[Can't wait to play Fallout 4? Neither can we. Check out the mod's we'd most like to see while you wait.]
To the surprise of pretty much everyone, Bethesda announced at E3 that Fallout 4 will be out on November 10, forgoing the extended, sometimes years-long pre-launch campaigns we usually see with big game releases. Pete Hines, Bethesda's VP of PR and Marketing, told GamesRadar it was able to pull off that particular mic drop moment because the game is "pretty close to being done."
That shouldn't come as any great surprise; as Hines himself pointed out, if you say you're going to ship a game like Fallout 4 in five months, it better be just about finished. But he also said that the studio was confident it could get away with such a small window in which to promote the game because it was already such a hype magnet.
"If we didn’t feel like that was enough time to generate the excitement that we expected and the interest that we wanted, then we would have announced it earlier," he said. "So part of it is because we felt like it was a big enough title that we could get away with it."
That too makes sense. A new Fallout was clearly in the works—game studios don't just abandon their biggest franchises—and there were enough fake teases (one or two of which were very convincing) kicking around that Bethesda could leave that kind of low-level buzz generation to the fan base. After all, why get in the way of a self-sustaining PR campaign—especially if you're having a good time? "It’s really fun to get this far into development and not say anything and then go 'Boo! Here’s all this stuff. Here’s what we’re up to'," Hines said. "Which isn’t even all the full monty, it's just a big wide picture."
