If you’re like me, you’ve been aching through the hoaxes and heartache in anticipation of a Fallout 4 announcement by privately-owned Bethesda Softworks. After the awesome, lengthy, hoax of survivor2299.com and Bethesda’s nonchalant gloss over the Fallout topic at the last E3, there may be a real ray of hope in the light of employment…
If you’ll remember the hoax from last year, a site popped up on November 14, survivor2299.com, that appeared to be hosted by ZeniMax Media and had a cryptic message in code that, when deciphered, read “THE INSTITUTE IS SEALED. THEY WON’T HELP US I’M HEADING TO BLACK ROW. -TBNLS 5120-.” Redditors and the whole gaming community were put on on the edge of their seats as the clock on the site continued to countdown and new coded messages popped up in the meantime, seemingly dropping hints of the environment that the next Fallout would be set in. I followed Yong Yea’s YouTube posts religiously, as I wanted it to be true! It was only a matter of time before an announcement of either the hoax or the confirmed development of Fallout 4 was to surface-and it was the admission of a hoax by the creator of survivor2299. We weren’t even mad about finding out it was a hoax, as it was a great gift to satiate our growing boredom with Fallout 3, which won Game of the Year back in the late 2000s!
Last November, at the same time as the hoaxy madness had everyone in an uproar, Bethesda had open positions for User Interface Designer, Future Generation Console Programmer, Concept Artist, Game Programmer, Quest Designer, Level Designer, Senior World Artist and Character Artist. I can’t help but direct my attention back to the (hopefully in-progress) development of the new Fallout game, and the fact that Bethesda, as of May of this year, has open positions for game-play testers in Dallas after the release of Elder Scrolls Online, Wolfenstein: The New Order, and The Evil Within, all games talked about at last year’s E3. Hopefully the fact that they’re asking for game-play testers could mean that Fallout 4 is in the final stages of production!
Pete Hines, VP of Bethesda and PR guru, has not exactly denied its development-but also hasn’t satiated our want for any morsel of information about Fallout 4. Meanwhile, in a fit of angst directed toward Bethesda, a petition to end Bethesda’s silence has surfaced on Change.Org while vague articles are trying to pull meaning about the development of the game from anywhere they possibly can. Twitter is a buzz with allegedly ‘leaked’ photos, and memos have surfaced (like anyone sends printed memos anymore) that dictate that there is to be no mention of Fallout by Bethesda at the E3 conference next month, leading me to side with Fred Nelson when he says that somebody at Bethesda is risking life and limb just to tell us something we probably already knew – We are not going to hear anything from Todd [Howard] and his team any time soon and that a formal Fallout announcement could happen eventually, but I hope sooner rather than later.
