Coming off of the success of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Bethesda Game Studios began work on its most ambitious game yet for hardware that didn’t exist. The team’s plans were impressive, allowing players to build their own weapons and homes, and dictate their own fates in the wasteland through intertwining story arcs and relationships that could end in love or death. The development spanned seven years, delivering successes, failures, and unexpected detours like porting Skyrim to the Xbox One (keep reading). Just 25 days before Fallout 4 releases, the creators sound off on the lengthy development process as they brace for players to experience their game.
The sprawling open-world adventures Bethesda Game Studios is known for were once made in the basement of a fairly ordinary office complex located in Rockville, Md. The floors above it that allowed sunlight were occupied by a wide variety of businesses and Bethesda’s publishing division. The enormous success of the studio’s in-house franchises, The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, led to Bethesda taking over the entire building. The lobby, which was once a sea shared by business people in suits and game developers in T-shirts, is now a gaming shrine holding an enormous statue of the Panzerhund from Wolfenstein: The New Order, and various life-size statues of characters from Fallout and Elder Scrolls. The T-shirts of the game developers won out. Bethesda Game Studios’ office was moved from the basement to the building’s top floor, its walls littered with beautiful concept art from all of its projects.
The office is abnormally quiet for the number of people who are hard at work. Almost everyone has their head buried in their computers as they finalize the launch plans for Fallout 4. A timer in the office ticks down to the launch date, but the time isn’t exactly correct. When director Todd Howard set it up, he entered the wrong time for the Australian launch, but it still gets the point across – Fallout 4’s release is imminent.
Howard is calm and collected when he enters the conference room that has been designated for the interviews. He looks around the room quizzically and tells me he hasn’t spent much time here. He says he doesn’t leave the development studio often, and he believes this room was once an architecture firm. When I ask him my first question, it’s clear his head is still on the present and ensuring Fallout 4 is the game the studio always wanted to make. He leans back in his chair, collects himself, and says, “I believe the first asset for Fallout 4 was created in 2009 – a week after Fallout 3’s DLC was completed.”
At that time, most of the development team began ramping up work on The Elder Scrolls V, but lead artist Istvan Pely didn’t follow them into the dragon-infested mountains just yet; he remained firmly planted in the irradiated wasteland to envision what the next Fallout project would look like – even without knowing the specifics of the forthcoming PlayStation 4 and Xbox One hardware.
“When we began Fallout 3, the first asset was the Power Armor,” Pely recalls. “It’s the iconic image. It’s on the cover of the box. That sort of represents Fallout for us. That was the T-45 Armor. We wanted to update that for Fallout 4. It’s a great way for us to simultaneously say, ‘Here’s how it’s going to be true to Fallout 3, and here’s how it’s going to be different.’”
Repeating history, Pely crafted Fallout 4’s first in-game model of the Power Armor, and upgraded it to the T-60 model. That art, created over seven years ago, is in the game today, but it underwent a number of iterations throughout the years.
Bigger and bulkier, the T-60 armor isn’t just another wearable piece of apparel that you slide over your head and shoulders. This armor is “authentic in the power armor sense,” Pely says, almost acting like a standalone vehicle. When it’s needed for war, the armor opens up, gears turn noisily as the cockpit is revealed, and the protagonist climbs in – serving as the brains and skeleton of a lumbering tank.
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