“Fallout 4” has been the subject of much speculation and lots of rumors prior to its announcement, and many of Bethesda’s fans were convinced that the game isn’t actually going to happen, at least not anytime soon. And now that we have the official announcement, the focus of speculation has shifted somewhat – fans now keep talking about the kinds of changes that the game might introduce, and how “Fallout 4” could shape the future of the franchise as a whole.
One of the things that Bethesda want to improve is the replayability of the game, adding even more reasons for players to come back and play through the whole campaign one more time. This was already done quite well in the previous games – one could easily run through the entire “Fallout 1/2/3” multiple times and get a completely different experience, meeting new people and using new items.
And now this is going to be even better – on one hand, player skills will work in a slightly different way, adding much more diversity to the character configuration. Players can now level up their separate skills as well as the main character, which will obviously have some implications on how characters can be developed, and the game will now have classes that function like specialists in certain areas.
On the other hand, there will also be a lot of customization for the weapons and tools that the player is using, allowing them to finely tune everything so that it works according to the player’s preferences. The crafting system for the weapons will actually work in quite the comprehensive way, giving various different options for tweaking each gun’s stats.
There will also be a lot of progress in the way of housing, and those who enjoy games like “Minecraft” will be able to build as much as they want, with a new system that allows for much more comprehensive construction of settlements. Of course, there will still be some limitations, but it’s at least much better than the old simple style of decoration that we had in “Fallout 3” and “New Vegas”.
One question keeps bothering pretty much everyone in the game’s community now that the cat is out of the bag – how did this stay secret for so long? Sure, we had our fair share of rumors, but none of them really revealed anything specific about the game in its current state, so Bethesda did an overall great job in preserving the game’s secrecy.
Recently, they revealed that the secret was actually quite simple and straightforward – they had trust in their employees, and they were simply hoping that everything would work out fine. In the end, anyone attached to the project understood its importance just as much as the company’s executives, so the developers themselves had an inclination to keep their work secret too.
But it’s still commendable that nobody managed to slip and reveal what’s going on, because that would have been disastrous for Bethesda. It’s a well-known fact that leaks can completely destroy a game if they arrive at an inappropriate time.
Valve suffered in this way previously, and their situation was actually quite serious too. The company had a significant portion of their work on “Half-Life 2” leaked to the public in a semi-playable form, and while many players were happy to get the leak, they also got the wrong impression about how the game would look and work, and that ended up damaging Valve somewhat.