Two weeks ago, Bethesda held their first ever E3 conference and they closed the show with a huge introduction to Fallout 4. This introduction was so large, its going to take TWO articles to cover it all — Let’s finish off this review of the information that was dropped by Mr. Todd Howard!
Look here for Part 1 of this article.
If you happened to miss the show, here is the Fallout 4 portion of it.
https://youtu.be/D5esyZPt5Jo
Picking up where we left off, at the 15:00 mark in the video, we are now given an introduction to the new Pip-boy. We get to see an “old picture, from the future” about the very first Pip-boy and then we get to see where the vault dweller finds the new Pip-boy. Our character exits the vault and finds a dead Vault-Tec employee whose Pip-boy is now missing a user. As our character straps on and starts up the Pip-boy, you can see him wipe away the dust off of the screen and the animation looks surprisingly realistic. Now we get a quick tour of the new, vibrant, animated Pip-boy menu. It is also here that reveals Fallout 4‘s new layered armored system; allowing you to equip multiple different pieces of armor around your character’s body. Here it is also revealed that the Pip-boy will be able to access collectible holo-tapes and game-tapes, allowing you to actually play small, classic-inspired games inside of a the game! These game-tapes will be Fallout themed versions of games such as Donkey Kong and Missile Command.
Then we get a very nice surprise. The Fallout 4 Pip-Boy Edition will come with an actual replica of Fallout 4′s Pip-boy. This replica is wearable and you can place your phone inside of the replica, allowing your phone to mimic a pip-boy’s screen. Bethesda has actually developed a second-screen, pip-boy app that allows your phone to act as the actual in-game pip-boy menu, assuring us that this second-screen “gimmick” app with be “the best f****** one!” If you get the Pip-boy edition or not, the app will still work.
Next they defer to show us Fallout: Shelter. A mobile game created by the Fallout team themselves and based on personal experience, it is quite an addicting mobile game.
Back to Fallout 4 now.
So far a lot of information has been given to us about a game that had been announced a week before this, but they still have so much more to give us! Going to the 23:00 mark of the video, we are introduced to the new building, salvaging/crafting, and modding systems in the game… Building, salvaging/crafting, and modding are coming to a Fallout game!
The new features in Fallout 4 will allow you to scrap materials from items around the waste, inventory those items, and use those materials to build new structures. You activate ‘minecraft’-mode and in this mode you walk around, scrap items and then can instantly build structures; such as, a new house for yourself, add a new dog house, add a bobblehead stand inside and a nuka-cola machine outside, and fully furnish the rest of your home to finish it off. After that, you could start constructing structures to start a colony around your home; you could build vendor stands to hold vendors that attract wastelanders, then for those wastelanders you could build sources for food and water. After your colony has grown you can add generators to set up lights and security defense systems. All of this new system works on a scale of ‘just for your character and the dog’ to ‘creating the next megaton’ and it is all a completely optional feature!
But wait, there’s more! The crafting system for modding the weapons uses “every” item in the game world. Different mods require different components that you can get from different items from around the wasteland. The example they show us is how to create a long scope; you need an adhesive using duct tape or wonderglue, glass from an alarm clock or a desk lamp or a microscope or from a baby bottle, screws from a typewriter or a toy car or a globe or handcuffs, and some steel which you can get from a toaster or a wrench or a coffee pot or a tine can. This means you can make a long scope using 4 of 14 items. All of those items from the Fallout games now have a function!
Fallout 4 includes “50 base weapons and over 700 modifications for those weapons!” The possibilities are strong with this game! Oh, by the way, this same system applies for creating your own power armor.
Finally, to close the presentation, we get a combat montage that shows off the refined combat element of the game. Starting at 29:20 we get a montage with all kinds of goodies that remind us that FALLOUT IS BACK! The guns have realistic recoil, the aiming is more precise, Power Armor will work like a mech-suit and not plain armor, we have death cinematics, you can hop into a vertibird and man the gun as you fly over Boston, and we have explosive teddy-bears!
For the final piece of information of this presentation, we get the icing on the cake: Fallout 4 releases November 10th, 2015.
“It’s good to be back.”
Source: Bethesda
