Fallout 4 Officially Announced

Like many, I'm sure, my experience with Fallout started with Fallout 3 - the game that came about after the title came into the hands of Bethesda, the makers of the Elder Scrolls games. Now, I'm no expert - I never played New Vegas, the quasi-sequel (akin to Brotherhood and Revelations to Assassin's Creed II - essentially a huge expansion pack, as I understand.)

I enjoyed Fallout 3 a lot, though it never felt like it had the depth of the Elder Scrolls games. There was plenty of exploration to be done, but not a lot in the way of major quest lines. Now admittedly, there's something kind of freeing and exciting about a world in which there's no quest marker pointing you where you should go, but instead just discovering little things along the way (the Vault that was nothing but "Gary" clones was simultaneously horrifying and hilarious. The one with the "Blue Gas" was just pants-crappingly terrifying.)

Still, the world definitely didn't feel as large as Cyrodiil or Skyrim, but given that we know this company is capable of doing such things, I have high hopes for the next entry.

Fallout 4 will be set in the ruins of Boston, which is really exciting for me as I grew up in a Boston suburb. Two things immediately stand out to me: The first is that there's a lot of footage in the trailer that shows the world before the nuclear war. It's even possible that the player character lived through that war, which I believe would mean that this game takes place earlier than the other games. Given that the trailer shows events occuring in that pre-war time, some have been led to speculate that we may, in fact, get to play through some of that - though whether it would use time-travel or flashbacks or what is anyone's guess.

The other thing that could be exciting is that the area seems better populated than the Capital Wasteland. In the Fallout timeline, MIT became "The Institute," which seems to have become a beacon of continued scientific progress within the post-apocalyptic world, and I imagine that if that's the case, they probably have a relatively safe perimeter to work within.

Fallout 3 was a lot of fun, but it was also a poster-child for the frustrating "brown is real" trope in art design. Everything had a kind of desaturated quality to it, and while that may be true of a real post-nuclear wasteland, I firmly believe that colors are good.

Indeed, ruins are all well and good, but I think what's exciting about the post-apocalyptic genre is not the misery and death, but the idea that new structures and cultures would rise up out of the ashes. Fallout of course derives a lot of its aesthetics from the Mad Max series, and I think what's appealing about that series is seeing the new social structures that grow out of the breakdown of the old ones. A lot of stuff might have been cobbled together out of old parts, but there's a human urge to create new things, and with the old rules broken down, people have the freedom to be very creative.

Another notable aspect of the trailer is that good old Dogmeat is greeted by the presumed player character, and he greets the dog before they head out on the road, and we hear his voice. I wonder, then, if this will be a game in which the player we control is a predetermined one rather than one we create ourselves. I generally like being able to create my own character, but I also recognize that having a set character opens up a lot more dramatic options for telling the story. Just having a voice is kind of a big deal (Mass Effect I think did a good job of hybridizing between total character creation control and a predetermined personality.)

Anyway, if this can be the Skyrim to Fallout 3's Oblivion, I'm super, super excited to see how it turns out (at some point I'm going to have to buy one of the new consoles other than my Wii U.)