Wesley Yin-Poole
Guest
Walton Goggins is set to reprise his fan-favorite role as The Ghoul from the Fallout TV show in Fallout 76.
The Ghoul appears in Fallout 76 complete with Goggins' likeness and voice as part of the free Burning Springs expansion in December. Burning Springs expands the Fallout 76 map into Ohio, west of the Appalachian region (a fictionalized version of West Virginia and the surrounding areas) already in the game.
While not available as a playable character or companion, fans can encounter The Ghoul at ‘The Last Resort’ in hub area Highway Town, where he hosts new Bounty Hunting missions. Through rewards, players can even equip themselves with The Ghoul’s gun as seen in the show.
During a preview event attended by IGN, Bill LaCoste, production director on Fallout 76, and Jon Rush, creative director on Fallout 76, said Burning Springs is inspired by not only the Fallout TV show, but Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas.
“We all saw Season 1, right?” Rush said. “We saw where that ended up. Kyle MacLachlan's character staring out at New Vegas and then you've got the Deathclaw skull down on the ground. So once Season 1 wrapped up, we immediately started planning for the content we wanted to make for Season 2. Now, we didn't know exactly when Season 2 was going to come out, but we knew that we wanted to at least start planning that content. And then once we found out more about dates, start planning all the patches around that too.
“What we wanted to do with the new region was we wanted it to really remind folks of what they came to know and love in Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas. And so when we set out to make this new region, the three pillars that we gave to the team were, alright, it's got to have desert, Deathclaws, and raiders. And to me that captures the tone and the essence and the danger of those games. We wanted that reflected in our map expansion in Burning Springs.”
The Ghoul came into the equation naturally as the setting and the bounty hunting system were fleshed out, Rush continued.
“Okay, here's the new region: desert, Deathclaws, and raiders. That's the tone. What's going to be the hallmark feature for that new region or that update?" he said. "And so that was bounty hunting, right? That makes sense. And a barren wasteland like that, there's going to be a lot of nefarious folks running around. And so having a bounty hunting system would be a great add for players, something fun to do. It's also a feature that we had discussed doing for a little while as well, and we were just looking for the right time.
“Who better to host a bounty hunting feature than The Ghoul, right? Not just a ghoul, it's the Ghoul from the show. So we started talking about that, and Walton Goggins is a big fan, of course, of the franchise. He's a big fan of the games. And so it came up organically really quick. And we had folks on our side working on the script, folks on their side working on the dialogue script, and came together. And of course The Ghoul actually came out once Walton Goggins took the script and really made it his own, made those adjustments. It was kind of cool to see him go from Walton Goggins to The Ghoul like that. It was really awesome.”
The expectation is that Fallout 76 will see a flood of new players as a result of Fallout Season 2, which premieres on December 17, 2025. Burning Springs and The Ghoul’s arrival in-game early December is well-timed to capitalize on the show’s huge popularity.
One obvious question is, how does The Ghoul fit in the Fallout 76 timeline? It’s worth remembering where we are in the overall Fallout timeline: the TV show is set in the year 2296, after all the Fallout video games. Fallout 4 takes place in the year 2287, while Fallout: New Vegas is set in the year 2281, a full 15 years prior to the events of the show.
The Fallout 76 timeline, meanwhile, begins in 2102, on October 23, known as Reclamation Day. It is the earliest game in the Fallout franchise, set 25 years after the Great War of 2077, when nuclear bombs devastated the Earth.
We know from Season 1 of the Fallout TV show that The Ghoul has survived for over 200 years. Cooper Howard, the pre-war character who became The Ghoul, underwent ghoulification from the nuclear blast in 1955 and has lived through the subsequent two centuries. Fallout 76 is canon, which means we know The Ghoul was operating in Ohio during its timeline.
“76 is furthest back in time in the Fallout timeline,” Rush explained. “And the show is the furthest forward in time, and that's where we were introduced to The Ghoul on the Amazon series. Lucky for us, The Ghoul has preserved himself by through ghoulification. So The Ghoul existing in the 76 timeline makes sense. Although what he's doing in Ohio, or what I guess used to be Ohio, is still to be determined. I'm not one to question The Ghoul, I'm just going to do what The Ghoul says.”
So, can we expect Burning Springs to bring new information to the canon of the Fallout universe?
“Yes, absolutely,” Rush said. “We've never explored this part of the map, and so even just the small sliver of Ohio being added, that does influence the lore of Fallout as a whole. So yeah.”
LaCoste added: “as most people know, there's only a handful of references to Ohio throughout Fallout, so it's really great to have a little bit of a blank slate in a region that we can kind of establish some early lore for the game.”
The announcement of Goggins in Fallout 76 comes hot on the heels of his response to Pete Davidson’s prediction that fans will “turn” on him as they did with Pedro Pascal. “If this is my fate… Well… F*** it. I’m going to enjoy the F*** OUT OF IT,” he said.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].