Fallout 4 game director Todd Howard has confirmed that events in the game mostly take place after Fallout 3, which was set in 2277.
Speaking to The Telegraph, Howard teased that the story in the game has been hinted at by the previous game, indicating that the Institute and its android slaves will play a key role. As for why Boston was chosen, the city is said to have had ‘the right mix of American history, Americana and hi-tech’ to make it the ideal setting for Fallout 4.
The game begins in pre-war suburbia and sees a family flee to Vault 111 to escape the nuclear assault. Given the amount of effort put into creating this alternative history future, Howard said “We do enough. It needs to be a prologue. It’s important to us to let you experience that world, so that when you emerge from the vault you feel the sense of loss and think “I wish this was the way it was.” Having the beginning and having the sense that stuff is all gone? That you’ve lost everything? That is important.”
Players begin by choosing their character, which can be a man or a woman, and heading to the vault. Two hundred years later, they emerge as the only survivor.
For the first time your character is voiced, and there times when your character's gender will be significant. This means there's plenty for voice actorss Courtenay Taylor and Brian T Delaney to say. “We were lucky to find two great voice actors,” Howard noted. “And it’s interesting because she may read things or act things differently than he does. So scenes play out differently depending on whether you are playing the game as male or female.”
High production costs for major games these days makes a voiced protagonist seem like a stanard choice, but there are concerns the dialogue will be limited.
“We had the same worry as everyone else,” Howard admitted. “A lot of games have voiced characters, but what they don’t want to give up is all the dialogue options. So for us a lot of it was logistical. The voice actors have been recording for two years, they’ve each done over 13,000 lines of dialogue. So to be able to do that makes the difference; you still have choice.”
Fallout 4 is first and foremost a RPG, but Bethesda has made great strides to ensure it plays as a better action title, Howard said the goal was to “make it feel great as an action game.”
Speaking about the change to the VATS system, he said “We found some ways to make it a bit, not a ton, but a bit more dynamic.” VATS previously froze the game but now it will allow the action to continue in show motion.
“It’s very, very slow and you’ll see the percentages change because the person is moving behind or coming out of a wall. So queuing up the shot at the right time matters. And while the playback is happening, the criticals are not random, you assign which shot is the critical one and you load up that bar. So it’s a little bit more under your control, not a lot, but just enough to make it feel better.”
Discussing the game's extensive crafting system, he said players won't need to engage with it, but there will be plenty to do. “It’s optional but it is big. There are missions for it you can decide not to do, but there is a whole system for it and a story reason for it.”
Most of the new features are thanks to the enhanced power of the new generation of consoles, which have allowed for more structured development. “The consoles are very PC-like,” Howard noted.
“Traditionally that’s where we’ve developed. So the time we spend developing the game is much more efficient because we don’t have to do it three ways. We don’t have to do one for the PC, one for the 360 and one for the PS3. The majority of our work works on all three. There’s still time spent on each, but not as much.”
As such Bethesda has been able to experiment with new ideas, such as bringing user-made mods to console for the first time. “We’ve wanted to do that for a while,” Howard commented. “We architecture our system so that mods work. They work on Skyrim if you can get them on a console, Oblivion as well. And Fallout 3. But there’s no way of getting them there. There’s still a lot of work to do. It’s going to come out on PC first, then they’ll move to Xbox One, then to PS4. There is a lot of work involved getting them onto each system.”
Fallout 4 launches on November 10th for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
