Fallout 4 will have an extensive crafting mode, much bigger than the one featured in Fallout: New Vegas or Skyrim. In addition to designing your own weapons and armor, you'll be able to build your own settlement in the game, which makes it quite a bit like Minecraft and other games like it. It's unlike anything Bethesda's ever done before.
If you felt overwhelmed by what you saw at E3 and feel like you might miss out on story content for not participating in the game's crafting mode, then worry not: it's completely optional.
"It’s a completely optional, freeform thing that you can do, if that’s what you want to do," Bethesda's Pete Hines said in an interview with GamesRadar. "If you don’t care about that and you just want to play quests and play side quests, and finish the main quest and that sort of thing then you can just ignore all of this [crafting]. Or do as much or as little as you want."
Granted, you'll miss out on a number of features, like having merchants settle into your shanty town. Pete Hines says that there are added benefits to setting up a town and having merchants settle in.
As for weapon crafting, its possible to build the parts of any weapon, or you can just use the stuff you purchase or salvage from corpses that you find while playing through the game.
"You can [play] it and never even notice that feature is there if you want to," says Pete, "but once you figure it out, it’s like, ‘okay, this is pretty cool. Now I want to do more’".
The idea is that while crafting isn't a necessary part of the game's experience, it certainly enriches it.
Fallout 4 will be released on November 10 for the PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
