“Fuck yeah we put a battle royale in Fallout 76,” Bethesda co-studio director Tom Mustaine proudly proclaimed at the company’s E3 conference earlier this month.
“Nuclear Winter is a battle royale born from the Fallout universe, from power armour to perk cards, from CAMP building to wasteland creatures, and of course my personal favourite, nukes,” he continued, before finishing the sentence with a flourish of his hands to outline the shape of an explosion.
If you’d heard those words from the mouth of a Fallout developer back in 1997, chances are you’d be pretty darn confused. For one thing, battle royale – one of the most commercially successful game genres we’ve seen in years – didn’t yet exist, not even in book or film form. Meanwhile, presenting nukes as an amusing and trivial thing in a Fallout game? Surely not.
