Based on everything Bethesda Games revealed during last night's E3 press conference, Fallout 4 sounds insane, and possibly the best chapter in the series yet.
Work started on this game back in 2009, right after completion of Fallout 3, though production slowed as some team members were distracted by putting Skyrim together. We saw the first few minutes of Fallout 4 at the conference, and it actually begins -- for the first time in Fallout history -- with a playable segment taking place
before the bombs dropped. Your character starts out standing in front of a mirror, along with his spouse, and the back-and-forth dialogue you have serves as the facial controls that determine what your character will look like (and even the gender....you can decide to be the woman).
200 years later, you emerge from Vault 111 as the sole survivor in the area. It's at this point that you first meet the dog that has appeared in the teaser trailers. The dog will obey contextual commands; for example, pointing at something in the distance will make the dog run over and retrieve it.
Fallout 4 will feature world-building and malleable environments that will put Minecraft to shame....okay, you can't build a giant blocky recreation of the Taj Mahal the way you can with Minecraft, but the level of customization in your ruined village will be nuts. Any object you come across can be taken, used as scrap, and combined with other objects. While this is fun, it also serves an in-game purpose: you will
need to build defenses for your own protection against raiders. You can also make and create your own weapons and power armor. You can even go far enough to build an entire settlement yourself, complete with food, water and power generators, and NPCs will slowly show up to populate it.
Those who order the Collector's Edition of Fallout 4 will receive a real, working Pip Boy! Well, it's actually a hollow shell that looks like a Pip Boy. If you stick your smartphone into it and run the special Fallout 4 Pip Boy app, it's just like actually having one. You don't need the shell to use the app either.
Finally, we have a concrete date for when all this can be yours: Fallout 4 will be out November 10, 2015.
