When Fallout 76 arrives on PC and consoles it will reportedly break new grounds for the hugely popular RPG franchise. Leaks suggest that the game will have a focus on multiplayer and building and the game is also expected to be a prequel rather than a direct follow-on to the events of Fallout 4. However, during the Microsoft press conference at E3 2018, Bethesda revealed that this isn't the only big difference between Fallout 76 and its predecessors.

During the Microsoft E3 2018 presser, Todd Howard, the director and executive producer at Bethesda Game Studios, took to the stage to present a brand new Fallout 76 trailer. That's not all though as the famed video game developer also revealed another tidbit: Fallout 76 will be four times larger than Fallout 4. Given that Fallout 4 was already a pretty large game (its map size is an estimated 3.82 square miles or 9.90 square kilometers), that makes Fallout 76 a real monster of a game.

On the one hand, this may be incredibly daunting. The game is reportedly set in West Virginia and with the state including a huge amount of landmarks (including the New River Gorge Bridge and Monongahela National Forest) that means that players will spend a lot of their time exploring. It also means that there is a significant risk that there won't be enough entertaining things to do and activities on the journey from A to B.

But on the other hand, it means that there will hopefully be a huge amount of things to discover. Fallout 76 is focused on Vault 76, which has fascinating lore that has been teased by Bethesda in the past. But despite these teasers, very little is known about the Vault meaning that players will be especially eager to explore the game's setting and find out more about what went down in the location. The ginormous size of the game will potentially allow many opportunities for lore learning, even if players' thumbs may ache from holding down the analog sticks as they travel all over the map.

There will be questions about how Vault 76 is connected to the newer games too. Will there be familiar characters from Fallout 4? What new sorts of adventures will players be able to go on in this game world that precedes the other Fallout games that people have played? There are a lot of possibilities there, made possible by the size of the game as Bethesda is no longer constrained to a small map if it wants to tell an epic sort of story. Judging by the reaction from fans on social media, many Fallout fans are very excited by that indeed.

Fallout 76 is in development for PC, PS4, and Xbox One. A release date has now yet been announced.