Exploring the ruins of Boston in Fallout 4 will be a fascinating experience, even if it's not the prettiest game of the year. That's the message of Bethesda's vice president of marketing and PR Pete Hines, who discussed the game's graphics with Gamesradar.
Fallout 4 will run at 1080p and 30fps on PS4 and Xbox One, while PC players won't be limited in either respect. Hines believes graphics aren't really what their game is about, however.
"We push it visually as much as we can, while realising that we are not making a game just for the sake of having it be the best looking game out there," he said, giving the example of Skyrim, "it’s not meant to be the most stunning RPG ever. That's not the stated goal. We want this massive interactive world, where you can talk to people, choose your own path and everything in the world has meaning and is an actual object".
Bethesda does want to create a good looking game, but also one in which players have a huge amount of freedom to interact with objects.
"Everything in the world [is] something tangible – you don’t walk into a room and see lots of stuff and it’s all fake. All the items are actual items," Hines commented. "You set off a grenade in a room? It’s going to blow shit around and knock it all over the place. You have to spend cycles and stuff tracking where all of that went, and how it’s going to bounce around".
The benefit of all this, Hines added, is "almost limitless freedom".
As such, it's not quite fair to compare Fallout 4's looks to those of Batman Arkham Knight for instance.
"If you’re going to hold us up to any other game and compare us side by side then it had better be a game that does all the same things," he continued. "If you can deconstruct and reconstruct the world in real time, in the game, and you can pick up every single item and it’s not just a texture then we can talk. Otherwise, well then it’s a bit apples and oranges".
Fallout 4 launches for PC, PS4, and Xbox One on November 10th. The game is set mostly after the events of Fallout 3 and will be the first game in the series to feature a voiced protagonist, with over 13,000 lines of dialogue recorded.
