After installing Fallout 76’s Skyline Valley expansion, the first thing you see when you arrive at the new map area of Shenandoah is the sky.
It’s been tinted a deep red, almost reminiscent of the clouds over the infamous Sierra Madre from Fallout: New Vegas, thanks to a mysterious and persistent storm. While this storm doesn’t seem quite as deadly, its epicenter – hanging directly over the ruined estate in the heart of Shenandoah, which helps to immediately establish the expansion’s main story arc – is Vault 63, the door of which you may have spotted abandoned near The Wayward.
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Most of the events of Skyline Valley revolve around this crypt, which is full of ghouls, some of which are regular ghouls, and some of which are new variants you’ve never seen before. The second group is the “Lost Ones,” who are full of electricity and have a very cool black-and-blue aesthetic. A bit like the Luminaries, most are feral, but – as always – there are exceptions.
One of these people is Hugo Stolz, the caretaker of No. 63, which you’ll find sitting underneath the manor house. Once you get there, he’ll ask for your help in resolving a problem with the vault. In other words, calming the storm. From what I’ve played, a lot of effort has been put into the backstory of Stolz and his family, and they all play key roles in the story.
I don’t want to spoil too much, but the Overseer’s actions – I can best describe him as a bit like the love child of NV’s Jason Bright and Fallout 3’s Dr. Braun; a blend of spiritual mystery and cold calculation – and his complicated relationship with his daughter Audrey feel like they must be unravelled to get to the bottom of what’s going on. There are also some giant mech robot brains outside the observatory where Audrey lives, which are somehow related to the story, although they were just abandoned wrecks when I played this expansion.
While the denizens of Number 63 may dominate many of the 12 new missions, they’re not the most important to Skyline Valley. In one mission, for example, I also encountered a timid pre-war park ranger who needed help getting some erratic visitors out of his bunker. Ideally, the 20 points of interest that make up the area—roughly the same size as one of the base game’s areas, located south of all the points of interest—would also make for some interesting encounters that aren’t explicitly tied to the main quest, though I didn’t get a chance to check them out properly.
Interestingly, when I asked Fallout 76 lead producer Bill Lacoste if there were any aspects of the DLC that he’d flag for people to “not miss,” he highlighted the new boss fight—although he didn’t want to reveal too much for those who haven’t yet experienced it through Skyline Valley’s public beta on PC. “It has a lot of mechanics that are a little different than some of the other bosses in the game,” he said. “It’s definitely very different from Earle. [Williams]It’s a little different from the Burning Beast Queen. [though] “There may be some similarities with the latter.”
When I wasn’t completing quests, I was joining a group of companions to try out Skyline Valley’s new activity, Dangerous Pastimes. Based around charging up makeshift lightning rods (in keeping with the overall storm theme, naturally), the activity offers a nice twist on the formula, giving you the chance to do battle with the hostile factions that make up the different variations of The Lost.
Some of the Lost behave like regular feral ghouls, and the berserker types explode when electrocuted, making them pretty deadly to melee characters without heavy armor. There are also armored officers who carry guns and fight like regular ranged human enemies–these are the toughest new enemies, in my opinion–as well as heavy champions in power armor with big guns. Fighting the Lost feels pretty different as a result; you’re not just fighting another group of standard feral creatures in a superhero.
That being said, the campaign does look like a pretty standard “shoot waves of these guys/collect items and add them to your inventory/power up X by killing a certain number of these things while you wait for the timer to count down” kind of activity, with a giant hermit crab as the final boss. So if you’ve never had much fun with this kind of game, it probably won’t do you much good. But at the end of the day, MMOs are going to be MMOs.
While I didn’t spend too much time looking for a good place to camp, the dense, in places scorched forests and hills of the Shenandoah I saw would definitely make for a pretty backdrop for the home you choose. The whole storm thing might make stargazing a little difficult, though.
Whatever you end up doing under that sky, Skyrim is definitely worth a visit—and its developers are optimistic that there’s plenty of fun to be had among its trees and haunted basements for both seasoned veterans and Appalachian novices alike.
The fact that Fallout 76 is my least-played entry in the series to date is a pretty strong argument for the fact that after experiencing Skyrim, I’m even more eager to dig deeper into it so I can head straight to Shenandoah once the update is released. Sometimes you just can’t resist the call of the wasteland, especially when there are so many lost things to find beneath stormy skies.
Fallout 76’s Skyrim expansion is released today (June 12), with the game going offline for deployment at 3pm BST / 10am ET / 7am PT.
