Fallout 76 was mentioned in the Fallout universe as far back as 2008, a decade before it released in 2018.

Fallout games often delve into the inner workings of various Vaults scattered throughout America, and that's exactly how one veteran Fallout 3 player has made the discovery below. It turns out that a Terminal within the Citadel mentions Fallout 76's Vault 76 as being one of the "seventeen control vaults," which will be run entirely according to Vault-Tec's marketing materials.

This means the Vault had no weird experiments going on within it, unlike some of the other Vaults you can uncover in multiple Fallout games. In fact, this is pretty integral to the plot of the recent Fallout TV show, and while we won't spoil the details here, the TV show makes a point of hammering home just how weird the Vaults can actually get.

The catch for this is revealed in the Terminal summary: Vault 76's residents would be automatically pushed back up to the surface after 20 years, no ifs or buts. This is almost accurate to Fallout 76 - in Bethesda's multiplayer game, the player is pushed to the surface on 'Reclamation Day,' which falls exactly 25 years after the nuclear bombs first started descending on America.

There's probably an inner lore working as to why the opening date was delayed by five years, rather than this being a lore oversight from Bethesda. If the Fallout TV show has taught us anything, it's that Todd Howard and company are meticulous when it comes to figuring out the lore and the world-building of the Fallout series.

Read up on our Fallout Season 2 guide for a look over everything we know about the Prime Video show's eventual return.

I was beyond excited when I chatted to developer Ironclad about the imminent arrival of Sins of a Solar Empire 2 back in 2022. With its simulated celestial mechanics and modular ship design, it sounded like a significant step up from its brilliant predecessor. But like so many in-development games that launch exclusively on the Epic Games Store, it soon left my brain. Even with all its discoverability issues, Steam simply makes it easier to keep track of games. So it's good news, then, that Sins of a Solar Empire 2's exclusivity is coming to an end, heralding its arrival on Steam this summer. 

Worth emphasising is the fact that Sins of a Solar Empire 2 is effectively in early access. This isn't remotely clear from the Epic page, nor its Steam page, where you could be forgiven for assuming the game is complete. That said, the Steam launch will come with a bunch of new features. 

• The Advent Unity faction, including two sub-factions: the Advent Reformation faction and the Advent Reckoning faction.
• Updated VO and dynamic music that's specific to factions.
• The official release of modding tools.
• A visual UI refresh that lets you select custom UI themes tailored to each major faction. 
• Enhanced AI, taking advantage of more advanced strategies, scheming against you and making diplomatic offers.
• A damage FX system that makes combat damage visible on large units and structures.
• More environments, planets and maps.

That's what's new for the Steam release, but more broadly Sins of a Solar Empire 2 introduces a whole heap of new things that make it quite a bit different from the original game. 

The aforementioned celestial mechanics simulation is the one that made me most excited. Planets don't have a fixed position, you see, instead orbiting their stars at different speeds, altering the map continually. Depending on a planet's position, then, it might be easier or more challenging to conquer, forcing you to tweak your plans on the fly. 

Ship combat has a more sim-like element, too, where ships have turrets that acquire targets, move and fire in real-time, and they act independently rather than all of them having the same firing solutions. Missiles are also physically simulated, and you can use tougher ships to move in front of weaker ones to body block the projectiles, as well as using their point defence turrets, which spin around and try to track and destroy any threats. 

You'll be able to check all of this out on Steam this summer, though we're still waiting for a specific date.