Besides the graphics not being all that new, one of the most abiding takeaways of all the Fallout 4 footage so far is that it looks strikingly similar. New Vegas, at least, explored new vistas thanks to a different location to Fallout 3's Washington. The fourth instalment is nominally set in Boston, but the desert all looks the same after a nuclear apocalypse. Which means that the world of Fallout 4 doesn't look all that different from Fallout 3, which players have already poured hours and hours of time into traversing. Being presented with a huge open world to explore is exciting, so long as it's something new and unfamiliar but in the case of Fallout 4, it doesn't look like it is. Obviously there will be new environments, enemies, whatever, but all the Fallout 4 stuff so far has focussed on the things that remain the same. It's hard to get particularly excited at the thought of wandering across a big open plain plagued by Super Mutants and loose bottle caps when you already did that for forty hours. War never changes but, from the looks of it, neither does Bethesda's level designers - or their idea of what a post-apocalyptic America looks like.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
