A few months ago we interviewed Bethesda’s VP of Marketing, Pete Hines, about the company’s ambitions and plans for virtual reality — including Fallout 4. He was decidedly cautious and was careful not to say too much, a sentiment that’s often reflected throughout Bethesda’s senior leadership, and is a big reason why they maintain such a strong fan base as a publisher and developer. They tend not to over-promise and often over-deliver.
During that interview, Hines stated that Fallout 4 VR was not going to be a small vertical slice of the experience, or an abbreviated version of the blockbuster title. Instead, he said it would be, “a standalone VR version of Fallout 4. It’s the entire game.”
Yesterday, in an interview with Glixel, Todd Howard, Bethesda’s prolific game designer, echoes the same sentiment, stating that they “definitely are” creating the entirety of Fallout 4 in VR. Howard is the creative powerhouse mind behind The Elder Scrolls IV and V, Oblivion and Skyrim respectively, as well as Fallout 3 and Fallout 4.
When asked if they were “trying to put all of Fallout 4 in VR”, he goes on to say:
We definitely are. The core experience, meaning you put on the headset and you’re standing in the world of Fallout and can go where you want, just that little bit is every bit as cool as you hope it would be. Once we did that, we were like, “OK, we gotta see where this goes.”
We’re not so worried about how many we’re going to sell or what the market is. That will all sort itself out. We have an opportunity to make something really unique. We’d rather do that than make some other tiny experience. I don’t think that’s what people want from us.
When we went hands-on with Fallout 4 VR back at E3 this year, we came away cautiously optimistic for the future. The build we saw used a teleportation-based movement system, which is the commonly used format, but it doesn’t translate to the action-packed open-world atmosphere for Fallout very well. Hopefully next time we see the game in action, it will be even more polished and primed with a better locomotion solution.
