The Fallout 4 Rumor Dog

Earlier this week, Bethesda Studios (famous for its legendary Elder Scrolls series) announced that the post-apocalyptic Fallout 4 would be confirmed. Before an hour of it’s planned launch, the trailer already managed to find itself leaked accidentally through a writer at Kotaku who allegedly just pressed ‘F5’ on the Youtube channel. Some things never change.

The widely anticipated game has been plagued with rumors as far back as last year, when a disgruntled Reddit user claimed to be fired from Bethesda while accidentally leaking confidential information. Although this is a hardly believable for a myriad of reasons, the post claims to be set in post-apocalyptic Boston with the main character only being able to play as a male. Surprisingly (or maybe not?), within the first minute of the trailer we are shown a scene of a boy and his family who soon find themselves in the middle of a nuclear apocalypse. Even if the rest of the content is debatable, user ‘SandraReed’ may indeed have some element of truth in her story. That’s one rumor to take into account for Fallout 4 Fans!

On the other hand, a few hoaxes that shook up the Fallout community were immediately dispelled upon their time of creation. The ‘Germany Trademark Hoax’ claimed that a game titled Fallout: Shadow of Boston was being listed by Bethesda. The company immediately debunked this as a hoax.

Fallout teaser website TheSurvivor2299.com generated a lot of debacle until the owner of the website decided to post a message saying goodbye accompanied by a video of a sad song. Strangely enough, if you take a look at the website now you will still be able read it’s cryptic message:

“KVNGR REV ALPHA PPS VT PIZ UHMYLPVOQ CM XHWMZP. NBJB SPI’F BYQS QT D’Y BYFGEOB FI VQDYL MAQ. -NGQHT 5120- Nuclear winter has come”

Although the contents of this message are no longer relevant thanks to Bethesda having released it’s official trailer, the website owner at the time confessed to have spent almost $1000 on the website to pressure the developer into revealing something at major gaming expos. How he responded to death threats, or a call up from Bethesda PR Manager Pete Hines is anyone’s guess.

Now that we’re up to speed on some of the biggest Fallout 4 rumors, it’s time for us to introduce our own special guide. Meet Rumor dog – appropriately named after the true star of Bethesda’s 3 minute trailer. People with a keen eye for storyboarding may notice that he appears in at least 9 storyboard scenes. That’s an astounding amount of screen time.  Perhaps Bethesda thinks we love animals – well, maybe we do.

As far as the plot goes, we know that the Brotherhood are back, and that some kick-ass robot action is inevitable. There will likely be a mixture of factions from previous Fallout games as well, including NPC’s that players have a choice whether to save or let die. ‘Rumor dog’ will probably be an actual named companion that players will be able to interact with – and given how many companion mods have emerged around the Bethesda games, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the company continue implementing features to support this trend.

One of the more lamentable game design decisions we can derive from this trailer is that the game developers are still intent on using the Gamebryo engine. Aside from making the game feel very rehashed, it will be nigh incomparable to other high-end releases such as CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher 3 in terms of immersion and realism. For a game that encourages us to survive a deadly wasteland, it might be nice to have a few less ragdoll-looking animations so we can actually tell which Ghoul is dead and which one is not. Or are they both dead anyway, technically?

That’s the first release for Fallout 4 Rumor Dog! Stay tuned for more.