Before the Bethesda press conference last night we had no idea that Fallout 4 would include so much player driven customization. I mean we did expect that the next version of the game would go in some new direction with weapon modding and player owned buildings, but the level of customization was totally unexpected.
The E3 demo which dropped just hours ago showed off an incredible array of materials and items that the player could build, with weapons now being fully player created and scavenged structures able to be build in certain locations from bits a pieces found in the game world.
The first thing we thought when we saw the house creation options (we’ll come to weapons later) is the similarities between Bethesda’s system and the tried and true crafting and house creation systems in Rust. The player does similar tasks to build in both titles – scavenging materials and then building their base.
SEE ALSO: Fallout 4 E3 Trailers! Releasing November
However, what is really apparent in Fallout 4, as opposed to Rust and other ‘survival’ games, is just how much quicker, easier and less complicated the system is. Instead of laboriously building wooden structures from scratch by hitting trees like Minecraft, Fallout 4 gives players the easy option of simply clicking on an entire wall of a house to reclaim the materials.
On top of this, building is a simple matter of just placing what you want with the right materials in the inventory. comparing this to Rust, you can see that Bethesda’s method is much more satisfying and streamlined, since it delivers what you want more quickly and easily.
It’s the same deal with weapons – there’s no complicated gathering phase before the gun you want can be made. Most of the materials required for a weapon part can be scavenged from multiple pieces of junk. We saw a scope could be made from raw materials scavenged from either an alarm clock or a microscope for example, and that’s of course not the limit at all.
SEE ALSO: Doom E3 Game Play Trailer, Gory Gameplay For All
This is presumably why weapon modifications are so varied – the fifty base weapons in the game are subject to around seven hundred upgrades through crafting new parts. The fact that weapons are defined as a of a selection of individual parts stuck together is an innovation we’ve only seen previously in Borderlands, and even in that series guns were randomly generated.
So on the whole Fallout 4 is going to do things that other games are still desperately trying to make more publicly acclaimed – and it’s going to do them way better. We could expect competing titles such as Rust to take note, and although Fallout 4 isn’t multiplayer, offering randomized NPC attacks on settlements instead of enemy players wrecking your stuff, the new title could represent major competition for other ‘survival’ franchises.
Watch the full Bethesda E3 showcase here: YouTube
More Info @ Fallout4.com