Fallout 76 added Bigfoot to events and everyone wants to kill him dead

Fallout 76 is an interesting game because it’s the only Fallout to be properly multiplayer; the whole point is that you and a whole Vault’s worth of rascals are exploring, trading, fighting, and rebuilding Appalachia in the post-apocalypse. Of all of Fallout 76’s features, Events are one of the more social parts of the game. Something will trigger on the map — bounty hunting a rude outlaw, defending a settlement from waves of Super Mutants, saving a lovely cow from cultists — and players head over to clear the task and earn rewards.

Bethesda has returned to Events in the latest cryptid-themed update, the Backwoods. On one hand, it’s pretty nice to have an excuse to check out more of the map and travel around to earn rewards. On the other hand, I’ve made enemies with Bigfoot and now I’m scanning the horizon after every victory, looking for his big dumb ass. That’s not the thing you’d expect from a Fallout game, so let me explain.

The Backwoods update overhauled Events, bringing old ones up to date with better rewards and more experience. Bethesda continued an irritating trend from Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, where all of the stuff from the original Fallouts carried over, despite improbable timelines and geographies. So, there are the aforementioned Super Mutants, and everyone’s using caps as currency, and the Brotherhood is there. What’s very interesting is that Appalachia has something that other Fallout games don’t: cryptids. While you play Fallout 4, I’m out here communing with the Mothman. We are not the same.With the Backwoods update, every event has a chance for an uninvited boss to lumber in at the end of the event. When I was doing a Most Wanted Event, which has players go to a theme park and play out a Western fantasy of robbing banks and protecting a wagon full of stolen goods (which are, in fact, tickets taken from cardboard standouts) from cowboy robots. It’s all very charming, but at the end of the event — a Storm Goliath, a massive building-sized mech from Skyline Valley - lumbered in. And he wasn’t even wearing a cowboy hat, which is a missed opportunity.

But no boss is more alluring than Bigfoot. Bigfoot is guaranteed to drop a four-star piece of armor or a weapon, which is the best gear in the game. Here’s how it works: You do an event, you wait for a notice that something is emerging from the forest, and then everyone there piles on Bigfoot to beat his ass like he owes us all money. If you don’t kill him within five minutes, he lumbers back to the forest. I have never seen this because public servers are carving this cryptid up like a turkey; he’s lucky if he survives two minutes, let alone five.

This was already kind of a phenomenon with high-level events, like the Head Hunts in Burning Springs. Starting a Head Hunt will instantly summon at least ten players to your event, all of whom are decked out in endgame gear. Now, with the Backwoods update, every event is a Head Hunt, because everyone wants to kill Bigfoot.

There are other additions with the Backwoods update: a new season pass, quality of life changes, and so on, but none of them are nearly as memorable as the big man himself. I’ve been enjoying Fallout 76 with the gang, and the new update is an excuse for us to all hang out in Discord, lazily swapping between events, just shooting the shit while shooting, uh, Bigfoot. It’s not a marquee update like the new zones of Burning Springs, Skyline Valley, or Atlantic City, but it gets why Fallout 76 is fun as a multiplayer game, and makes some solid corrections to fix outdated mechanics.