In the previous game, subtitled New Vegas, players are told the protagonist is a courier apart from that, no other information is given. This does two things: Firstly, it sidelines the female character, and presents the male as the default, intended protagonist of the game (an opening speech by both of them could have been interesting) and secondly, it creates a character before the player has had a chance to.Ĭharacter creation has always been a key element of Fallout, with the playable character often being a blank state that players fill in for themselves. For the first time, there is no song, and the opening monologue is spoken by the game’s playable male character. War never changes.” Fallout 4 changes this. After the song ends, the monologue begins, with the video-game-famous intonation, “War. Previous games in the Fallout series have begun with a maudlin tune from the ’30s, ’40s, or ’50s, wailing away over a series of grainy images of a destroyed world.
There’s a marked difference as soon as the game’s introductory film begins. Fostering an emotional attachment to what has come before is not something that sits easily with the game’s satirical take on that previous world. But to get the player to feel the same is difficult, and the game doesn’t exactly reconcile this newfound sentiment with its irreverent tone. You play as someone who lived and loved this old world, somebody who has an emotional attachment to it. Fallout 4 is the most nostalgic game in the series, pining for its its lost world. And allowing the player to be a part of this world, even briefly, breaks this distance down completely. That pre-war world, untouched by nuclear fallout, has never been shown, and because of this the series has always managed to uphold an ironic distance between the wastelands the player explores and the past these spaces gesture back to.īut Fallout 4 is different it begins before the bombs. But the series has only ever revealed this in the clues left behind in its various wastelands. The Fallout series has, since its inception, hinted at a world before nuclear annihilation that resembled the 1950s in its culture and its design, rather than the 2070s, which is the decade in which Fallout’s “Great War”-a two-hour series of nuclear blasts that decimated the planet-took place. Back before the bombs fell, and before the world of the Fallout series took on its mutated, feral, apocalyptic form.
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