The Fallout 76 beta has been announced on the official Bethesda forums to be happening sometime in October, giving us a better timeframe on when the game will be getting its first test cycle. The game itself will be releasing in November, so that might not give Bethesda much time to fix it.
Fallout 76 is the first Fallout game to get a beta due to its gameplay; whereas all of the other Fallout games were single player, Fallout 76 is the first multiplayer Fallout game, with players of Vault 76 exploring the post-apocalyptic wilderness of West Virginia. The game was announced at E3 to be getting a beta before release, and now we finally have a release window.
While there’s not a specific date, we do know that with the Fallout 76 beta coming out sometime in October we don’t have much time left to go before we can start playing it. However, there’s a stipulation: you’ll only be able to play the beta if you pre-ordered the game from a participating retailer, and it won’t have very much content, mainly being intended as a server test.
That means that you’ll have to pre-order the game from the Bethesda store, or other places like GameStop and Amazon. You’ll then get a code that you can then enter on a Bethesda.net account in order to enter the code and get into the beta. Once that happens you’ll be able to dive into the beta when it becomes available, though the Xbox version will come first.
Considering how popular the Fallout franchise is, and how much hype Fallout 76 got around it, it’s a good idea for Bethesda to try and test out and see if their servers can handle the undoubtedly huge influx of players.
While the game will likely still have a lot of the various hilarious bugs that Bethesda games are normally known for, hopefully the server test for the Fallout 76 beta will prevent what will be the biggest problem for any multiplayer game.
