Bethesda has confirmed that you won’t hear any Fallout 4 story teasers until the game’s launch.
Aside from the main Fallout 4 reveal at E3 2015, Bethesda has only shown off one other demo behind closed doors at QuakeCon and Gamescom. That demo focused on combat, the expanded SPECIAL system and customisation options.
There wasn’t even a whiff of any story content.
Apparently that’s deliberate though, according to Bethesda’s VP of Marketing Pete Hines speaking to IGN.
“I would be stunned if we said anything else about the story ever again [prior to launch],” explained Hines. “We’re going to let everybody experience that in the game as much as possible.”
“But there are certain trade-offs you have to make to build some amount of awareness to what the game is offering, so you’re willing to make some sacrifices.”
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Fallout 4 was announced at E3 2015, much to the delight of fans. They were even more excited when it was revealed the game’s release date was as close as November 10.
That’s a pretty speedy turnover, particurlarly in the AAA games’ market. Usually games are shown off years in advance to give publishers and developers a chance to market them properly.
According to Hines though, that’s the way that Todd Howard (Game Director) and his team like to work.
“If you ask Todd he’d probably prefer like a week or even a day between announce and launch,” added Hines. “He tends to hate showing his stuff before it’s out because he’s a bit of a perfectionist and it takes a lot of time away from making the game to work on demos or presentations. It’s not that he doesn’t want to show fans what he’s making but every time he shows something he sees what’s wrong or what needs to be fixed.”
“Ultimately we landed on six months; it felt like it worked for a game like this. We felt that it was highly anticipated. Obviously Bethesda Game Studios has a stellar reputation and it is both a Fallout 3 follow-up as well as a follow up to Skyrim, which is well known throughout the world. And [we knew that] Fallout 4 would be something that would have a lot of buzz and noise around it and we didn’t need as long as you might for some other titles to kind of build that interest to launch.”
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
