Fallout 4: Here’s What Fallout: New Vegas’ Lead Designer Wants to See

Fallout 4 is most likely a no-show at next month’s E3 2014 event, but that doesn’t mean speculation about the game has ended or that it will cease any time soon. 

Inadvertently lending to the speculation that Fallout 4 is in development, Fallout: New Vegas’s Lead Designer Josh Sawyer talked about what he would like to see in the next game in the long-running series of post-apocalyptic role-playing games.

“Fallout games are best when the choices are – and this applies to role-playing games in general, but Fallout is a more desperate world – more agonising,” said Sawyer in an interview with Eurogamer. “They feel more appropriate to the post-apocalyptic genre. So I hope that whatever twists and turns the story takes, it’s more nuanced than a black-and-white choice.”

As evidenced by his work in New Vegas, choice and consequence play a big part in Sawyer’s designs, and he appreciated the fact that though the Lone Wanderer saves Vault 101 in Fallout 3, they’re exiled into the wastes for their actions.

“Also, you see that in the Road Warrior [Mad Max] films,” he went on, “Max, even when he wins, just goes on being a wanderer. There’s that kind of bitter-sweet victory in the difficult choices that people make. Regardless of what the setting is, I would hope that that is a big part of the storytelling of it.”

Sawyer talked about what he would like to see represented in Fallout 4. “A lot of stuff I did in New Vegas was to try and make choices feel more impactful and meaningful and to challenge the player,” he said.

“Some people want to go through the wasteland like a tourist, which is fine – they don’t really want it to be super-difficult. They want it to be interesting and engaging, and they want to see a lot of neat stuff and go through a cool story. And that’s cool.

“Personally I like things to be a little more challenging,” he added, “and there’s a segment of players that also want [that]. I don’t have any doubt in this.”

Sawyer stated that he would like to see Fallout 4 ship with support for modifications, which have made titles like Skyrim vastly improved over their vanilla offerings on the PC. 

Here is a list of the things we’d like to see in Fallout 4.