Please Stand By - Bethesda to Announce Fallout 4 on June 3rd

This is as crazy as saying Fallout NV was not nearly as good as Fallout 3. It's like the same thing but better

@pyrodactyl: but it wasn't

This is my most anticipated game atm.. I have 3 wishes

1) Dont be an MMO

2) Dont include any extra "monetization" features other than actual new gameplay content.

3) And for the love of god dont screw the PC over so hard on the UI this time again!

Bring it on Bethesda!

Zero chance it'll be an MMO. PC will get the shitty end of the stick again though.

Obviously it's going to be an MMO. Elder Scrolls Online did so well after all.

With Witcher 3 out ... those guys sure have a high bar to cross.

I know this team of individuals makes games that I enjoy, I'm a little worried about V.A.T.S going away, but if they do go that route I'll have faith that it is for the best. We'll know soon I'm sure of it, I love fallout, im very excited for fallout 4

Please be more Fallout 3 than New Vegas

The writing, and the combat, and the world-building, and the technical prowess, and the gameplay balance, and the...

Just kidding, remasters incoming

Why... not wait until your press conference?

I never play Bethesda games for the combat, I play them for the exploration. If they get that right, I'll be happy. They do have Id tech now, though so that might change some things.

Awwww yessss.. Fallout MOBA! Mark my words...

I hope that they don't drop what they've done so far with NV since it was a spin off which will result in a couple of backsteps and me getting upset :'(

All i want from 4 is more fluid combat system and a faction system that plays a main part in the story of the game.

Fallout 4 is gonna be the best. I already know it. As much as I loved 3, New Vegas was dated the second it was released because of that super old ass engine. It was hard for me to get into and it was also 10x buggier than 3. But I can't help but feel excited to see where Fallout 4 goes.

Timer expires at midnight Australian time. I feel spoiled, typically these expire either when I'm at work or at 4am.

@bollard: For me, it's simply a matter of the setting. I don't really find myself drawn to high fantasy settings. But I really like sci-fy and post apocalyptic. Blade Runner, Deus Ex, Mad Max, The Road, Book of Eli, and Fallout fits in rather nicely. Plus Todd Howard's team make fantastic worlds to explore. I loved Skyrim even though I'm not much for fantasy, but they are so good at world building and system interactions.

After playing The Witcher 3 lately, I'm really hoping that Bethesda game studios have brought on some new writers. If the story telling and basic character interactions are closer to the quality of CD Project, I would be on cloud nine. If they had some of the writers from New Vegas on the next Fallout, that would be fantastic.

I played both Fallout 3 and Vegas and didn't really see a big difference between the writing to be honest. Do you know of any good examples from Vegas that show off the writing?

Calling it right now: The majority of the plot deals with "The Institute" hinted at during Fallout 3 and Massachusetts will be the setting.

PC version will have the most active mod community out there, just like every Bethesda game since Oblivion. They've been shaving the sharp corners off these clunkers for over a decade. You'd think Bethesda would take a look at some of the more innovative (not porn) ones like Mart's Mutant Mod and integrate that into the vanilla game. But it seems like they take advantage of that community being there and use them as unpaid beta testers. Whatever. I'll very much enjoy the modded Fallout 4.

I never played vanilla Fallout 3, in fact I played New Vegas first (and wrongly assumed 3 had similar story revelations and character moments), and man other than a couple good radio broadcasts that game is a bit of a snore. My best memories of that game are related to instances created by mods, without that you've got this kinda bad shooter and a clunky VATS thing.

Man a lot of hate for Bethesda in this thread. I thought Skyrim was an amazing step up in their production values/quality, so Im very optimistic about Fallout 4. See a number of Witcher 3 comparisons...Yeesh... You fucked yourself by using that bar lol! That was prob about the same expectation as hoping the Witcher 3 combat was going to be AAA. Yea, we hoped for it, but....Bethesda makes janky, but fun open world games that have serviceable story, writing, and are fun to explore. And offer a great sense of adventure. I dont expect much to change with this one other then a step up on production values, and quality in line with Skyrim. Which I thought was their best game to date by quite a bit.

@john1912: My biggest worry is that they will play it too safe and just make a better looking version of the same thing they did last gen. I don't think that's enough for me.

