Walton Goggins is coming to Fallout 76: "We don't really explain why he's there"

That bounty hunting feature will drop in a big new update, Burning Springs, which will also add a new region to the north-west area of the map.

This new region, Ohio, has been inspired by Fallout 3 and New Vegas, to make sure it thematically resonates with the vibe of Fallout season 2.

One of the key points of interest in this new region is Highway Town, where you’ll find The Ghoul doing some shady business in a bar called The Last Resort. He has a huge stack of bounties to hunt, and you’re gonna help him do exactly that.

If you’re on the Fallout 76 private test server, you’ll be able to test out this cool new feature from 2nd October. The rest of us will have to wait until December 2025.

To get ahead of the game on this one, Radio Times Gaming travelled to New York City to chat with two of the key developers of Fallout 76 about this exciting new development. So, how did they end up getting The Ghoul himself?

Fallout 76 creative director Jonathan Rush told us: “So, it kind of happened organically. You know, with the new region, we wanted to figure out what the tentpole feature of the new update would be, and something that captured the spirit of that region and also the broader strokes of player feedback came to be bounty hunting, right?

“And so, who better to host a bounty hunting feature than Walton Goggins? As The Ghoul. I mean, there's nothing better. So yeah, Walton Goggins, of course, being a big fan of Fallout, being a big fan of the games, this was a very, very easy fit to have this character be in this update.

“It was great getting the script written out. There were some writers on our side and a writer on the show side, and they were collaborating there and getting the script into a good place. And, of course, that all comes together once Walton Goggins has that, as like a starting point, and he then really crafts that into his own character, which is The Ghoul.”

What was it like, then, actually seeing Goggins in the booth delivering lines as The Ghoul? “It's amazing,” Rush admitted. “It was amazing watching him record these lines. I found it just astonishing, seeing how quickly he could just transform into The Ghoul, and you're not hearing Walton Goggins anymore. You're hearing The Ghoul. To me, that was just magical.”

Jumping into the game ourselves, we tried to exhaust the dialogue options with The Ghoul to see what has brought him to Appalachia. After some probing, he did obliquely refer to a bounty that he followed out here, but he doesn’t get into details.

“We don't really explain why he's there,” Rush told us. “He's simply there being The Ghoul. He's The Ghoul, as we would expect. He's The Ghoul, doing something that The Ghoul would do, with bounty hunting.

“And so, taking it even further than that for this patch, for this update, didn't really seem wholly necessary. That's not to say that, perhaps, down the road, we learn more, or maybe we don't. But that's part of, I think, the allure, it's the mystery of The Ghoul.

During our couple of hours of playtime with the new update, the bounty system revolving around The Ghoul proved to be very playable and enjoyable indeed.

There are two different types of bounties you can pick up from The Ghoul — there are smaller ‘grunt hunts’ that you could happily handle on your own, and there are larger ‘head hunts’ that function more like raid battles, with other online players joining you to take on a more powerful enemy as a group.

In both of these bounty types, there was a lot of humour to be found in the gameplay. The first grunt hunt we took on was just a scientist wandering around (very Fallout season 1 vibes), who didn’t put up much of a fight. This, in itself, was quite comical as we turned our very well-armed level 300 characters against him.

One of the most memorable head hunts that we faced featured a very powerful old lady in a suit of souped up power armour. This was much trickier, even with a whole group of level 300 players. It’s a very good sign that, every time someone started a head hunt, I immediately wanted to drop what I was doing and join in with the fun.

Certainly, The Ghoul feels right at home in Fallout 76, and it makes sense in the Fallout timeline that he would be alive and active at this point in the overarching story. It’s easy to imagine players new and old flocking to this feature once it drops in December. Bring it on!

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