Fallout 4 Announcement: Trailer dissection and my thoughts

After a nearly five year wait, Fallout 4 has finally been announced; today on the third of June 2015 Bethesda announced the fourth main entry in the venerable post-apocalyptic series for the PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It’s an incredibly anticipated title and one that I’ve wanted to see since I first got into the series in 2014. So in a first for my blog, here is my own reaction to the initial trailer.

0:00 to 0:30

From the offset, we know for a fact that it’s Fallout; the classical track plays and we zoom out from the fifties style television to view a destroyed house. In this case the song is (if my shazam result is correct!) “It’s all over but the crying” by The Ink Spots, a vocal group who were popular in America through the thirties and forties

It’s also clear that the graphics have definitely taken a fair step forward from Fallout 3 and its pseudo-successor New Vegas. We can see the improved lighting radiating in from the window on the right. It is an announcement trailer so we should take this with a grain of salt for now until Bethesda shows off real gameplay.

0:30 to 1:10

As the camera pans around the ruined house, we see a lone dog sniffing about the place; I’d say we’re definitely going to have another companion similar to Fallout 3’s Dogmeat once again. As the dog explores, snippets of life before the bombs fell flash before our eyes, featuring various tenets of the series such as the robot Mr Handy alongside a relaying by what we assume is an American official over the radio. Are we going to see flashback sequences in Fallout 4? It could be an interesting direction for story and narrative purposes.

1:10 to 1:25

The dog runs out the back door and onto the desolate streets as statements from the official grow more serious, warning of the detonation of nuclear bombs. As the dog runs, the trailer cuts between the grimy ruins of the wasteland and the pre-war citizens running for cover on a significantly more colourful suburban street. This forms a fine contrast between the destroyed world and the peaceful society abandoned long ago.

1:25 to 1:30

We reach the top of a hill, the site of a vault guarded by soldiers in the popular power armour and marked with a Vault-Tec billboard. It’s here that Ron Pearlman makes his triumphant return, uttering the famous words from the series: “War never changes”. We can also see both the divide between those who survived the bombs by making it to the shelter of the vaults and those who failed to heed the warnings until it was too late.

1:30 to 1:36

The vault in question is Vault 111 and as the steel door opens we catch a hint or two of first person gameplay of the protagonist, emerging from the vault, shielding his (or her!) eyes from the natural sunlight. From what I’ve seen so far, the game’s graphics seem far brighter and colourful than any other previous Fallout game. It’s difficult to tell whether or not this may impact the immersion of exploring a ravaged game world at the moment.

1:37 to 1:40

The trailer then pans around some of the locations of the game and we see several landmarks including what I assume is the Bunker Hill Monument and later the Paul Revere statue and Massachusetts State House, confirming that the game will be set in Boston on the eastern coast of the United States. In the Fallout series, Boston is known as The Commonwealth and has only been mentioned in Fallout 3 in the quest “The Replicated Man”. It is described as a hub of technology and is also home to The Institute; an organisation home to all manner of advanced technology and artificial intelligences. From this it can be argued that the Brotherhood of Steel (who have a huge interest in technological artefacts) is sure to feature along with the return of androids.

1:40 to 1:50

After a brief view of what looks like an underground settlement we’re taking to the expanses outside the city where we see many different kinds of life-forms, including Deathclaws and feral ghouls, who have all received a fair few visual upgrades. These are accompanied what could be a far more detailed day and night cycle as well as a possible weather system; we can see the sun setting behind the deathclaw, rain pattering down on the underground settlement and stormy clouds building over the city outskirts. We also see what appear to be soldiers bearing a different kind of power armour; could these be Enclave remnants patrolling the wastes?

1:50 to 1:55

We now see other settlements in the Commonwealth including a metallic fortress and a trading hub which I believe is called “Diamond City” with stores for medical supplies (Chem-I-Care), general supplies (Diamond City Surplus) and possibly a store for melee weapons called Swatter. The baseball bat on the left has nails in it; could this hint at the return of weapon customisation, only to a greater extent than we could in New Vegas?

1:55 to 2:05

Next we see a new flying vehicle in the form of an airship flanked by the usual vertibirds seen in the series followed by more sweeping shots of the city. Again we see evidence of a more dynamic weather system with a red sun forming over the horizon before cutting back to vault 111, the first of its kind to have a vertical structure. Could we be seeing more dynamic missions taking place on and around these kinds of vehicles in the final product?

2:05 to 2:25

Following a final flashback to a nuclear explosion we cut back to the dog who is sniffing around a garage with countless items and loot, including a full suit of power armour before coming across the protagonist on the road next to the building. This could mean one of two things; either the player character may have the option to build and maintain safe houses to store items, or it could be a simple hideout that the player character stumbles across while wandering the wastes. Either way, it’s looking very exciting.

2:25 to 2:40

The concluding portion of the trailer sees the protagonist petting the dog and, for the first time in the series, speaking before setting off with the highest buildings of the Commonwealth in the distance. Nothing is set in stone yet but both the Vault-Tec jumpsuit and the pip-boy indicate the protagonist is from Vault 111. The player character having a voice may be controversial with some of the fan-base but personally I wouldn’t mind it, so long as we still have the chance to customise our character’s appearance from the offset.

My thoughts

Even though we’ve only seen the first trailer, my anticipation for Fallout 4 is already flying high. The technologically advanced setting of Boston holds all sorts of potential for new energy weapons, new enemies and possibly new moral dilemmas over the ethics of science and technology. What if we see Doctor Li from Fallout 3 again? Last time she was mentioned in the Broken Steel expansion, it was suggested that she headed north to find The Institute. With the number of years between Fallout 3 in 2008 and Bethesda’s development of Skyrim in 2011, there are all kinds of ideas to throw around and lessons learned to make their next game the best it can be. All eyes are now pointing to Bethesda’s first E3 conference in a couple of weeks, where they may reveal the first snippets of gameplay.

At the same time though, Bethesda also has some large expectations to meet. With the recent release of the Witcher 3 and its ambition in upping world size whilst reducing loading screens, Bethesda also has to keep up with the technicals; it may also be high time for the developer to iron out the bugs which have held their releases back a bit when placed against their competitors. If Bethesda can match this level of quality then I have no doubt that Fallout 4 will be a winner and another brilliant entry in the series.

All images taken from Fallout 4 - Official Trailer courtesy of Bethesda Game Studios. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE2BkLqMef4

(Images used in fair dealing for purpose of review)