One of the things I am most looking forward to, if Fallout 4 is in production, is the chance to see The Wasteland given a proper graphical overhall. The last two games have been created with the functional, if ugly Gamebryo engine which has evidently been valued for its ability to handle the complexities of Bethesda's huge open worlds. F3 and NV were pretty ugly games for the most part - however Skyrim, which apparently used an updated version of this engine was a distinct upgrade.

My hopes are that with the new consoles' power, Bethesda are looking to create a game which can really do the filth of the Wasteland some justice, however I was wondering if people knew what engine they were using?

I am in the middle of playing Wolfenstein and I completed Rage when it came out. I have been really impressed with the graphics, especially the detail which the Id Tech 5(is it?) engine can produce. Both games, especially Rage, have amazing texture work, with art similar in style to the devastated urban areas and man-made desert we might expect from a Fallout game. The graphics produced by IdTech5 have this wonderful quality where they seem to look just like concept art, with extraordinary shading and complex individual details. This got me quite excited about the potential Id Tech had for creating a Fallout which has great art and graphics, the only area where the games have not been outstanding in my opinion. While it will obviously be much harder to create the volume of art needed for a huge RPG, and some repetition,a la Skyrim will occur (although I really didn't find the recycled art as egregious as some people) the potential to create jaw dropping vistas is really exciting.

The moment after leaving the vault in F3 is one of my favourite in all of gaming. Being presented with that huge landscape, the wide horizons to explore in all directions, thrilled me with the sky high potential gaming offers to just get lost. It was too bad that ugly textures, weird faces and animations reminiscent of zombies taking their first steps to often threatened to shatter the games hold. Surprisingly FNV was a step backwards,especially once we got into the supposedly bustling metropolis of Las Vegas. I managed to play F3 with out really getting that bothered about the visuals, but I found the crappyness of NV jarring. For some reason I when I think of NV the whole game is coloured a kind of crappy washed out greeny-grey, I can cope with games which look bad technically but NV also seemed to have no real style either. Yet the beauty of the Fallout formula was that I still managed to have a great time.

Its strange, the awful graphical presentation of Fallout seems so part of its essence that imagining a game with decent graphics seems like some kind of unrealistic fantasy. A good Fallout game with the eye-catching textures and animations of Rage seems almost unfair to expect. Like it would almost be too good. However, realistically they must be aiming for something like this. The jump between Oblivion and Skyrim was significant and that was on the same console, I can hardly bear to imagine what should be possible on new consoles, but deep down something inside me just feels that they are working away on some slightly upgraded version of the classic Bethesda bug farm. Perhaps you can help:

Does anyone know what engine they are using?

Is Id Tech suitable for making the kind of open, deep and complex game we expect Fallout to be?

In general does anyone know how Bethesda view the Id Tech engine? Is it like EA and Frostbite where they see it as a company wide tool, or is it just for Id games?

Whatever else you might say about the quality of Rage, I thought it was one of the best looking games I had ever seen, especially on a machine as inferior as the 360. I was truly blown away by some of the visuals, especially the texture work - did anyone else's mind jump to the potential it had to make Fallout bloom?

My fervent hope is that the reason they are taking so long to even announce anything about F4 is that it is being developed only for next-gen (please God!) and that they are scrapping the Gamebryo and either taking on IdTech or using it to develop a new engine - what do you think? Can you even conceive how amazing a Fallout game could be with modern graphical technology?