During its E3 press conference last week, Bethesda announced a number of new additions and updates coming to Fallout 76 as well as a free trial period for the game that is set to end today. If getting a chance to try the game out for free wasn't enough, Bethesda revealed its Nuclear Winter mode, the game's own take on the battle royale genre. While the mode was considered to be a "beta sneak-peek" during the trial period, it doesn't look like battle royale and Fallout will be parting ways anytime soon.

Thanks to the positive reception Fallout 76's Nuclear Winter has received since the start of the free trial period, Bethesda has announced it's decided the battle royale mode will remain online indefinitely. In Nuclear Winter, 52 players are forced to fight for the right to be named Overseer of Vault 51. Players are able to use a variety of well known items and weapons commonly seen in the Fallout wasteland, such as Power Armor and turrets. Another feature added is base-building, which is similar to how Epic Games' Fortnite lets players build but with a Fallout aesthetic.

It's been well documented that Bethesda's first attempt at making a live-service, online-only Fallout game didn't go as well as planned. Before it even released, Game Director Todd Howard admitted he was aware of the problems with Fallout 76. After a shaky launch and subsequent months of "damage control," in the form of bug fixes, massive patches that both solved and created new issues, and miscommunication of pre-order bonuses, things finally look to have steered in the right direction for Bethesda.

With those myriad of issues taken care off, the team can now focus on its upcoming Wastelanders update for Fallout 76, which is set to launch later this year. The two biggest additions coming with the update include new main quest storylines and NPCs being added into the wasteland world of West Virginia. Currently, players are only able to talk to robots and electronic devices in the open world, and it appears Bethesda has been listening to community feedback closely with the upcoming changes. As promised, the Wastelanders update, as well as all other content that follows, will be available at no additional cost.

Even though initial player reception and critical reviews for the game weren't what it intended, Bethesda has done a good job at winning back players who may have left the world of Fallout 76 early on as well as at attracting a new audience that may have been waiting for the game's issues to be fixed. If the extension of Nuclear Winter mode is any indicator, then Bethesda's plans to support Fallout 76 "forever" look more appealing than they did a few months ago.

Fallout 76 is available now on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.

Source: GameSpot