E3 still isn’t officially underway for another day or so, but Bethesda sure wasn’t gonna wait around for other companies to break their news. The developer and publisher took to the stage last night to promote its upcoming games, including sequels to Dishonored and Doom. But for many people, those games paled in importance when compared to Fallout 4 — the long-awaited sequel to Bethesda’s revival of the classic Interplay-developed computer RPG series.

(Yeah, I know: a sequel to a sequel that revived a series that already had a sequel. Games have a convoluted history — bear with me.)

When it comes to Bethesda’s style of immersive, open-world, and wildly popular RPGs, Aaron and I come from very different schools of thought. Aaron’s the type who loves to get lost and forge his own story in the fantasy wilderness of The Elder Scrolls or the knowing satire of a nuked-out America. To me, those things sound great on paper, but Bethesda’s quality can never keep pace with its ambition.

But now Fallout 4 is coming. And you know what? It actually sounds like a really good idea whose time has come. Again.

Let’s figure out why.

 

Intro/outro music: "Sunrise" by WJLP. Used under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC 3.0 license.