Fallout 4 Doesn’t Use id Tech Because of Moveable Objects

Bethesda Softworks has made an impression with Fallout 4 but no one can deny that the initial impression was how it didn’t quite look as good as, say, Batman: Arkham Knight or The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. VP of marketing and PR Pete Hines offered his own reasoning for Fallout 4’s visuals, stating that no game offered the kind of interactivity that it did. Speaking to AusGamers after QuakeCon, Hines was asked whether id Tech was ever under consideration for adding that extra level of beauty.

As it turns out, it wasn’t. “No, because of moveable objects [in Fallout 4]. Doom has interactive stuff, but it doesn’t account for hundreds and thousands of little items that you can pick up and move and they’re all individual. It’s not suited for a game where you want to have thousands [of items] and clutter the world with all this stuff that’s all interactive and has physics. It’s just not what it’s for.”

That being said, id Software does contribute in other ways. “It doesn’t mean there’s not things that the id guys are doing that aren’t applicable. Like, ‘How did you solve this? In this scene, what are you doing here?’ There’s a million things on the much more granular level, like, ‘Maybe we want to add this thing to our engine or borrow this thing that you do in Doom or The Evil Within,’ or whatever, ‘And we’ll write our own version of that that works on our engine or solves our problem’.”

The huge amount of interactivity and the sheer breadth of the open world also opens up a potential can of worms…or bugs, as the case would be. However, it’s also that breadth and the level of things to interact with that “makes the game awesome, because it is real and those [objects] are real things that you can pick up and move, and you can take your bobble heads and arrange them neatly and roll wheels of cheese down a hill by the thousands. That’s part of what makes the game fun, is all of the stuff that you’re allowed to do in these virtual worlds.”

Fallout 4 will be out on November 10th for PS4, Xbox One and PC. What are your thoughts on what Bethesda is promising? Let us know in the comments.