With E3 2015 just around the corner I thought it was time to jot down what I would love to see in the (possibly upcoming) Fallout 4 if the title gets announced by Bethesda.
Without a doubt this is my most anticipated game of all time, I’ve had so many good memories in Fallout 3 – which is not surprisingly my favourite game of all time so far. I hope that will soon become second to a game which not even a mouse is allowed to leak details on and Bethesda keeps very close to it’s chest.
What I do know is that they will release a Fallout 4, I mean why wouldn’t you with the chance to make millions on it and the amazing success of the previous games. Features like V.A.T.S and the deep quest story lines were quite revolutionary in it’s time and they provided hours of gameplay options for players.
1. Player built houses and vehicles, this one is fairly obvious due to the amount of heli-mods in FO3 which doubled as houses. To be perfectly honest I want to be able to build a house anywhere on the map by gathering the resources and building it over the course of the game from components I find, all the NPC’s can build houses and cities where they want and I want to as well. I would probably choose somewhere high up and use it as a sniper nest, or perhaps in a super mutant camp where I use barb-wire to prevent them getting to me while I sit on my porch and laugh spinning my revolver. Don’t forget to add the traps too Bethesda! Which could prevent your house from being attacked by those damn raiders, mines were good in FO3 but were far too simple for my liking. Vehicles would be awesome as well if you were able to find the components of one, assemble it and launch drive-by’s (or fly-by’s) in the wasteland, especially considering that the enclave were flying them around in the previous game.
2. Co-Op Multiplayer, NOT Online play with randoms. I love the single player aspect of the game, it really feels like you are a lone ranger in this wasteland trying to survive, however we all know that games are much more fun with at least one other person to share the experience with and if you had one or two other friends playing during a LAN it would be at least triple the fun exploring this new wasteland with someone you know. Obviously the game should still have a pure single player mode for those who wish for the solo experience or don’t have any friends :p but keeping this will ensure the tradition these games have been based on.
3. Another main feature I am excited about is, simply, the increase in graphics quality, sure graphics isn’t everything and there could be a few other things on this list but it will immensely increase the immersion rating, for example the difference between Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim was quite a leap and I honestly enjoyed Oblivion as much as Skyrim, spelunking for those legendary glass weapons I coveted so much, and honestly I would be slightly less inclined to play it if the graphics were poor. Recently modern games have stretched for photo-realistic environments such as Dying Light and GTA 5 for Pc, and not only do they look good but they can do so much more with it such as hidden troves of loot, better effects and more realistic interaction between objects which overall provides a greater immersion. On a side note I hope they support 4K as well as strange monitor aspect ratios such as my 3440×1440 monitor.
4. Quests! Quests! and more quests. It’s a part of the Fallout series that everyone loves, sure there was a fair selection in the previous games (over 50 or so including the hidden ones in Fallout 3) but I would like to see a lot more of them such as in Skyrim which had 273! It took many days of playing to find and complete them all at best and they were only the side-quests which often involved interesting plots and twists along the way. Although Bethesda please don’t make us kill a bride at a wedding again, that was quite… brutal even for Fallout. Now the quests would be useless without a huge arsenal of weapons and loot you can receive at the end of them, but this one isn’t simply about loot. I would like to see vastly different weapons each one unique weapon with special characteristics such as the Rat Slayer in New Vegas which has a brilliant critical chance and slightly lower damage which made it fun trying to get headshots on super mutants sprinting towards you with a spiked bat. But the items shouldn’t just stop at weapons, armour and other equipment is just as important much like the medical power armour in Fallout 3’s DLC which talked and automatically injected you with stimpacks when you needed them. I felt there was a lack of general items that did other effects like increasing your movement speed slightly to help escape from those deathclaws, or boots that let you jump that little bit higher over a wall.
5. Professions, Roaming the wasteland sure is fun but eventually you need to settle down with a partner and get a job to earn a steady flow of caps, maybe as a hit-man for the talon company, or working at the local nuka-cola factory, or as a deathclaw culler hired by the local villages to keep their people alive, i’m sure Bethesda could come up with some great ideas here to extend the gameplay further. They touched on this idea briefly in Fallout New Vegas where you temporarily work outside the front of a shop keeping unwanted visitors away. I liked that small segment, and all they need to do is mix it up a little to keep it interesting, for example working inside the shop and outside, putting the guns onto the shelves to sell (or for you to steal and try to lie your way out of it).
6. I liked the variety of skills in New Vegas which made it a bit harder to max every stat, you actually had to think about ‘what type of person you were going to be…. James…. James’. You should get that reference if you played FO3 at all. There was a good amount of skills in Fallout but more is better, and I would like to see some that aren’t completely combat related such as ‘Survival’ where you could cook your own food at various places around the world. Skyrim had a fair few non combat skills although mining would have been a good one to add as well there. A construction skill would fit well if you are building a house
7. Advanced companions, Throughout the previous games there have slowly been greater additions to your party through the addition of NPC’s you can hire or persuade to join your cause, from Lily – A large friendly purple stealth mutant, to Sidney – A hot headed girl who can take on even the largest of foes. These were the beginnings of something great with companions you can level up, equip, position strategically and ask to hold items for you. Being just a few of what they can be used for i’m sure Bethesda will pleasantly surprise us by the sheer quantity of followers you can choose from and the detail to which you can equip them. Some advanced commands would be great as well, such as walking to a point and opening fire, communicating to them via the pip-boy over longer distances and even getting them to house-sit your home when you aren’t there and prevent it from being raided. The level of AI should be higher as well, including the enemies as honestly, Fallout 3 was far too easy at times and I would rather not have to turn on the hardcore mode (which in FO-NV means you had to eat regularly) just to increase their accuracy and response times.
I’ll finish with one thing about what NOT to do. GET RID OF THE INVISIBLE WALLS THAT PLAGUED FALLOUT NEW VEGAS. Come on Bethesda, even though you didn’t really work on FO-NV you could have seen that was a disaster waiting to happen. If anything, the one thing I love about Bethesda’s games is the open-endedness of the worlds without restriction where you can and can’t go. If you wanted to scale a mounting by jumping repeatedly, GREAT! and if you wanted to do half a quest then start on another then GREAT also, but don’t box the player into a specific place and make the game linear! that goes against everything I love about you. Fallout New Vegas was also much smaller and less compact then Fallout 3 which disappointed me a fair bit due to the lack of quests and places to explore, it should be tailored a little more like skyrim which had entire sections to explore without a quest in sight. Also if it’s not too much to ask I would like to be able to kill children, because they mouth off at you and you can’t do anything about it without a mod.
That’s all folks, leave a comment if you want to see something in particular on release.
