Today, the 17th of July, was “World Emoji Day”. To mark the occasion, Bethesda tweeted a gif of the Fallout 76 Emote Wheel, which will feature in the studio’s upcoming post-apocalyptic title. The wheel is a new addition to the Fallout series, coming as part of the new suite of multiplayer features.

The Fallout 76 Emote Wheel

The Fallout 76 Emote system seems fairly similar to many emote systems featured in other multiplayer titles. Rather than keying emotes to a particular button-press, as games like Destiny have done, Fallout 76 features a wheel which allows players to select from up to twelve different emotes.

The emote wheel clip was accompanied by a player character giving an exaggerated thumbs-up; one of the available emotes. Each of the emotes on the wheel was represented by a symbol, suggesting its meaning; a flashing heart, a thumbs-down, a wave, and so forth. It’s unknown if the twelve emotes featured in the Fallout 76 trailer is the extent of the game’s emotes. Other games with emote systems have often included lots of emote options, allowing players to have a number of different emotes active at a time. It could be that Fallout 76 will allow players to assign emotes to the wheel. The game does plan to implement cosmetic micro-transactions in order to fund DLC development (making all DLC for the game free); emotes would be an obvious thing to sell as a cosmetic micro-transaction.

Players should be able to get their first look at the Fallout 76 Emote Wheel when the public beta starts. As of yet, Bethesda has not revealed the start date of that beta; although they have revealed that it will start one week earlier on Xbox. Of course, micro-transactions may well not be active during the public beta, so the full range of emotes (if they are included as micro-transaction products), may not be visible until the full release on November 14th.