Fallout 4

"Welcome Home"

Fallout 4 is an upcoming game being developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks.

Setting
The setting has been confirmed to be Boston, Massachusetts from the trailer released on June 3, 2015. The trailer shows the Paul Revere Monument, the USS Constitution, as well as the Massachusetts State House with its unique Golden Dome. Scollay Square, the Bunker Hill memorial, and Fenway Park are also visible in the trailer. Possible areas within Fenway Park include (from left to right) Swatters Custom Baseball store, Diamond City Surplus, Power Noodles, and Chem-I-Care. Fenway Park is likely renamed Diamond City, as seen in the surplus store name, and the white diamond symbol seen on the outside of the building and on the Diamond City Surplus store.

Vault 111 is likely to be somewhere in this region, as it was seen in the trailer. Further, a character wearing the Vault 111 jumpsuit carrying what looks to be a modified laser rifle can be seen meeting a dog and starting on a road leading away from the camera, a motif seen in various previous installments.

The setting will also include mountains and the out-lands of Boston's city limits.

Development
Initially, in 2004, Bethesda Softworks licensed from Interplay Entertainment the rights to create and publish three Fallout games (Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 4). Later, in 2007, Bethesda purchased the entire franchise, and Interplay licensed back from Bethesda the rights to a Fallout MMORPG. The legal dispute is now over, with Bethesda Softworks and its in-house development studio retaining the rights to all of the Fallout franchise, including an MMO.

In 2008, Bethesda's Pete Hines said: "The whole reason we went out and acquired the license and that we now own Fallout is that we clearly intended to make more than one." He also added: "This is not something we're going to do once and then go away and never do it again. When that will be or how long that will be God only knows, but we acquired it specifically because we wanted to own it and develop it and work on it like we do with The Elder Scrolls."

Release date
Fallout 4's release date has been confirmed by Bethesda to be November 10, 2015 at their 2015 E3 press conference.

In August 2010, Todd Howard revealed in an interview with Eurogamer that Bethesda was working on two projects; one had been in development for two years (beginning after Fallout 3 was released), and the other was still in pre-production. It is now known that the title farther along in development was The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. There is still no confirmation on what the second game is.

On January 9, 2013, the voice actor behind Three Dog (Erik Todd Dellums) was given permission by Bethesda to hint towards his appearance soon. On his Twitter account, he stated, "To all my #Fallout3 and #ThreeDog fans: There may be more of the Dog coming! Fingers crossed!" However, in July of the same year, Dellums tweeted that the game he is working on is not being produced by Bethesda Softworks, therefore it was not the anticipated new Fallout title.

On April 15, 2013, Bethesda Game Studios announced on Bethlog that they had completed all new content for Skyrim and were moving the studio's attention to an as of yet unknown title that had previously been in pre-production. Although Bethesda Softworks did announce The Evil Within during the same week, this is being developed by another studio and will have no direct impact on whatever project Bethesda Game Studios is currently working on.

On February 18 2014 Todd Howard was interviewed on Rock paper shotgun, and said that a new game announcement would be very far away. "We don’t [have a timeframe for our next game announcement]," he said, "but I think it’s gonna be a while." He is forever positive and says "PC is resurgent," enthused Howard. "Skyrim did better than we've ever done on PC by a large, large number. And that's where the mods are. That feeds the game for a long time. And it's exciting that the new consoles are very PC-like. That opens up avenues for us going forward to do things that we've wanted to do in the past. There are kind of random ideas we're working on right now, and it's like, "Wow, I think there's potential here to do some really cool stuff."

On June 2, 2015 a countdown timer was set on Bethesda's Fallout website expiring on June 3 at 10:00 AM EDT.

On June 3, 2015, seconds before 10:00 AM EDT, the Fallout 4 trailer was released on YouTube. The Fallout website, seconds after 10:00 AM EDT also debuted in full Fallout 4 style including a working teaser phone number, previously used during the Fallout 3 release.

Bethesda's first ever E3 showcase, in which the official release date was announced, took place on June 14, 2015 at 7PM PST. It was able to be watched live on YouTube and Twitch.