If you’ve ever entered the Dark Zone in The Division, you’ll know how cruel and merciless online players can be in a massive multiplayer PvP environment.

Needless to say, fans of Fallout, a game that has traditionally been the complete opposite – a massive single player, RPG environment – were initially concerned when news broke that the latest addition to the Fallout franchise, would take the new form of PvP.

Especially, given that it was also announced at E3 not long ago that players in Fallout 76 could use nukes.

Oh yes. Players will be able to collect codes and infiltrate nuclear silos throughout West Virginia and use the missiles as they see fit, including on each other.

Not those adorable little Fatboy mini nukes…nuclear silos. ICBMs. That’s pretty terrifying. It’s bad enough when someone robs you of everything you own in The Division…but to have your settlement utterly vaporized by a particularly vindictive player has got to be worse. However, an interview with a Bethesda executive reveals that other players will be far more dangerous than the nukes.

The nuke mechanic serves a twofold purpose. It’s used to essentially level up the targeted area of a map, since whichever area you nuke will spawn powerful, irradiated enemies that drop upgraded loot. You can also use it to nuke another player’s base, but not reliably.

Pete Hines, VP of marketing at Bethesda Softworks, told Swedish gaming outlet FZ, that nukes can only be launched at specific areas of the map. Not at individual players.

“You can’t target an individual,” he said. “I can’t see you running around the map and go oh no I wanna nuke that guy.”

If a player happens to be in the blast radius of a nuke, they’ll be notified in advance so they can escape. The nukes in Fallout 76 primarily exist to create end-game encounters and they have little to no use as a PvP mechanic. However, Hines said that hostile players will still be an integral part of the experience. Fallout 76 won’t have any NPCs, which means anyone you talk, trade, quest, and fight with will be another human being.

“I’ve had people ask me like, well what happens when I’m wandering through the world and I get jumped by four other players?” Hines told FZ. “Well, what happens in Fallout 4 when you’re wandering through the world and you get jumped by four raiders or ten or whatever the number is? That stuff happens.”

Hines assured players that there will be mechanics in place to prevent abuse, but West Virginia is going to be a dangerous place.

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