Ambitious Fallout 4 overhaul mod Fallout: Cascadia does more than just bring back the skill and dialogue systems from previous games in the series. It's a standalone story that lets you explore a huge map—roughly 80 square kilometres—set in and around the ruins of Seattle, Washington. Judging by the new teaser trailer, above, that landscape is going to be varied, detailed, and very pretty indeed.
Its towns and cities look suitably dense, with plenty of buildings to explore, but there's a definite emphasis on natural environments. You'll traipse through dense forests, stumble across diners in the woods and catch some stunning sunsets while walking around lakes.
The team told Kotaku this week that they're using vegetation to make it feel very different to the base game. It's set decades later, which means natural life has started to flourish again. “We wanted to create a world where nature shows subtle signs of having returned to a more natural order," the mod's director said. "We want to create an environment where you can wander into [an] area and forget what happened to the world for a little while while maintaining that ‘post-apocalyptic’ feel we’ve all come to know and love.”
It could prove a refreshing change from Fallout's previous worlds. And if nature has been able to recover, it'd be great if civilisation had moved on from Fallout 4, too, with more NPCs to interact with and generally more signs of life. Let's wait and see.
The mod doesn't yet have a release date, but don't expect it anytime this year.
OG Fallout lead Tim Cain explains just how much thought went into the timeline, and why canned beans were key: 'Post-apocalypse, but not so far post- that everything's collapsed and everyone's dead'
This mod puts Wordle on all the hacking terminals in Fallout: New Vegas, and even gives you XP for guessing the words right
