QuakeCon 2015 is currently a thing that is happening, and Bethesda has a pretty big presence at the show, with DOOM and Fallout 4 their major talking points.
Speaking about the latter, game director Todd Howard shared some insight into the way Bethesda builds their open worlds, from conceptual art to visual effects like lightning and weather effects.
There’s lots of super-sexy terms thrown about in the video above, including ”polygonal, volumetric lighting” (phwooaar), but at the end of the day Howard says that it’s creating a memorable world to explore that’s important, rather than bells and whistles.
And - the colour blue! Fallout 3 had the destroyed-world aesthetic down pretty well, but its drab, grey-green palette meant that almost every area you stomped through looked pretty much the same.
”I think we’re so used to it, because we’ve been working on the game so long,” says Howard, ”that when people said “oh my god, there’s blue!”… and looking back at Fallout 3, there is this sameness to the environment. If you’ve been playing the game for an eight-hour stretch it can be a little depressing. So our view was - the world’s already destroyed. You’re going to get a lot of browns and greys and dust. And Istvan Pely, our lead artist, was really into calling out things for your attention that had some colour.”
Howard goes on to detail some of the advanced weather effects that players can expect, which should go further towards distinguishing areas in the game. Radiation storms can blow through the game world, masking previously clear locations with that familiar Fallout 3 haze.
Fallout 4 is set for release this November, on PC and next-gen consoles.
