Fallout 76 is adding a new survival mode

It looks like Fallout 76's player community finally has some new material to look forward to after December and January updates focused mostly on patches fixing quests, PC implementation, and quality of life concerns. In yesterday's Inside the Vault update, we finally got a preliminary glimpse of what could be in store for the future of last year's troubled release.

Most of the newsletter post details an upcoming game mode called Survival, where players can 'engage in even more demanding, high-stakes, and deadly adventures".  Survival will enter the game (tentatively) in March, with more features and updates added over time. Survival mode will be a separate game type from the standard 'Adventure' mode, but Bethesda states that all progress, equipment and such on a given character will be persistent no matter which mode you play in. "All your progress from Adventure mode will travel with you, and anything that affects your character in one game mode will also affect them in the other."

One seemingly prominent focus of Survival mode is to give greater weight to the PVP mechanics of the game, a weakness I mentioned in my review. In the base game, the only thing lost upon death are material and junk items, but in Survival mode, aid or other items may also be lost and the winner will earn greater Cap rewards as well. While the update is light on non-PVP related adjustments, it does state that players will only be able to respawn at their C.A.M.P or Vault 76 after death as an example of one of its more punishing mechanics. The post also mentions an upcoming patch that will seek to snuff out exploits and streamline some vendor interactions, state as a tag that states whether a player already knows an available recipe in the vendor window. 

Offering up a PVP-focused mode is an interesting first swing at post-launch support outside of fixing performance issues and stability improvements, but it does address a perceived weakness of the original launch, so it's somewhat exciting to see a hopeful shift to a more steady balance of patches and content support from here on forward. Hopefully one of the game's many inaccessible Vaults dotted across the map will begin to creak open soon after.