The Ghoul Finally Joins Fallout 76, Walton Goggins' Dialogue is Perfect

Since it first aired back in 2024, The Ghoul from Fallout season one has been the talk of the town and it seems as though Bethesda is not done with him just yet.

Appearing in Prime Video’s Fallout television adaptation and portrayed by Walton Goggins, Cooper Howard, most commonly known as The Ghoul, quickly became one of viewer’s favourite characters.

Once a Hollywood actor and Vault-Tec ambassador before the war began, Howard mutated into a ghoul after the effects of the bomb’s radiation and now makes a living in the wasteland as a legendary gunslinger and bounty hunter.

Despite initially getting off on the wrong foot, The Ghoul teams up with Fallout’s Lucy and in the second season, he will be accompanying her to New Vegas to discover the truth behind her father’s disappearance.

With Goggin’s Ghoul becoming such an iconic character, it is no wonder that Bethesda wanted to find a way to capitalise on his popularity.

As a result, The Ghoul has now made his way to Fallout 76.

“I happen to run a little service for the folks of this… charming locale,” he says when players first stumble across him and now shared over on the Culture Crave Twitter account.

“See, they ain’t got anything you might call law around here. Suits me fine, mind you, but that leaves a lot of bad blood unaddressed.”

Featuring Goggins’ likeness and added to Fallout 76 as part of the upcoming Burning Springs expansion, The Ghoul can be found in ‘The Last Resort’ hub in Highway Town and will be the new host of bounty missions.

As a result, he will not be a playable character and will not travel alongside the protagonist but players can drop in on him when they wish to earn some extra cash.

Goggins was the inspiration

According to a report by IGN, the Burning Springs expansion arriving to Fallout 76 is inspired by the Fallout television adaptation.

“We all saw Season 1, right?” said Jon Rush, creative director on Fallout 76.

“Who better to host a bounty hunting feature than The Ghoul, right?

Not just a ghoul, it's the Ghoul from the show.

So we started talking about that, and Walton Goggins is a big fan, of course, of the franchise. He's a big fan of the games. And so it came up organically really quick.

And we had folks on our side working on the script, folks on their side working on the dialogue script, and came together.

And of course The Ghoul actually came out once Walton Goggins took the script and really made it his own, made those adjustments.

It was kind of cool to see him go from Walton Goggins to The Ghoul like that. It was really awesome.”

Fallout 76 Burning Springs goes live on 2 December alongside the arrival of The Ghoul himself.