Grabbed by the Ghoul-ies – Hands on with Fallout 76’s playable Ghouls

thesixthaxis.com:

Having skin is kind of overrated, don’t you think? Looking like a bad guy getting flayed after opening the Ark of the Covenant is definitely the look for the 2100s, and you will soon be able to prove that beauty is more than skin deep with Fallout 76’s playable Ghouls when they arrive in early 2025.

That’s right, with Ghouls being more popular than ever thanks to Walter Goggins’ star turn as a bounty hunting Ghoul in the Fallout TV series, you’ll soon be able to play as a Ghoul yourself in Fallout 76. But you aren’t born  with it, and it definitely doesn’t involve make up. No, you’ll have to undertake a quest to be all Ghoul-ified once you’re deep into this game – you need to have a level 50 character, to be precise.

It all starts when you pick up a radio transmission from a distressed man who’s just about survived and attack by some rather ghastly bandits, and should you follow up on the call track Leman down as he visits the human doctor, it quickly becomes clear that he’s not going to be long for this world. The only chance he has it to find a… different kind of doctor and scientist way up in the North East of the map. Maybe they someway, somehow have a solution?

Well, since they’re part of a secretive society of Ghouls, they might have a thought or two on how to handle lethal doses of radiation, and so their solution is to transform Leman into a Ghoul himself. Along the way you’re given some almost perfunctory decisions to make. Do you egg Leman on and encourage him to accept the transformation to join this small community of outcasts? And following that, will you more willingly choose to become a Ghoul yourself?

There’s a ton of reasons why you might want to. You lose none of the stats and skills that you have from before, but there’s now a whole new endgame progression to engage in with 30 new Special cards focussed on all the special traits and abilities of the Ghoul characters.

The biggest perk is that Ghouls are not only resistant to the radiation that caused