Rumors of a follow-up to Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas have been circulating for years, and now Bethesda Softworks has given fans of the post-nuclear apocalypse something else to froth over.
Bethesda announced Tuesday on the Bethesda Blog that it will host its first-ever E3 Showcase in Hollywood on June 14, or two days before E3, the biggest consumer-facing video game industry event of the year that takes place in Los Angeles. E3 press conferences are where video game publishers blow lids off new game announcements, and establish what audiences can expect to see on the show floor of E3 a day or two later.
Publishers like Microsoft, Sony, and Ubisoft usually have a huge slate of games to tease and/or reveal every year at their E3 press conferences. Bethesda Softworks on the other hand has a comparatively smaller portfolio of franchises in total, so one might ask how many games it could possibly have to show in order to support an entire press conference.
Or one might suggest that a single, huge announcement could justify the time and expense of an E3 Showcase on June 14. And that, of course, meant Fallout 4 to everyone who heard the news.
Welcome to the hype train.
#FALLOUT4 IS TRENDING WORLDWIDE. pic.twitter.com/zfM9i5fu9T
— — Da⁹⁰ 🇵🇸🇸🇩🇨🇩 (@DigitalAbdullah) February 10, 2015
The Fallout franchise has been running since 1997. It transitioned from a series of isometric role-playing games on PC that have since become legendary, to a pair of first- or third-person RPGs developed in the style of Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls games. Fallout helps define what the modern RPG can accomplish. And it’s been five years since anyone’s heard anything definitive about a new Fallout game. Hence reactions like these, from Reddit:
Enjoy hope, meshed with doubt, meshed with pleading for this to be a Fallout 4 announcement.
Redditors on r/fallout are reflecting on this interview footage with Todd Howard, game director and executive producer at Bethesda Game Studios about what the studio is working on. Howard said “we’d rather say surprise, boom, here it is,” in regard to showing off Bethesda’s next game. And an E3 press conference sure is a nice place to say “Boom!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRb5opLHTTQ
And as this Redditor points out there’s always one, good argument for why Bethesda doesn’t need to hold its first ever E3 press conference to announce Fallout 4.
Twitter has also had some time to process the news, of course. A small sampling of recent activity on the Fallout 4 hashtag.
if i get fallout 4 before 2016 i wont graduate college.#Fallout4
— C (@ThAt_dude_FResh) February 11, 2015
https://twitter.com/Graduated_Gamer/status/565536941236834304
If @BethesdaStudios dose not announce #Fallout4 at #E32015 I will boycott all Bethesda products, coming from someone who is a lifelong fan
— Nathan Reinert (@OrangeGlaze1997) February 11, 2015
Reading @Bethblog will be at E3. Dare I think of #fallout4 ? pic.twitter.com/gGWXW9TU2B
— Chris Carter (@the_sarge1984) February 10, 2015
This hype train will only get larger, and louder, until Bethesda’s event takes place because there are too many people who want to recreate that first moment of stepping into the Capital Wasteland in Fallout 3, for things to work out any other way.
Illustration via Bethesda Softworks
