Bethesda has committed to years of additional updates to Fallout 76, and those updates are not small additions to the popular multiplayer game. Following updates like Gone Fission and the recent Infestations update, the team behind the MMO-lite are working on some major story updates for the future.

Over the Summer Games Fest season, production director Bill LaCoste and creative director Jon Rush teased the game’s future in multiple interviews with multiple outlets. Alongside the game’s story updates, the duo also confirmed that pets will turn into actual companions in the future, a mechanic that we reported on last month.

‘It adventures with you, it explores with you, it quests with you, it’ll fight for you,” Rush told MMORPG, teasing that the update will launch before the end of the year. “You can tell it to stay, you can tell it to come, you can tell it to speak, you can tell it to guard, you can tell it to kill. It has a levelling system. Your camp pet is now your pet… They’re gonna go doggone wild.”

To MMORPG, Rush teased that there are additional story components in the works, although players might not receive any major story additions in 2026. In a separate interview with GamesRadar, the two leads explained that they are “making new features and crafting new stories” that adhere to the feeling of a mainline Fallout game.

With the new stories, and any feature, coming to Fallout 76, LaCoste explained that there’s a hyper-focus on the feeling the series is supposed to give players. “It’s about getting that Fallout feel right,” he said. “We’re looking for a balance between these darker, more serious tones and more levity, humorous moments. It’s the balance of these aspects wrapped under a blanket of retro-futuristic Americana that makes Fallout – that’s the Fallout sweet spot! It’s echoed in the games and in the show, and that’s where the stories are most effective.”

This also means that every story will be told through the lens of Americana. “I don’t know if there will ever be an expansion beyond America,” LaCoste said, “but I think there’s a lot of importance in keeping it [isolated] that way – so that players can think about what is happening around the world and create their own stories, which the modding community can take advantage of too!”

While not confirmed, it’s also hinted that some of these new stories could even take place in the game’s existing maps of Appalachia or Burning Springs. Rush explains that the hope is to keep “thickening th experience of Fallout 76”, something they started with fishing and continued with Infestations.

“Fishing did exactly that. ‘Anywhere you can swim, you can fish!’ is something you probably heard us say last year – that tells me, as a player, that I should be exploring the whole map again, just to see what kind of stuff can be pulled out of the water,” he said. “In many ways, that fishing feature inspired what future features will look like, in that they are designed to thicken and enrich that experience.”