Having skin is kind of overrated, don’t you think? Looking like a bad guy getting flayed after opening the Ark of the Covenant is definitely the look for the 2100s, and you will soon be able to prove that beauty is more than skin deep with Fallout 76’s playable Ghouls when they arrive in early 2025.
That’s right, with Ghouls being more popular than ever thanks to Walter Goggins’ star turn as a bounty hunting Ghoul in the Fallout TV series, you’ll soon be able to play as a Ghoul yourself in Fallout 76. But you aren’t born with it, and it definitely doesn’t involve make up. No, you’ll have to undertake a quest to be all Ghoul-ified once you’re deep into this game – you need to have a level 50 character, to be precise.
It all starts when you pick up a radio transmission from a distressed man who’s just about survived and attack by some rather ghastly bandits, and should you follow up on the call track Leman down as he visits the human doctor, it quickly becomes clear that he’s not going to be long for this world. The only chance he has it to find a… different kind of doctor and scientist way up in the North East of the map. Maybe they someway, somehow have a solution?
Well, since they’re part of a secretive society of Ghouls, they might have a thought or two on how to handle lethal doses of radiation, and so their solution is to transform Leman into a Ghoul himself. Along the way you’re given some almost perfunctory decisions to make. Do you egg Leman on and encourage him to accept the transformation to join this small community of outcasts? And following that, will you more willingly choose to become a Ghoul yourself?
There’s a ton of reasons why you might want to. You lose none of the stats and skills that you have from before, but there’s now a whole new endgame progression to engage in with 30 new Special cards focussed on all the special traits and abilities of the Ghoul characters.
The biggest perk is that Ghouls are not only resistant to the radiation that caused their transformation, it will actually help and heal you now. No need to avoid dirty water anymore, you can just slurp it up and eventually gain Glow, even. But you don’t really need to, since you’re no longer subject to hunger or thirst.
If that sounds like Fallout 76 easy mode, then there are some downsides as well. Instead of hunger and thirst, you have to manage your Feral meter which, if you let it get a bit out of hand will significantly debuff your ability to use ranged weapons, though your melee attacks are boosted quite a lot.
Being a Ghoul, pretty much all the regular humans will now absolutely detest you. Any cities and encampments will want to turn you away if you ever show your face, and the Brotherhood of Steel will really not take kindly to your presence… so you’ll now have to hide it. Visit makeover guru Jaye Vo within the Ghoul enclave’s bunker, and she will work wonders to help hide your ghastly appearance from view.
It’s a rather randomised process that can sometimes cover you up with a bandana and nice hat… or basically just wrap your head up in a bin bag with some breathing apparatus. It would be nice to have more flexibility here, as you don’t get to make the choice for what your disguise will be, and have to revisit Jaye Vo to swap between displaying your Ghoul publicly and keeping it private. It’s a bit clumsy and feels like you should have a little more of a handle on it alongside the rest of the customisation suite, where you still have a great deal of freedom to customise your Ghoul’s appearance, right down to the skin texture.
If that all becomes a bit too much, you will have the opportunity to revert from Ghoul-dom to being human. This can be done once for free, as Bethesda don’t really want people switching back and forth at the drop of a hat.
Still, it’s a rather attractive proposition, especially when considering the kinds of challenges that you will face in Fallout 76’s end game. There’s the recently released Gleaming Depths raid where the sequence of challenging boss fights could use a bit of added durability from your character build, for example, and there’s no doubt that radiation resistance will be handy at more than a few other instances across the irradiated wastelands.
Fallout 76 seems to be in a pretty good place right now. The lasting memory of this game for many will be of its rather rocky launch, but that’s more than six years ago now, and Bethesda has brought a lot of big updates into the mix, and introduced broader ideas, like MMO-style raids and map expansions. It’s not Fallout 5, of course, but similar to The Elder Scrolls Online, it can scratch some of that itch.
Oh man, I bet being a Ghoul is really itchy…
