Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. There was a moment when I was first playing Fallout 3 that hit me on a profound level. My imagination was just as fired up in this moment as when I was sitting in the dark theater and the opening scene of Jurassic Park unspooled before me.
I bought Fallout 3 pretty much only due to the huge word of mouth. I didn't like RPGs, but on Black Friday the year it came out Amazon offered it for 50% off. What the hell, I thought. The game starts off with you being born as proud papa Liam Neeson welcomes you into this world and asks you who and what you want to be. You select your character traits, race, gender, etc and then you have a little bit of a childhood in Vault 101.
Character dialogue options, free-roaming around this sealed vault... it was everything I expected and didn't think I'd get hooked. Then you have to leave Vault 101 and enter the Capital Wasteland. I escaped the Vault with my life, which was harrowing enough, and then I found myself outside overlooking a giant open world with not a single waypoint or indication of where to go. Just my eyeballs scanning the horizon, seeing shapes in the distance and a broken road going either way at my feet.
That's the moment I was hooked. That's the moment I realized video games could be something completely different than what I was used to. The game designers very smartly nudge you in the direction of Megaton, a shanty town built around an undetonated nuclear bomb, but there's nothing forcing you to go that way. In fact, I talked to a friend who played it just about as much as I had and asked him what he did about Megaton (you have an option of disarming the bomb or detonating it). His response: “What's Megaton?”
This dude had put 100 hours into this game and never been to one of the central areas.
Bethesda's work on the game touched me in a way that only movies and books had done previously. It was a new art form, storytelling where I got to control the direction of the story, the order of events and who my lead was going to be.
And they did it in a way that combined RPG with a first person POV that became something entirely new. Not to mention the game is beautiful (set in and around post-apocalyptic Washington DC), has a jet black sense of humor and the most righteous old-timey soundtrack of all time. Nothing made me happier than wandering around the Wastes with the Ink Spots blasting, taking out Deathclaws with Lincoln's Repeater while searching for more loot.
I liked New Vegas, but it felt like Obsidian catered to a much more hardcore demographic than Bethesda did. It felt and looked right, but was also overly complicated, at least for this RPG noob. I realized when I was on hour 2 or 3 of delivering letters back and forth trying to earn enough money to enter the Vegas strip that this one wasn't going to fully scratch the itch I had after completing Fallout 3.
The way Bethesda has been working so far is their main team alternates between their two big titles. They did Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and then went right into Fallout 3. The assumption was after they finished Skyrim they were going to jump into Fallout 4, but then there was silence. Bits and pieces would leak out from time to time that they were working on it, but nothing solid. Until recently.
Bethesda's about to announce something big at their own stand-alone presentation that happens during E3. Usually they're the first to deny Fallout 4 when they announce something special, but this time they went quiet. No denials.
This morning they tweeted this:
#PleaseStandBy http://t.co/ChhE4rZ9GM pic.twitter.com/3NefHBcYU7
— BethesdaGameStudios (@BethesdaStudios) June 2, 2015
For Fallout 3 freaks like me that image can only mean one thing: More Fallout! The link takes you to Bethesda's Fallout page and now I'm officially in a tizzy.
It seems almost certain they're announcing Fallout 4 and if they have been working on it since Skyrim then hopefully that means they're going to be announcing a release date. The Fallout 3 release date was set only a few months after they announced it. God help me if I get a new Fallout game and a new Star Wars movie all in the same few weeks. I think I might just die of happiness.
What do I want out of an official Bethesda-run Fallout 4? Really, I just want a giant, gorgeous post-apocalyptic open world to get lost in for a few hundred hours. Their item/organization systems are about as perfect as you can get when it comes to ease of use, so as long as they don't fuck that up and keep the crazy humor (there's one section in Fallout 3 where you enter a VR system and find yourself in a black and white Leave It To Beaver style perfect '50s TV world where an evil little girl tasks you with being cruel to the people in the neighborhood for her amusement... it escalates to the point where she wants you to kill them all ala a little Michael Myers. I'm not kidding!) then I'm ready to roll with whatever.
I'd love it if there was a co-op option so I wouldn't feel like too big of a loser running around by myself all the time. That'd be cool. I can't even imagine what they're going to give us, but I'm certain they'll be pushing the envelope on these Next Gen consoles in much the same way Fallout 3 and New Vegas did for the PS3 and Xbox 360.
Anyway, Bethesda's big presentation will be on June 14th, in a little less than 2 weeks. They'll be streaming it on their Twitch Page and I'll be sitting there chewing the ends of my fingers off.
Fallout 3 is my favorite gaming experience of all time. It's going to be hard for Bethesda to top that for me, but goddamnit I'm rooting for them to do it!
War. War never changes.
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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