In an interview with Metro, Bethesda’s Pete Hines discusses all things Fallout 4. One element that stuck out as particularly interesting, was the discussion surrounding the announcement of Fallout 4. Almost nothing about the game’s reveal has been done traditionally, with Bethesda keeping it under wraps until just a few months before its release date.
Announced just prior to E3 2015, and then given a full rundown at the show proper, Fallout 4 was already only a few months away from hitting store shelves. According to Hines this was not only how the team wanted it, but it actually could have been a much shorter lead time if they had fully gotten their way.
“There’s a couple of reasons for all that,” Hines says in regards to how short the time is between announcement and release. “The brevity of the period between announce and launch was really a function of how much can we actually get away with? ‘Cause if you ask Todd he’ll just say, ‘Can we announce it and release it that day?’. Like, he never wants anybody to see his stuff before it’s out.”
Hines gives other reasons why there was so little marketing right up until the E3 2015 unveiling. “And everything that you do is a burden on the dev team. Every video that you do, every demo that you do is taking some amount of time from the team to say, ‘We need to capture this, we need to put this together, what are we gonna show? Oh wait, that’s not working in this build ’cause we just entered this stuff in…’
“So it’s a burden on them to be able to deliver some demo for some show, when their real goal is, ‘I gotta have a game in everybody’s hands on November 10’. And so by shortening it you’re reducing the number of beats you need to maintain momentum.”
Fallout 4 hits PS4, Xbox One, and PC on November 10th.
Published: Aug 20, 2015 08:15 am