5. A Ton Of Environmental Storytelling
Something that comes with increased visual fidelity and far more in-depth environments, is the notion of environmental storytelling; a hook that games like Gone Home and
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture hang varying degrees of their appeal on. For Fallout, Bethesda have made a point of filling the world with as many visual touches as possible. Broken billboards, homes littered with personal items and bits of clothing, fridges stocked with food and other things more in line with what we've seen in The Last of Us' suburban areas. The idea is to paint a society in a particular technological prime, ripped away from their homes, and the aftermath that followed. One of the most resonant images in Fallout 3 was seeing something like the Washington Monument blasted apart, and it appears Bethesda are building on how impactful these elements can really be.