The official Fortnite Twitter account has teased an upcoming Fallout collaboration. By most accounts, more Fallout is a good thing, but for Fallout 76 players, it’s a bittersweet reminder of the battle royale mode their game lost years ago.
Fortnite has seen crossover events with a massive roster of huge franchises, including heavy-hitters like Star Wars and Stranger Things. Now, thanks in part, I’m sure, to the success of Amazon’s Fallout TV Show, the game is getting a Fallout crossover that will undoubtedly see new mechanics based on the Fallout universe introduced to Fortnite for a few weeks alongside skins players must earn during that season if they want to keep them forever.
Fallout in Fortnite isn’t what Fallout 76 players want
Fallout skins in Fortnite aren’t what all Fallout fans want, though. You see, Fallout 76 had a battle royale mode once called Nuclear Winter. When it was initially released, I remember it feeling fairly out of place because the premise was pretty weak, but the gameplay, rewards, and lore were engrossing.
At the time of writing, others who remember and played the game mode, and even those who jumped into the game after it was closed and have only seen screenshots or videos of it, are lightly lamenting its loss and wondering if there’s any space for it to return.
Creator Frederick on Twitter points out the fun and flaws of Fallout 76‘s Nuclear Winter. “It was a weird and unique experiment that re-invented the way you thought about the game’s systems and world. It was also bad, lol.”
I can’t deny that this game mode was bad, but not for the reasons you might think. As it does for most franchises, Battle Royale works for Fallout, but Nuclear Winter didn’t work for Fallout 76 because it was implemented very quickly. It felt very much like Bethesda saw Fortnite‘s success, decided it wanted a piece of it, and threw out a battle royale mode for its online Fallout game.
Fallout 76 uses card-based Perks that you unlock more of as you level up your character. Nuclear Winter broke this system and contained many weapons that broke it even further. Mercifully, weapons and Perks from the game mode became locked to it, so you couldn’t level up a character in the battle royale mode and then dominate public survival servers.
The rewards I loved the most were Holotapes. It’s difficult to know how many of these there were, but I believe there were dozens scattered around the Vault that acted as the lobby for the 52-player game mode. As you leveled up, you could access more rooms and find more Holotapes, telling the story of a supercomputer called ZAX.
The computer was left in charge of Vault 51 to create fictional scenarios and test humanity’s tribalism to its limits. By the end of the experiment, it had only succeeded in forcing Vault Dwellers to split and war with each other. Learning about this in Fallout 76 was fascinating and a real treat while Nuclear Winter was live.
Perhaps because of this division of progression, Nuclear Winter‘s player base dwindled fairly quickly until Bethesda deemed it necessary to shut the game mode down entirely in 2021. Some players in Fallout 76 still have rewards from the game mode on their save files today as a memory of what was a brief and tumultuous time for the game.
