Fallout 4 Developers Talk Story, Voiced Protagonist, World Map and More

I’ve been able to take a moment and round up a plethora of interviews about Bethesda’s Fallout 4, the upcoming new installment in the venerated post-apocalyptic RPG franchise. If you’re interested in the title, there’s plenty of good information to be found in them.

The Telegraph managed to get the scoop on the game’s timeline, the influence of gender on the story, the reasons that convinced the developers to set the game in Boston, and more. I’m going to quote a couple of choice excerpts, but I recommend you go read the full interview:

The game opens in Boston in an alternate 2075. The conflicting theme of optimism and fear of atomic annihilation that followed World War II has persisted into the 21st century. It is a fascinating aesthetic, based on visions of the future from the 50s. (In any decade you can ask: what were their designs going to be?) says game director, Todd Howard.

(What were the cars they wanted to make? If you look at the 40s and 50s and you go to the Carousel of Future at Tomorrowland and you see what they thought the future would be that stuff is amazing. That’s a big inspiration. Like concept cars from the 50s. I thought we drew crazy stuff but the real stuff is crazier.)

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Fallout 4 is set ‘˜mostly after Fallout 3 and, while remaining tight-lipped on story details, Howard says that the goings on in Boston and the mysterious Commonwealth Institute were hinted at in the previous game. Boston itself has ‘˜the right mix of American history, Americana and hi-tech’ that make for the ideal Fallout location.

Attention to detail in its setting help set the stage for a narrative Howard hopes is going to surpass the studio’s previous work. One of the biggest changes for Fallout 4 is that your character is fully voiced for the first time in any BGS game. You can create your own character, either male or female, and Howard says that there are times that your gender will ‘˜be important’.

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(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 2 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.)

GameSpot:

Okay, moving on, Fallout 4 attempts so many different things at once–it has a building editor, a mobile app, games for you Pip-Boy, a gun customisation tool, as well as the game itself–how on earth do you keep focus on all that?

That is the hardest part. We’re lucky, in that nowadays we’re not a very big studio–we’re just over 100 people. We have about eight more people than we did when making Skyrim. Relative to what we’re making, it’s a tiny studio.

But it’s also the same team; this is the group that did Fallout 3. This is the group that did Skyrim. We’re able to work with people that know our systems and design processes so well. We can complete each other’s sentences. So that’s how we get so much content, but absolutely, the hardest part is gluing it all together.

But I imagine that you, personally, are trying to make sure that everything is all fitting together.

Yeah, we’re probably doing too much. [Laughs] If the game sucks, the answer may have been we tried to do too much.

But you have had four years.

We have had a lot of time. And obviously we wouldn’t have been ready to show the game unless we were confident about it.

GamesRadar asks Pete Hines about the November release date:

I asked Bethesda’s Pete Hines why, when most games tend to allow time to develop a buzz, they chose to announce the game so close to release? “The simplest answer was that we felt like we could,” is his reply. Part of that decision seems to have developed from the huge expectations already surrounding the game. “If we didn’t feel like that was enough time to generate the excitement that we expected and the interest that we wanted, then we would have announced it earlier. So part of it is because we felt like it was a big enough title that we could get away with it”.

They also asked Pete Hines about the game’s crafting mechanics:

The stuff you need is obviously collected from the world, although the systems involved with that are something Bethesda’s “still toying with a little bit”. At the moment there are two sides to the resource collection – a system for item creation and a system for world building. “With the scavenging for all the individual stuff, you do it at the workbench. Like, you have a bottle and it’s always a bottle until you’re ready to scavenge it to use the glass for a scope,” explains Pete. “So, you carry this stuff or you need to put it in an inventory and when you go to craft, it tells you ‘˜this is what you need'”.

If you do have your heart set on a certain piece of gear then you can make life a whole lot easier when it come to finding all the bits, according to Pete: “you can actually flag stuff to say ‘˜I’m looking for this stuff because I want to make this”. So, if there’s a recipe you have your heart set on you can select it so that “anything that fulfils the requirement gets flagged in the world: ‘this thing will give you something that you’re looking for'”.

When it comes to creating larger things like buildings, there’s a slightly different system that dodges the issue of becoming over encumbered with 14 tires and a couple of trees worth of wood as you wander the wasteland. As Pete explains: “for the larger building stuff it’s not in your inventory, it’s in the workbench that you’re using in that area”, handily dodging the issue of not having (overly) magic pockets. It sounds a lot like you’ll be re-allocating much of the materials required on site rather than hoarding them on your travels. “So it’s not like you’ve taken that house and deconstructed it,” he continues, “I deconstructed this and it’s all stored over here and then when I go to build it’s pulling from that inventory of stuff I have. It’s saying ‘˜okay, you’ve got enough stuff to do X. You can build a wall but you don’t have enough for a door. You can build a bench but not a chair'”.

Digital Spy:

When did you come up with the concept and story for this particular Fallout?

“We started right after Fallout 3. It’s an odd thing where whenever we do a game, for some reason, and it’s not strategic, but I always think of the beginning, and so I’m sitting there like, ‘OK, we want to get you in a vault’, because the vaults are really important to Fallout, and I really like the stuff before the bomb, I love all the retro stuff, and this would really be a good way to start the game, so that’s usually how we start.”

What comes next?

“The world. So then it was, like even then, we didn’t know what happened in the vault at that point, just that you’re going to go in and then come out later, and like, ‘OK, where are we going to put it?’ Because the world is the main character, so we had a lot of conversations and a lot of debate about different places, but felt that Boston, we already had some stuff that we’d done on it in Fallout 3, there are some hints about what’s going on there, and it just had the right flavour of location, of the history and the high-tech stuff in Boston.”

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Can you tell us how big the map’s going to be?

“I avoid answering that, and I’ll tell you why. If you look at our previous stuff, it’s kind of like that. We don’t actually measure it like that. Because Skyrim is one size, but the mountains take up a lot of space. That’s not really a game place, it’s in your way, you have to go around it, so we’re not really doing that. In the city, it’s very dense, but there is no load – like in Fallout 3, there’s a load – for areas of the city, we don’t do that. So it’s very dense, the buildings are tall, and a lot of them are open, so you can just walk in and around, so… it’s big. I wouldn’t say, you know, if you played Skyrim, I couldn’t tell you it’s X bigger, so we’re just saying it’s about the same size.”

For those of you who are going to play on console, Bethesda confirmed via Twitter that the game will be 1080p/30fps on both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Resolution and framerate won’t be limited in any way on PC, as expected: