t cross, there’s nothing like that, which we have plans to address, by the way. It’s a nice, organic transition into the Capital Wasteland.

Is the Drifter a quest antagonist or an event that can compete with players for bounties?

Rush: The Drifter offers a very unique challenge for groups that are skilled enough to get through Hideouts at the toughest difficulty levels. The Drifter is not your friend. He is, in fact, your competition. What the Drifter wants is to eliminate that competition. We’ve done some studio playtests, playtesting Hideouts and the Drifter with teams of four. I’m not exaggerating when I say that there were two of us on a team, when the Drifter came out, who were legitimately trying to hide from him. We didn’t want to fight him, and he eventually beat us back so hard he was spawn-camping us. We’re adjusting that. However, very challenging and, with that, very rewarding for folks who are able to thwart the Drifter.

Are any more Raids planned after Hideouts?

Rush: The way I’ve always viewed Raids as a complete feature, I would like to have a few of them. There’s a reason for that. There’s something linking them together. So yes, there are plans for additional Raids. Where those appear on the roadmap, not talking about that yet. In most ways, we have positioned Hideouts as a stepping stone for players to progress into Raids. Hideouts serves as a very grand expansion of the bounty-hunting feature itself. Those two are linked, but also in difficulty, gear, and skill-wise and tactics-wise with your group, a nice stepping stone up into Raids. So, more plans for Raids, absolutely.

Can Hideouts be completed solo?

Rush: There are different difficulty levels of Hideouts. They’re one part easier than Raids and they could be one part harder, depending. Are they soloable? Yeah, I think if somebody was geared up well enough, they could get through one on their own. The very most difficult level, I don’t know. I certainly couldn’t, but I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody could.

Lacoste: You can enter them solo. I would not suggest it for most people, though.

Might the team revisit and expand The Pitt or other Expeditions?

LaCoste: We do want to go back in there and do some things and make it better and add some rewards and things like that to it. That’s certainly on our roadmap for future expansion. We’ve definitely heard players complain to us openly about not continuing on with some of the content that we built in the past. These are definitely some of the areas we want to go back and add to in the future.

Rush: The concept of Expeditions, offering the opportunity to go explore other areas that might be too far outside of our map, is very appealing, like going to The Pitt. What we’ve discovered over the years is that our players really like being able to stay on the larger map, on the Appalachian map, because there are all these layers of uncertainty that can get added along as you play, like a Scorchbeast flying over in the middle of an Infestation. Looking back, we would love to find another way for players to experience these Expeditions. Whether that means maybe going through and streamlining some of the experience, new rewards, and possibly offering them in limited periods, could be one way. We’re discussing it. Perhaps more stories and lore behind it would go a long way.

Could bounties eventually spread to the Mire?

Rush: Our hope was that as players took on these bounties, the bad guys would get the message and leave Appalachia alone. But now they’re spreading into Skyline Valley. The Mire, I don’t know, could be next. We’ll have to see how our players fare against this latest round. It’s possible.

Are there plans to add cross-play or cross-progression to Fallout 76?

LaCoste: No updates right now. Obviously, we would all love to have that in the future, but no plans as of this moment.

Will more previously closed buildings open for exploration?

Rush: Yes. These Hideouts actually take place in some locations that have been closed off until now. Additional plans, too, for non-Hideout use, for environmental storytelling, or just more exploration. We’re always on the lookout to thicken the map.

Could MODUS’s story be expanded?

Rush: Well, I don’t want to spoil anything, but maybe.

Could players become Super Mutants?

Rush: Playable Ghouls came about. It was something that we had discussed for a while, and it was something that we finally decided to move towards because we could see a niche in the gameplay that being a Ghoul could fulfill. So when I’m posed with the idea for a playable Super Mutant, my first thought is always, well, what’s the gameplay benefit? I’m sure there is one, and it mostly comes back as, well, you could be a tank. It’s like, well, sure, you could be a tank now. You put on Power Armor. There’s so much value in just the role-play aspect of it, too. Even just looking like a Ghoul, players found a lot of value in. So I know players would enjoy being a Super Mutant. I, for one, would love to be a Super Mutant. I’d really want to give a very meaningful gameplay experience to those people, too. So it’s a fun idea, and one I’ll certainly be thinking about quite a bit.

What further technical upgrades are planned?

LaCoste: Our current-gen Gen 9 stuff is out now. Obviously, the question that comes up a lot is what’s next after that? For example, PS5 Pro optimization is now out, which is great. PSSR upscales, Xbox One to GDK, FSR even for Xbox Series S and X. And then one thing people have been asking for a while is a FOV slider for all platforms, too. There’s HDR support and extended widescreen support. We’ve been doing that over the past year or so. And then for PC, which a lot of people ask about too, is multithreaded rendering for PC and also Direct3D 12 upgrades. We have a lot of upgrades coming for cube maps, reflections, lighting, shadows updates. And one big thing is you will finally get shadows in your Shelters. So look out for that relatively soon.

Might Bethesda make more episodic events like the Slasher update?

Rush: The Slasher update is a first of its kind for Fallout 76. What we usually do with these updates is we drop them and everything’s there and people are experiencing it. But this one is kind of episodic, a nice fall, creepy, macabre theme that unravels over the course of not just this patch but the next one too, as you’re trying to solve the mystery of who this Pint-Sized impostor is. If we get enough enthusiasm from players, it would be great to do more of these down the road.

Different themes; could be a cryptid-themed one. Who knows? Here’s to experimentation.

Thank you for your time.

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