When working on the upcoming Fallout 4‘s shooting mechanics, developers at Bethesda Game Studios used Bungie’s shared world shooter Destiny as a reference point, according to Game Informer. With Destiny regarded as many as having some of the best gunplay in the biz, this is good news indeed.
The always vocal Fallout 4 director Todd Howard had this to say about the development of the post apocalyptic epic’s gunplay.
“The main difference in the way we develop is that we will develop with as many knobs as possible… We’re always thinking of scale. We’re not a team that is just going to make eight guns and spend forever on one gun. We knew we were going to have thousands, so we needed to develop a gun system that had all of the dials.”
Helping with Fallout 4‘s gunplay is Josh Hamrick, who left Bungie after six years to join Bethesda. He’s a senior systems designer, and his primarily role has been “focused intently on tuning firearms.” It’s great to see the studio making such an effort to focus on the shooting aspects of Fallout 4, as it was an oft criticised part of Fallout 3. Howard himself described these mechanics, in a choice sound bite, as “meh.”
“We started out with Fallout 4 knowing that, look, we can’t apologize for being a role-playing game… we have to build a first-person shooter, and it needs to be a really, really good one. We spent a lot of time on that.”
VATS will return in Fallout 4. The system allows players to essentially stop time to target specific body points, spending AP to attempt to cripple the limbs of enemies to effect their prowess in combat. While in Fallout 3, this mode was often a crutch for players to work around the clunky shooting mechanics of the game when battles got intense, Howard promises that in Fallout 4, it’ll still be a viable combat tactic.
“We want players to have the edge if they use the VATS system. If you’re building your character for VATS, it’s really powerful.”
Bethesda also enlisted the help of DOOM and RAGE developer id Software for Fallout 4‘s shooting mechanics. With so much prestige involved, it looks like the studio is really going the extra mile to double down on the few problems that existed in the stellar Fallout 3.
Fallout 4 arrives on November 10 across PC, Xbox One, and Playstation 4. Will you be picking it up? Let us know down below.
