Fallout 76 Ghoul hands-on - Bethesda’s next free update lets you ghoulify yourself

Become a walking corpse and unlock powerful perks

Fallout 76 / Bethesda

In the forthcoming Fallout 76 ghoul update, you can turn yourself into a walking corpse.

For the first time ever in a Fallout game (2001’s Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel aside), you’ll have the option of nixing your nose, sloughing off your skin, and mutating yourself into a ghoul.

When you hit level 50 in Bethesda’s free-to-play MMO, you’ll receive a distress signal. Give it a listen on your Pip-Boy and you’ll kick off a quest called Leap of Faith. This sees you visit a secret lab and encounter a radiation specialist called Parthenia, who has a novel way of curing radiation sickness - by turning you into a ghoul. 

Some body parts will drop off but hey, at least you won’t get sick anymore. “We didn’t take the easy way here,” says Bill LaCoste, senior producer at Bethesda Game Studios. 

“We didn’t just give you an outfit that made you look like a ghoul and let you run around in the Wasteland and not have factions be affected by you being a ghoul. We actually thought of this from the standpoint of, ‘if we are going to allow players to play as a ghoul, we want them to roleplay as a ghoul.’”

Fallout 76 / Bethesda

Bring Parthenia some irradiated ore from Emmett Mountain and she’ll create a special inhaler. This not only turns you into a ghoul, but should you regret your decision, back into a human too. 

“Some of our players have played thousands of hours, so locking them into this would have not really been a great idea,” says LaCoste, “especially if they didn’t end up wanting to play a ghoul forever. We think they probably will, but we wanted to provide players that option just in case, because isolating players into that path was not good.”

Take the plunge and you’ll enter a whole new irradiated world. Your first step is customizing your gross new body by choosing hairstyles, scars, makeup, and even how far your nose hole extends into your face.

In the early build I play, my ghoul resets my character to a default model, but LaCoste says he wants to implement a feature that takes your existing facial features into account during the ghoulification process.

Once you’re rendered freshly hideous, you’ll be invited into the ranks of an underground ghoul faction called the Revenants. They’ve got a base in the northeast called Radiant Hills that comes complete with a cameo from Dave the Ghoul (you might remember him from 2024’s Fallout Day broadcast), as well as a makeup chair that lets you disguise yourself in order to interact with some of the less ghoul-tolerant factions like the Brotherhood of Steel. 

Fallout 76 / Bethesda

But there’s more to the update than playing dress-up. Becoming a ghoul also unlocks a range of abilities unavailable to humans. The biggest is rad-resistance, which means you can now wade merrily through pools of glowing green waste, drink from toxic water sources, and feast on corpses.

Doing so not only heals you, but supercharges your abilities. For instance, resorting to cannibalism raises your feral meter, which massively boosts your hand-to-hand combat skills at the cost of shooting accuracy. While ghouls are no longer at the mercy of hunger or thirst, you may want to monitor your feral meter and keep it subdued with chems. 

It’s a brand new way to play, and comes with some important choices to make. For example, power armor loses its impact since it’s primarily used to negate radiation which, of course, ghouls aren’t affected by. This means you’ll have to give your loadouts a rethink.

“Anybody who currently runs a Bloody build,” says LaCoste, “is not going to be as powerful when they are as a ghoul, because they will not be technically low on health. You’re not going to be wanting to run a ghoul because you can’t really build up that radiation. Your radiation is actually giving you health, so you would never be at the damage levels you need to be with a Bloody build.”

Fallout 76 / Bethesda

Ghouls also have 30 new perk cards - 28 regular and two legendary. The first new legendary perk is Action Diet, where kills heal HP and reduce how feral you are. The second is Feral Rage, which decreases the cost of Glow perk abilities when feral. However, if you’ve got your favorite perks locked in already, you can still use the full range of human perks in addition to the ghoul ones.

That’s not everything in the update. Alongside the option to ghoulify yourself comes a spectator camera so you can keep tabs on your team when you inevitably die, contextual ping system for better communication (this helps with directing party members during multi-stage boss fights), player titles, and improved rendering adding more vibrancy and contrast to the visuals across the entire game. 

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With 50 patches and 20 major updates since Fallout 76’s launch in 2018, Fallout 76: Ghoul has the potential to be one of the most impactful. Playing as a radiation-impervious deviant with unique perks adds an all-new way to play. Best of all, if you get cold feet, you can reverse your decision.

LaCoste is more than happy to let players pick their own course. “We wanted to give people the overall experience of what it’s like to be a ghoul in the Wasteland, and I think we’ve delivered on that really well. We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback already from what people have seen and played. So I think we’ve hit the nail on the head.”

Fallout 76: Ghoul is a free update scheduled for release in early 2025.