7 Fallout 4 Changes That Will Ensure It Was Worth the Wait

A Huge World as Your Playground

Fallout 3 brought us a huge expansive world, then Skyrim developed this even further and pushed the limits of last generation’s consoles. It’s world was filled with quests, dungeons and caves, all offering endless hours of opportunities to get completely sidetracked from the main story and just go exploring. Then we come to this generation. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt went one step further and created a world with numerous different regions, all of which were huge and littered with points of interest, side quests, and monster nests to go and destroy offering endless hours of distractions from the main story quests.

Every fan of the Fallout series will be hoping that Bethesda provides us with a post-apocalyptic Boston on a huge scale, offering plenty of real life landmarks to go and explore (we’ll go into this more shortly). The pull of previous Bethesda titles has been their open ended worlds allowing the player to go and do as they see fit in the world that is offered to them. Start right away on the main quests, attack some local bandit camps, or just go and see what the world has to offer and bail from overpowered enemies you really shouldn’t have come across yet.

Whatever it was you chose, Bethesda’s worlds have always made it feel acceptable to play the game as you see fit and have accommodated this in a huge open world. More of the same is certainly at the top of the list for fans of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas.

A Middle Option for Travel

Okay, so the picture above isn’t a horse, and who knows if you could ride a Brahmin. But, the point still stands. However good Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas’ worlds were, there were times when exploration sometimes felt a bit too sluggish. Of course the fast travel option allowed us all to jet from point A to point B in a matter of seconds but that really takes away from some of the beauty of having an open world game. The moments of exploration and discovering some of the incredible areas these worlds have, for example the UFO site at the very top of Fallout 3‘s map, are some of the most satisfying and enjoyable parts of Bethesda’s game.

However these areas sometimes required a fair bit of travel through…well, uninhabited wasteland. Of course this should be expected in a post-apocalyptic world, but wouldn’t it be great if we could ride a mutant horse (…or a Brahmin) to make the traveling a bit faster? Maybe, just maybe, we use the dog to speed across the wasteland of Boston before bringing us back to a human perspective with the click of a button. Whatever method of travel Bethesda includes, there would be no harm in adding the option in for those times when we wouldn’t mind exploring at a faster pace. And for those other times when we’d love to just wander the wasteland and blow three hells out of someone’s face with a plasma rifle, we can leave our speedy companion behind and bring him back when we see fit.

The Witcher 3 and Skyrim both offered this option one way or another, and it’s certainly appreciated in the former when the world is so vast and would take hours to get from one side of the largest region to the other, without our trusty steed.

Iconic Boston Locations

Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas offered us various real-life locations in their post-apocalyptic versions of Washington and Las Vegas respectively. Hell, if you hadn’t found it previously check out the Lincoln Memorial above. Fallout 3 also included famous landmarks such as the Capitol Building and the Washington Monument.

As for Fallout: New Vegas, well it was filled with ’em, just check this comparison out here. So while we’ve already discussed about the ones we’d like to see here, there’s something about real-life locations being present in post-apocalyptic games that give the player a touchstone to the present day. Whether they managed to survive the trial of time and nuclear bombs, or not. Seeing these landmarks adds another level of immersion for the player.

As awesome as Skyrim was to go and explore, there’s always something satisfying about spotting a building and feeling that sense of familiarity in an otherwise unknown and unexplored world. Not to mention the fact that real-life locations tend to offer up some truly interesting experiences for the player. In the article previously mentioned there’s a few pretty good guesses at exactly what might be going on in a Fallout 4 version of Boston’s numerous landmarks, such as Harvard University.

More Fallout Eccentricity

Fallout  has always been about offering some off-the-rails questing, weaponry, and characters, all while keeping it somewhat realistic in a futuristic setting. After all, cannibalism is more than a possibility in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

But then, from time to time, Bethesda likes to test the waters with some of their more wacky ideas such as the Fat Man, a mini nuclear bomb launcher. If that doesn’t sound bizarre enough, how about the Experimental MIRV, a shotgun-like version of the Fat Man, launching 8 nuclear bombs at once and subsequently dealing the largest amount of damage from any weapon in the game. A wasteland Boston should become a playground for some more truly eccentric questing and weaponry.

