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V.A.T.S. and exploration in Fallout 4 trailers from E3

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In honour of the development of the game itself, Bethesda have taken their sweet time releasing the footage of Fallout 4 that was shown at E3’s various conferences. Embedded below you’ll find the exploration video from Microsoft’s conference, which shows off some idle wandering, dog finding and eventually bad-guy frying. There’s also the ‘combat compilation’ from Bethesda’s own show which has guns, rocket launchers, guns, laser rifles, guns, helicoptors, guns and what seems to be an orbital ion cannon. Plus: guns.

I’ve been playing New Vegas recently and watching this again shows it has even more similarities than I thought. There’s a definite increase in fidelity – both in terms of literal number of polygons on screen, but also in quality of animation, particularly on faces. It still has that slightly janky Bethesda-bug feel, though, and I’m worried all my frustrations with Skyrim and Fallout 3 are unlikely to be fixed by a shiny new engine. Still, those problems have never seemed to slow the popularity of the other games, so it’s unlikely to effect the majority.

Interestingly, this actually gives me far more faith than the less shooty-bang trailer. The light tone is appreciated but it’s more about the obvious focus being put on gunplay, which is important in what is, at its heart, a shooter. You can play it as an RPG, but those systems are more mathematical and come down to how diverse you can make a character and whether good voice actors have been hired. Guns are harder to balance the feel of and the variety here, plus the number of set pieces and the new, even more cinematic V.A.T.S. looks great.

Fallout 4’s currently slated for November 10th. Replaying the third game? Here’s the best mods around.