Skyrim was alright, but I need more than Skyrim with guns at this point.

I really like Oblivion and Skyrim, but Fallout 3 was one of my favorite games of last generation. I absolutely loved it, and it grabbed me like very few games do. So excited about this. I just found the world of Fallout 3 so incredibly interesting, it felt like there were so many great side quests and tucked away areas.

@john1912: Skyrim doesnt represent the strong suits of Fallout though. A lot of big games are sorta Skyrim now because it hit a note with a lot of people. But Im not walking around apocalyptic boston to discover dwarven ruins, I wanna run into some crazy event. Fallout has always been about big moments that happen the way they do because of choices you make. Other than freeing some prisoners that killed most of the people in a city, nothing in Skyrim really took that kind of turn on the scale that Fallout does. If their ambition is merely Skyrim with a Fallout theme, I feel like they're doing the Fallout name a bit of a disservice. People have these high standards for the franchise because they really love one or more games within them. Casting that stuff aside because Skyrim is the best selling thing Bethesda ever made is a bit worrying to people. I dont want a Fallout that's Skyrim. I've got a Witcher, Dragon Age and Zelda that are Skyrim now. Its the new Batman combat or Ubisoft open world template in that profit driven companies are going to copy that game model until people are sick of it and I'd rather Fallout not be a symptom of that. Its not "hate" its skepticism.

All will become clear tomorrow, in the meantime people can speculate.

Ah all this F3 (Bethesda) narrative talk brings back some warm memories on these forums: http://www.giantbomb.com/fallout-new-vegas/3030-25933/forums/the-return-of-harold-455501/#32 Good times. :D

I really, REALLY hope that Fallout 4 won't follow the same path that TES took with Skyrim. Everything about that game was incredibly boring to me. To this day I still don't understand the hype.

@adequatelyprepared: What "path" are you talking about?...Because it's the very same type of game as Fallout 3. Elder Scrolls is Fallout in a different setting and vice versa.

I wasnt trying to imply that they should or will stick solely to the Skyrim format. Thats all it is, its a format, a template for a large open world game. What they decide to do with it is what matters. I hardly see saying a game is using the Skyrim format, as excluding large or small scale game changing events like setting off the bomb in Megaton. Or putting one faction in power over another at the Hoover Dam. Those are just story elements. I guess Im not sure how that would be expected or implied in any fashion honestly. . Im only saying Skyrim set a new bar in polish, and quality across the board for Bethesda. So I feel I can expect good things to come from Fallout 4, and I would only assume staying true to the feel of the past games would also be part of that improved quality, and overall polish.

I dont know what you expect though. Its Bethesda. Youre more of less going to be getting what you got in the past which is Skyrim meets Fallout. I would expect the same as Fallout 3/New Vegas but with a significant improvement to quality and presentation.

@frostyryan: It could maybe be a setting thing for me than anything else. Everything in Skyrim for me just blends into this indistinguishable generic fantasy mess.
There's only so many circular dungeons with Draugr's and simple puzzles that you can go through before everything starts feeling pretty samey.
I loved Fallout 3 and NVs world, and how every vault had it's own story to tell. They're probably the only RPGs I have dumped 100+ hours into while completely disregarding the core story quest.

I really wish I could get into Fallout 1 and 2, but there's a lot of interface features present in modern turn-based over-the-top RPGs that we take for granted that are completely absent in those two initial games.
Doesn't help that I have the Steam versions of those games, which are filled with graphical glitches, when I really should have gone with GoG.

Sad that it isn't Obsidian. Bethesda can't into the Fallout universe (unless they hire writers who know how to do it justice, then I'm okay with it).

Thing is, Bethesda is only good at making engines that look and feel great in the shortrun, then end up being dated and irrelevant in a very short longrun. They tend to just stink at making role-playing games in general and just stick to ducktapping shallow, bugged content in a large world that their talented artists craft. There were so many moments where Skyrim's quests, though linear and uninteresting by themselves, just broke when in conjunction with the events that happened in the main quest or other side quests that should have changed something in relevancy with the NPCs, the politics, and the environment.

Say what you will about Obsidian and their buggy games, they know how to make worlds. Almost everything in New Vegas and its factions were interconnected. Even the smallest things that the player causes can change NPC dialogue and that shows just how dedicated Obsidian is when it comes to actual role-playing. New Vegas is what Fallout 3 should have been.