We love Fallout for its alternate look at the future of American cities, and within its world anything is seemingly possible. In the Fallout 4 trailer we saw a garage which could potentially be our character’s base, full of weapons and a nifty bit of armor too. Let us create our own weapons and add on accessories we find across the wasteland, I’m sure the community could make some pretty awesome creations within the Fallout world.

Improved VATS System

With Fallout 3, Bethesda introduced the VATS system. An incredibly interesting concept with so much promise, but one which fell just a bit short of a truly realized vision for an alternative combat option. While VATS offered some incredible slo-mo views of a mutant getting his head pummeled by your baseball bat, or numerous blasts of plasma out of your rifle, it also made the combat significantly easier.

This is probably down to the fact you could simply set yourself up with a nice view of the enemies head so the damage would be high and attack it repeatedly. Come on, admit it, for most enemies it tended not to pose much of a challenge to simply align yourself directly opposite the enemy before jumping into VATS. Of course crippling an enemies legs or arms had its benefits but these were commonly overlooked for the money shot. A few simple tweaks to the VATS system would make it all the better. For example, if you gained extra XP for a stylish crippling of the leg from using VATS whilst behind your enemy with a baseball bat. Alternatively, the beauty of the slo-mo kill cam could need some prerequisites, such as the killing of 5 enemies.

The targeting system was a really cool mechanic introduced in Fallout 3, now Bethesda should use Fallout 4 to really bring this combat system into its own.

Flashbacks

When we first watched the Fallout 4 trailer and the dog turned into the robot and a destroyed, worn-out room turned into a beautifully decorated baby’s room, we all had the same thought. Flashbacks! The Fallout 4 trailer seemed to strongly suggest that flashbacks or at least the world before the bombs dropped would play a significant role within the game.

We can only hope that this will play an important role when we’re actually in control of the game, allowing us to flashback and see what the world was like before the nuclear war began. By doing so we’d gain more context as to what really happened back then, the back-story to some characters, and, more importantly, they might even give us a way of altering how the game plays out. For example, what if during a flashback in the opening tutorials of the game, your questing decisions had huge ramifications on how the post-apocalyptic Boston turned out?

If you chose to play out a quest one way instead of another, one faction may be more dominant in the wasteland, or a whole group of NPC’s could be located somewhere entirely different. Maybe they’re just not there at all. I’m sure Bethesda could come up with a novel way of implementing these flashback scenarios into the game, it’s just a matter of time to see if they’ll be included, and in what way.

Improved Karma System

You were starving, okay?! You had no other option but to chew on the leg bone of that tasty human. Screw karma, it was a necessity! Although karma in the previous games certainly had some ramifications, it was difficult to see how being slightly good or slightly bad truly effected the player experience. Only when the player was a true saint or an absolute cannibalistic, homicidal maniac would the game truly appreciate or hate you for your actions.

Fallout 4 has the opportunity to truly revamp its karma system and allow every action to become a significant decision truly worthy of a good think. Should I help this kid get back to his parents and get a so-so reward, or should I murder the runt and steal all of his bottle caps and that nice weapon he’s donning. Of course you take him back to his parents…right? But what if you didn’t and then not only did people speculate that it was you who did the horrible deed, but in turn charged you more for goods? Or maybe they found concrete evidence that you were the culprit and so you are forced to engage in constant battling with that particular faction. You could even end up being banished from cities. Granted it may take some of the fun out of playing the game in an evil manner, but surely that’s what would happen in a real post-apocalyptic world.

Regardless of how it’s truly implemented, a real refinement of the karma system is necessary to bring it up to modern day gaming standards. Though not necessarily a karma system, The Witcher 3 allowed gamers to make an outrageous number of decisions that would later effect all manner of characters and the world itself, some for good, others for bad. Make a wrong decision and you often felt like you regretted it. Fallout is the perfect world to bring true karma repercussions and numerous character conclusions to the player. We’ll just have to see what Bethesda have got in store for us.

So that’s it, our top 7 things every Fallout fan wants to see in Fallout 4. Have we missed something you really want to see in the game? Feel free to let us know in the comments below.