[*]You can play solo, but at launch there will be no private maps. They fully believe in the idea of sharing a world with other players for Fallout 76.
[*]There is a main story, there are plenty of quests, but they want this game to be about what you want to do on any given day. Maybe you want to explore a new region, or maybe you want to go hunt down that last rare component for a crafting project. Maybe you want to kill a creature for its drops, or maybe you want to set up a new C.A.M.P.
[*]Events! An example given was a horde of super mutants attacking a farm. You get notified and can swoop in to save the day, and they want you to meet other players doing the same thing. You don't know what's going to happen, and they're okay with that. An example given was "maybe you see ten Yao Guai come in because somebody trained them in from across the map". Animal Friend, ahoy!
[*]In addition to the C.A.M.P.s you can build anywhere, there are also public workshops that must be claimed. These are specific locations that you have to clear out, and once you take them there could be events that spawn. But they can also contain useful crafting resources: An example is a mine that, once claimed, allows you to get a regular income of lead ore. Lead = bullets. Being able to make your own bullets is very valuable in Fallout, and potentially to other players.
[*]Your C.A.M.P is your portable, build-anywhere settlement. They're smaller than a full settlement, but can be placed anywhere on the map. If you join a new game, your C.A.M.P will automatically be where you left it. If by some miracle two people have their camps in the exact same spot (they stress this is very unlikely due to a player limit of 20-30 and an enormous map), it will be saved as a blueprint and you can put it down anywhere you want.
[*]Crafting is a big part of the game. You'll be able to craft guns, mods, ammo, food, armor, power armor, etc. Everything that you could craft in Fallout 4, and way more. They want you hunting down rare materials to craft that next big item.
[*]Talking about how they want survival elements to be a big part of the game, but never tedious or boring: "I have to brush my teeth every day, or they'll rot out of my head. I do NOT want to do that in a video game. I just don't care!"
[*]You have to eat and drink to survive. Anecdote: Somebody stumbled into a heard of cats and said they'd never been happier to see cats because it meant they could eat!
[*]Food rots over time, and your gear degrades and must be repaired.
[*]Rads are different, and cause mutations. The higher your rad count, the greater the odds that you'll get a mutation. They're like traits from Fallout 2, where you get a buff to one thing, and a penalty to something else. They can be cured if you don't like them, and in the late-game you can become permanently mutated if there's one you really like. Most mutations are stat or gameplay changes, but some are visual.
[*]You will be able to sell items you craft to other players. Crafting is a big part of the game and they want crafting specialization to be worthwhile and powerful. You can spec into cooking and make valuable food that other players might be willing to pay for.
[*]Perk cards completely replace the perk chart from Fallout 4. Every single time you level up, you take a new perk card. Perk cards are divided among the primary SPECIAL attributes, and you can have a limited number active at one time. You can swap your active cards out whenever you want, and can share them with other players in your group. This incentivizes coordination in groups, where you can specialize to work well when grouped up.
[*]One person in your group might be focused on survival stuff like crafting and cooking, somebody might be geared up for combat, another might be specced into building great defenses for your settlement, and the last might be built as a medic to heal other players up.
[*]For crafting food, you find recipes all over the world to unlock new stuff to make. There are "orders of magnitude" more recipes in 76 than Fallout 4, and a lot of the items you craft are +/-. One food might make you more susceptible to disease, but give you a huge health buff.
[*]They are exploring the idea of letting you set up a robot vendor in some kind of a hub area, so you can sell items to other players who visit the hub. This is not confirmed, they're still exploring it, but he reiterates that it's a live game and that they're thinking long-term.
[*]There are anti-griefing measures in place, they don't want the game to be too chaotic. Aggressive players will get a wanted level, and the penalty for death is only respawning at a nearby location.
[*]There are different ways to communicate with other players, including voice chat, an emote wheel, and even a photo mode that came out of a game jam.
[*]They want to know when to control the player, but more importantly, when NOT to control the player. They want this to feel like a Fallout game. The other players in the game world a system they do not control, and they will not shy away from it. They embrace it. They said when players collide it might be messy for a bit, but they have levers in place to solve problems. They'd rather do that than play it safe. They want to try this, they can make adjustments later if they want to.
[*]24-32 players at once. It was a challenge deciding on how many players would be in the game, and how frequently they wanted players to bump into each other. They want meeting another player to feel special, so they didn't want it to be too frequent.
[*]Players will be visible on the map at all times, in their words, for good or ill. They want you to be able to see other players doing an event or a quest, and then go along to help them, or maybe even to attack them (though again, there are anti-griefing measures in place that they will tune as the game goes on).
[*]You can trade with other players that you meet.
[*]You can immediately join your friends in their session or invite them to yours.
[*]Party size is currently 4, though that is easily adjustable. They're aiming for 4-person co-op gameplay, but they also want to have bigger conflicts like 12v12 deathmatch.
[*]They're always adding more content to the game. Right now they're working on the aforementioned team deathmatch mode for players who may complete every quest and want something to do.
[*]Nukes nukes nukes. Nukes are endgame content that require you to play through the game's story and complete repeatable quests to find the launch codes. The story there is that the Scorchbeasts (the giant bats) are crawling up out of the ground, and you can seal the fissures with nuclear strikes. They're hard to access and will not be used constantly by tons of players.
[*]Nukes are NOT A GRIEFING DEVICE. Their function is to create high-level areas wherever you want on the map, and you are actively incentivized to do this in non-populated areas, because you want to be the first one in there to plunder them. If you stay too long, you die!
[*]The Legendary item system returns, and places you nuke are excellent places to farm legendary items. Eventually, the nuked area will return to its pre-nuke state. Depending on where you nuke, you'll find different things inhabiting the area, because areas have different flora and fauna.
[*]You can nuke other players. Todd is very excited to see what people do with the nukes, because they just don't know what's going to happen.
[*]If your settlement is nuked, you can easily repair the damage. Again, nukes are NOT A GRIEFING DEVICE.