Fallout 4 Xbox One and Steam Free Play Weekend Kicks Off Today

Boston is going to be filled with drunk Celtics fans this weekend if the spunky team in green manages to upset the Cleveland Cavaliers to extend the Eastern Conference Finals. Or it will be a post-nuclear wasteland, though not as a result of a loss. It just all depends on your plans—to see the latter, you can fire up Fallout 4 for free this weekend on your Xbox One or PC through Steam.

This will be the first time that Fallout 4 has been free to play for an entire weekend, and an extended one at that. Bethesda has already unlocked the game on Xbox One and will do the same on Steam later this afternoon. Here are the days and times for each platform:

• Xbox One: 5/25/2017 at 12:01 AM PT through 5/28/2017 at 11:59 PM PT
• Steam: 5/25/2017 at 10 AM PT through 5/28/2017 at 1PM PT

We are not sure why Bethesda is offering a shorter window of free play time through Steam compared to Xbox One, but whatever, we won't look a gift horse in the mouth. Regardless of platforms, Bethesda says users will be able to play all of Fallout 4's base content and can try out mods to boot. The only caveat is that on the Xbox One side of things, users need to have an Xbox Live Gold subscription.


This is a great opportunity to see what all the fuss is about if you haven't had a chance to play Fallout 4 up to this point. The game took top honors at the DICE Awards in February 2016, winning the distinction of "Game of the Year" for 2015. It also has high Metacritic scores from professional reviewers—88 on the Xbox One and 84 on PC.

To go along with the free play weekend, Bethesda is discounting Fallout 4 across the board (Steam, Xbox Live, and PlayStation Store), both for the base game and the Season Pass. Bethesda says markdowns will be as deep as 67 percent. At the time of this writing Fallout 4 was not yet on sale through Steam, though Microsoft has the Standard Edition discounted to $19.80 (down from $60) for Xbox One and the Digital Deluxe Bundle discounted to $44 (down from $110).