Bethesda will launch a beta for Fallout 76

Bethesda Game Studios will hold a large-scale beta test for its Fallout 76 multiplayer game before its November 14 release.

Todd Howard, head of Bethesda Game Studios, said at the company’s showcase event at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) trade show in Los Angeles that the beta will help the company test various single-player and multiplayer systems, as the game has a mode where you can play with dozens of other survivors of the nuclear apocalypse.

“I read it on the internet that our games have a few bugs,” Howard joked onstage, making fun of Bethesda’s reputation for good but often buggy games.

Fallout 76 is the name of Vault-tec vault that was the first to open in the wake of the nuclear war. Survivors go out to reclaim the world, and there are a lot of things they can do together — and a lot of ways they can fight. Among the things they can do: acquire launch codes for nuclear missiles and launch them at each other. Imagine how much fun that would be in the beta test, which Howard called the “break-it early test application.”

Correction, 9:12 p.m. Pacific: This has been corrected to show the beta comes out before the November 14 release date.