Extreme Mutant News: Fallout 4’s launch trailer, eye candy, and more

By Joel Hruska 

Fallout 4, otherwise known as The Game That Ate November, will launch in a matter of days, and we’ve rounded up the various news, pre-releases, technical previews, and developments that accompany the game. It’s been just over five years since we got a new Fallout game, and excitement for the game is reaching a fevered pitch.
First, the technical details. Fallout 4 uses the same Creation Engine that powered Skyrim, but includes a number of sophisticated feature updates that the Creation Engine didn’t support back in 2011. It’ll ship with full DX11 support (there’s no word on a DX12 version, but Bethesda engines have typically lagged cutting-edge adoptions in API. Nonetheless, the game looks incredible. Bethesda is touting a new volumetric light engine, physically based deferred rendering, and a cloth simulation system that lets fabric ripple realistically in the wind. The screenshot below shows how different the same area can look depending on the time of day and ambient weather conditions.

Click to enlarge

Other features include Bokeh depth of field support, temporal AA, SSAO, something delightful called “Dynamic Dismemberment using Hardware Tessellation,” and screen space reflections. The proof will be in the pudding, but FO4 looks set to jettison the grim, washed-out Wasteland we saw in FO3 and FNV at least some of the time.

If you still haven’t had enough visual goodies, you can check the launch trailer below. As predicted, the Institute is a major focus of the game — but it looks as though you’ll be fighting against it, rather than alongside it. The launch trailer has a number of intriguing scenes — “synths” are obviously feared (and shown in various stages of construction), but we also see the Sole Survivor fighting against the Brotherhood of Steel. Fallout canon typically positions the Brotherhood as the good guys, or at least as a neutral party willing to help you in exchange for assistance in their own projects.

In contrast, this video shows the player launching an attack against a Brotherhood Initiate — and a Brotherhood Initiate in a Vertibird at that. The Vertibird (think of a parallel world version of the V-22 Osprey) is the kind of advanced technology that the Brotherhood historically lacked. The Washington DC BoS chapter was ill-equipped to fight the Enclave in FO3, but the New England chapter is far better equipped. Speaking of the Enclave, there’s no sign of them in any of FO4’s materials — whether they make an appearance in the game or not is still unknown.

Of map-size and Pip Boys

In other Fallout news, Ars Technica took the new Fallout application for a spin and found it could be handy as a way to keep the game map or other features on-screen while you actually play. It’s possible to look at one screen of data on your phone while using the Pip-Boy for other functions in-game, which means you can effectively dual-screen the wrist-mounted interface. Unfortunately, using the wrist-mounted actual Pip-Boy when playing the game (if you’re lucky enough to have the Collector’s Edition) is a better idea in theory than in practice. It’s rather bulky and awkward to use, and the angle the device fits doesn’t really mesh well with playing the game. Still, it’s nice to see a company using a mobile app for something besides forcing a player to unlock treasure chests (thank you Ubisoft!)

This GIF shows the Skyrim map, overlaid with FO4 and FO3.

Finally, there’s an ongoing effort to trace exactly how big the Fallout 4 map is by running across it. Kotaku claims it takes 10 minutes, 40 seconds to run across the entire map, as compared to about two hours to walk across Skyrim. (Estimates on how long it takes to run put the total around 30 minutes depending on your route, equipment, and various perks). Those concerned about the game’s size / longevity, however, would be well-advised to keep one thing in mind — total map size isn’t a great estimate of how much content is in the game. Even in Skyrim, simply knowing the size of the map told you nothing about the number of included dungeons, hidden areas, or the explorable towns. Fallout 3 had a number of DC Metro tunnels to poke through and explore, and the DC area, while visible from the main map, couldn’t be reached directly from the outside.

The video above shows a run-through of the map, though it may not be online for very long. Bethesda has been cracking down. The company has apparently declared an embargo for the embargo (Reviewers aren’t supposed to tell their readers that they’ll be running reviews on Monday morning until Friday morning. Why? No idea).