When Fallout 4 was first officially announced back in June, I had expected that Bethesda would supply us with a steady stream of gameplay videos in the months leading up to its release, much like CD Projekt did with The Witcher 3. Instead, all we got was a bunch of rehashed snippets from the game's E3 presentation and a series of (admittedly well-done) animated shorts describing Bethesda's new streamlined take on the SPECIAL system. The press-exclusive gameplay video they showed at Gamescom was never properly revealed to the public, either.

What was going on with Fallout 4? That question may have been answered when retail copies of the game began leaking out to the public at the beginning of the month, a week and a half before its official release date - a turn of events which made Pete Hines a very unhappy man. In addition to spoiling the game's big twist to a hilarious degree, what those leaks revealed was that Fallout 4 was, well, a rather humble-looking game - not much more than a souped up Fallout 3 with dialog wheels. Let me remind you that this is a next-gen title that had been in development for over four years.

The game's launch trailer, which has been out for a few days now, may give you an idea of what I'm talking about. Watch as the Sole Survivor begins his journey to unite the factions of post-apocalyptic Boston against the sinister forces of the Michigan Institute of Technology. Tough moral choices no doubt abound:


So yeah, Fallout 4 is out now. You can get it for $60 on Steam, along with a $30 Season Pass for DLC that has yet to be announced. Is it going to be as successful as Fallout 3 and Skyrim were? Or will the gaming public finally realize that Bethesda are in fact a rather middling mid-sized developer who, by means of oversized marketing budgets, have been successfully masquerading as an AAA studio for the past decade? Well, a few people might. The game's still going to sell twenty zillion copies, though.