Bethesda Game Studios, the company responsible for incredible video game franchises as The Elder Scrolls, Dishonored, and Doom, is finally releasing the long-awaited Fallout 4. If you’re not up-to-date with either Bethesda or the Fallout series, I’ll fill you in: Ever heard of Skyrim? Yeah, Bethesda made that. That should be enough of a look into the sort of masterfully-crafted games the company makes.
Unlike the flourishing expanse called Tamriel you explore in The Elder Scrolls series, Fallout is an RPG centered on survival in post-nuclear U.S. after the Great War with China where atomic bombs turned North America into a barren, dystopian wasteland. People were given invitations to live in bomb shelters called “vaults” before the war broke out. However, the true purpose of the vaults was to secretly experiment on their inhabitants to benefit the U.S. government.
Though Bethesda now owns the rights to the Fallout franchise, it was originally created by Interplay Entertainment in 1997 and utilized a turn-based combat system. Since picking up the series after Fallout 2, Bethesda has implemented a real-time action system, which gives Fallout 3 and its successors a distinctively different gameplay experience.
Fallout 4, which comes out November 10, 2015 and is set in Boston, Massachusetts, is anticipated to not only win Bethesda another slew of Game of the Year awards and make me fall deeper in love with the series but also completely revamp and expand on the gameplay possibilities that have earned the Fallout franchise its die-hard fan base.
The game runs on Bethesda’s next-gen Creation Engine, which gives the game unparalleled definition and hyper-realistic rendering. What I’m most excited for, however, is the limitless weapon creation system because you can scrap world items and other weapons for their base components and combine them in infinite ways to create your own weapons.
This is a major step up from the “Gun Runners’ Arsenal” DLC for Fallout: New Vegas where you could purchase modified weapons, but not control the modifications. The coolest part of this whole scrapping system is that everything can be torn apart, whereas typewriters, broken computer terminals, and coffee mugs served virtually no purpose in previous installments of the franchise.
Another big addition is the ability to use scrapped components to build settlements, which can attract anyone from non-player characters (NPC) and traders to raiders and Deathclaws. People who loved Skyrim’s “Hearthfire” DLC, The Sims, or even the “Create-A-Park” mode from the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games will appreciate Bethesda’s decision to put the power of shaping the wasteland into the player’s hands.
Speaking of the wasteland, the developers decided to make Boston in Fallout 4 seem less devastated by the Great War than either The Capital or the Mojave Wastelands from Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. This came as a shock to me because, given the condition of the landscapes in the previous two games, I expected Boston to follow suit, featuring radiation-fried vegetation and oddly spaced patches of post-nuclear civilizations just struggling to survive. Boston, however, seems to be thriving by comparison.
Fans have been playing and re-playing the preceding Fallout games in preparation for Fallout 4 for the last five years. After numerous hoaxes, unreliable leaks, and thousands of memes begging Bethesda for just a little hint at Fallout 3’s sequel, our prayers have been answered.
When the game was announced this summer in the form of a countdown clock on Bethesda.net followed by an official trailer, the Fallout fandom exploded, but it wasn’t until actual gameplay and new features were shown at Bethesda’s E3 Showcase that the Internet changed. Literally, I couldn’t go anywhere without seeing something Fallout-related. Additionally, Bethesda’s release of Fallout Shelter in the Apple App Store for free right after the Showcase not only gave fans some metaphorical Sugar Bombs to tide them until November 10th but it also generated an estimated $34,764 per day.
I got into the Fallout series my freshman year here at Lycoming when my roommate had me play Fallout 3 instead of going to the Homecoming bonfire, and I haven’t been able to stop obsessing over the franchise since. In fact, a few weeks after Bethesda’s E3 Showcase, I bought an Xbox One and preordered Fallout 4. I would highly recommend sprinting, or driving, to the nearest GameStop, Walmart, Best Buy, whatever, and purchasing Fallout 4 if you want to experience, in my opinion, the greatest video game series of all time.
