Bethesda recently held an exclusive Fallout 4 panel at QuakeCon 2015, tons of new information from which has emerged online. While the event wasn’t livestreamed, we’ve learned about the game’s romance options, character progression, and more.
Players will have twelve companions in the game, some of whom they can romance regardless of gender. Game Director Todd Howard said:
You can have one [companion] at a time, and we wanted to have a lot of different archetypes and we track how they feel about you. With the humans, it can even lead to romances, and that is regardless of whatever gender you’re playing.
One of the companions, Dogmeat, is actually based on the Lead Designer’s dog as Bethesda wanted the character to closely represent a real life dog. In Fallout 4, Dogmeat can be given various commands such as retrieving objects and looting enemies. Other companions include Mr. Handy, Preston Garvey, and Piper – the newly revealed female companion.
Speaking of Mr Handy aka Codsworth, Bethesda said that he’s voiced by Stephen Russell, who is also the voice behind Thief protagonist Garrett. Since Mr Handy can say our name, Russell had to record “thousands” of popular names as well as some other interesting names that people are likely to name their characters. Some of these include:
– Ms. Angela
– Mr. Matthew
– Mr. McFly
– Ms. Katniss
– Mr. Boobies
– Mr. Fuckface
With regard to character progression, Bethesda confirmed that players will be able to distribute points between the SPECIAL (Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, Luck) system as always, but in Fallout 4, distribution of points will have a much larger impact on a player’s character. As players level up, they’ll be able to unlock or upgrade perks, which are now tied to SPECIAL stats. Each stat has 10 perks, corresponding to the 10 points available for that stat. In other words, the game comes with 70 base perks including some old and new, and taking into account all the ranks and upgrades, the progression system will have 275 unlockables.
According to Howard:
When you’re coming out of the Vault, if you’ve decided to go right to the 10 on a stat, and lower on your other ones, you can be picking some really cool perks. And we’ve found that playing the game over time, this gets us some really cool play styles, and it changes what you want to pick when.
Other information revealed during the panel is as follows:
- The game features a ton of weapons including sniper rifles, wind-up laser shotguns, Fat Man, and makeshift weapons.
- Players can opt for stealth action and hacks to avoid conflict.
- Lockpick system is similar to the one in Fallout 3.
- Having enemy factions go against each other will significantly impact the game.
- Exposure to radiation will reduce players’ maximum health and will continue to do so until radiation is no longer in our system.
We’ll continue to update our readers as more information about the game becomes available.
Fallout 4 launches on November 10 for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.
