During a recent hands off demo for Fallout 4 here ). Although there were a few minutes during the demo’s opening that briefly skimmed across the majorly expanded SPECIAL system, it was otherwise about 20 minutes of the Lexington, Massachusetts wasteland being spray painted several shades of crimson by the exploded body parts of various ghouls and raiders.

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It was certainly a spectacular sight to behold, but also a fairly shallow one since there was little revealed in terms of plot, characters or quests, and deliberately so according to Bethesda’s VP of PR and Marketing, Pete Hines.“I would be stunned if we said anything else about the story ever again [prior to launch],” says Hines. “We’re going to let everybody experience that in the game as much as possible. But there are certain trade-offs you have to make to build some amount of awareness to what the game is offering, so you’re willing to make some sacrifices.”Fallout 4 was only officially announced in June, yet the game is set for release this November. It’s an unprecedentedly short turnaround from reveal to launch, at least in the AAA game space where games are often shown too early and subsequently struggle to sustain a marketing plan spanning years rather than months (take Ubisoft’s The Division, which just enjoyed its third year in a row at E3 and Gamescom and still won’t come out until 2016). Consequently, such protracted hype campaigns can often conspire to blow up in the faces of publishers as fan expectations either become ultimately impossible to meet, or things go the other way and enthusiasm turns to apathy.According to Hines, the decision to give Fallout 4 such a short build up from announcement to launch was made to appease numerous departments within the company, but perhaps the man with the biggest influence on the short build up was Fallout 4’s much revered game director, Todd Howard.“If you ask Todd he’d probably prefer like a week or even a day between announce and launch,” says Hines. “He tends to hate showing his stuff before it’s out because he’s a bit of a perfectionist and it takes a lot of time away from making the game to work on demos or presentations. It’s not that he doesn’t want to show fans what he’s making but every time he shows something he sees what’s wrong or what needs to be fixed.”“Ultimately we landed on six months, it felt like it worked for a game like this. We felt that it was highly anticipated. Obviously Bethesda Game Studios has a stellar reputation and it is both a Fallout 3 follow-up as well as a follow up to Skyrim which is well known throughout the world, and [we knew that] Fallout 4 would be something that would have a lot of buzz and noise around it and we didn’t need as long as you might for some other titles to kind of build that interest to launch.”Certainly the team’s focus on ensuring that Fallout 4 reaches its full potential seems unwavering. In an era where many game publishers are perhaps too eager to upsell DLC season passes to fans months prior to a game’s release, Bethesda Game Studios appears to be doubling down on the quality of the core experience first and foremost.“I can tell you with all confidence that right now the team is one hundred per cent focused on the game itself,” says Hines. “Mod support, DLC… That’s all nice, but if we don’t deliver an awesome game by November 10th our DLC plans won’t matter and our plans for mod support will be irrelevant. We have to deliver a great game [in the first place].”“That doesn’t mean [the development team] haven’t spent some amount of time thinking about what they might do [regarding Fallout 4 DLC], but honestly that’s not a focus for anybody right now.”The commitment to the game’s quality was apparent in the recent Fallout 4 demo, at least as far as the combat animations were concerned. The VATS system, for example, depicted new levels of violent dismemberment in its signature slow motion, with apparently none of the clipping or janky character models that were so often prominent in Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas.“The first-person combat, [both] the guns and melee is something the team spent a lot of time on trying to improve so that it felt like a good first-person shooter, as opposed to a ‘well it’s an RPG so it’s good enough’ approach,” says Hines. “I think they wanted to really push on the action and combat aspect because it is something that you spend so much time doing in a game like Fallout 4.”At one point a hand-cranked laser was picked up by the player and used to rearrange the limbs of a group of hapless raiders. Later, three VATS headshots were fired at point blank range, showering the insides of a burnt out supermarket with viscera while canine companion Dogmeat ambled past in search of another victim. Playing host to all the chunky ultraviolence was a game world that appeared rich with detail and diversity, not to mention interactivity. It’s another point of pride for Hines.“Every single item in the world is a real object that has physics, and can go bouncing off of walls, ceilings and floors, [or] can be picked up and put down somewhere else,” he says.“So I think [the development team] has continued to try more and new ways to control the chaos and to still allow the players this almost unlimited freedom because that’s ultimately what the game is about. Be whatever you want. Go and do whatever you want.”It certainly sounds tantalising, but beyond Fallout 4’s substantial reveal at E3 and this subsequently more narrow-focused demo, there’s not a lot for fans to cling to beyond their existing love for the franchise and their faith in Todd Howard’s team. Nor is there much time between now and launch for Bethesda to tease out much more information about the game. Yet Hines certainly seems confident that the experience that Fallout 4 provides will satisfy fans, and that the loftiest of expectations on the game come from within Bethesda rather than without.“I think Bethesda Game Studios really pushes the boundaries of what is possible in a game, in ways that other games don’t even contemplate or consider doing,” says Hines. “The team believes that this is the biggest, most ambitious game that they’ve ever made. And from the guys who made Skyrim, Fallout 3, Oblivion and Morrowind, that’s a pretty lofty goal.”In less than three short months, fans will find out just how far those boundaries have been pushed and whether or not that goal has been met. At this stage, it would appear that by building upon existing systems like VATS and SPECIAL yet keeping the game's plot largely shrouded in mystery, Fallout 4 is hopefully on track to provide an experience that is at once both familiar and foreign, much like the decimated architecture of its post-apocalyptic Boston setting.

Tristan Ogilvie is a video producer at IGN AU, and his mum thinks he's SPECIAL. He's also an extremely reluctant user of Twitter