We're probably going to get another Fallout 3 with better graphics, a good first 5 hours experience, then later on a boring 200 hours of shallow character building, broken quests, plot-holes, drab dialogue, 2-dimensional characters, and an awful ending. Hopefully Bethesda learns their lessons from Skyrim because that game was just plain disappointing. They need better quests, better writers, and better character building. They need more focus with their games; quality of quantity and not get randomly generated loot and quests to help game designers design the game for them.

Maybe I'm cynical, but that's just my two cents.

This may be a controversial thing to say, but they really should focus on quality, not quantity. I don't want to hear them tout how enormous Fallout 4's world is; I would much rather a relatively small open world game, if it means that all of the content is top-notch.

100% agreed. I've always had trouble getting into Betheseda games despite really wanting too because of this vary trait all their games seem to have.

I hope that the passage of time allows for a more varied environment in Fallout 4. I enjoyed Fallout 3 but I find the brown and gray wastes exhausting as a setting and couldn't finish New Vegas because of it. I don't know if they can do much about that, considering that is the setting, but that's why I have trouble preferring it to Elder Scrolls, even though it is a much more unconventional setting.

I also think that DA:I and the Witcher 3 have really raised the bar on open world RPGs in ways that Bethesda hasn't had to deal with until now. They never really had any competition in their particular space up until Skyrim. Now they're really going to have to stretch themselves in ways they haven't to keep from delivering just another open-world RPG experience.

@beachthunder: preach.

@veektarius: I thought New Vegas did a much better job adding variety to its environments than Fallout 3 did. Did you ever make it to Red Rock Canyon? I remember being pretty impressed with how visually striking that place was compared to the endless greenish-grayish-brown of Fallout 3.

And I definitely agree about competition. I don't think I actually like Skyrim by and large, but it scratched an itch that hardly any other games did at the time, so I sunk a lot more time into it than it probably deserved. (Although I spent a lot of that wishing it was something more.) Now that some more competent examples of open-world RPGs are out there and pretty fresh in peoples minds I don't think people are going to be as forgiving. The mere novelty of a big open world RPG isn't the selling point it once was.

They started a flame in my heart with the last two.

Let's hope they set the world on fire with this one.

Fallout 3 is one of the best games ever, and I really haven't played a Bethesda style game since its release. So yeah, I'm hyped for this.

@doctordonkey: I hate and love what you just did.

There's some Javascript that includes the following:

 s: 45, m: 45, h: 22, d: 26, M: 11

But that puts it in early June, assuming the countdown starts during E3, and every Fallout so far has released in the fall (September, September, October, October).

@mlarrabee: that could imply a release on the 26th day of the 11th month, 22 hours 45 minutes and 45 seconds into the day?! When the moon is full the secrets will be revealed on the map.

I'm so hyped, Fallout 3 is definitely one of my favourite games of all time, and holds a special place in my heart.

Timer ends at 12:00 midnight.

I'm standing by.

better have a new engine and a massive overhaul of the combat system

New engine is a must. Better modding tools would be welcomed.

Now that Bethesda/Zenimax has shown that it thinks modders of its games are a potential source of revenue who knows what is going to happen.

Fallout4.com is now live!

Man it would be a real bummer if fallout 4 was just skyrim with guns.

Because that's when they're bringing out the big guns like WET 2,

I hope this aint fake.

Let me sound like a weirdo and say that my number one wish for the next Bethesda RPG is that it can be completed without having to rely on a waypoint.

I loved that Morrowind gave you enough information to navigate by yourself. Instead of a 'Go talk to this person' objective accompanied by an arrow to follow, it did stuff like "Go find Caius Cosades. He lives on the western shore of the river in Balmora, down from the Thieves' Guild."

It sounds like a simple thing, but it was a great extra step for immersion into the world. I'm totally fine with stuff like waypoints being added, for accessibility etc, but it is disappointing when there isn't really another option. I can avoid fast travel etc if I want, but if the game doesn't give any of that info, it can be impractical to avoid waypoint markers.

Oh well, there is more of that sort of design sensibility throughout the Witcher series, so it's not like I can't scratch that itch.

@rhombus_of_terror: It's not fake, it was on the Fallout4.com website.