Following the Nuclear trailer for Fallout 76 (seen below), many people are pumped up about the very real possibility at throwing nuclear missiles at other players. Some aren’t so jazzed about it though.
Many concerns have been voiced, and not without reason- being griefed by a stacked out player dropping nukes on you isn’t fun (I played Dota 2 you know) and the trailer presents it as something that could happen on a semi-regular basis.
Bethesda has come out to address the issue with their marketing VP Pete Hines responding: “Getting the ability to launch a nuke is not easy. You have to get a number of different code pieces so you have one full code. You also have to get to the place where you enter that code, which is obviously not just ‘open the doors and walk right in.’ Then you target a place on the map. You can’t target an individual.”
Which sort of omits the fact that you could, probably, target their hidey-hole. And I don’t think packing up your stuff is going to be so easy as to get out of the way of an incoming nuclear explosion and the trailers do seem to suggest quite a big area of devastation. So while you may be able to avoid the ‘nuke, this protection might be just for you only.
The areas affected by the blast should, in theory, provoke a gold-rush of players wanting to get rare resources out of it, but the craters last for only a limited time (how that is possible with the half-life of Uranium being 4.5 billion years is beyond me), so you’ll have to hurry.
Additionally information about anti-griefing systems have been circulating. Players bullying others are supposed to get stuck with a Wanted marker, rewarding others for taking them down. How well this is going to work is entirely up in the air though.