You Could Spend 400 Hours in Fallout 4

When Fallout 4 was officially announced during Bethesda's E3 showcase, the crowds went wild.

But it wasn't until the game was shown off proper that it called for celebration. Fallout 4's demonstration to the press revealed an absolutely massive game with tons of content simply oozing from its pores: crafting, the usual Fallout exploration with a post-apocalyptic storyline, and memorable characters. It's positively enormous, and now the game's lead producer Jeff Gardiner is attesting that he's played the game for 400 hours so far and still hasn't seen all there is to be seen in-game. If that's the case, we could playing this game for months to come.

When speaking to OXM (via GameSpot) in a recent interview, Gardiner went into detail so he could further clarify his statement, speaking on the game's crafting system and how players would need to search high and low in-game for specific items required for both puzzle-solving and item creation.

"It's all common sense visual stuff. If it doesn't connect to the generator, the power doesn't work. You can actually flag stuff to say, 'I'm looking for this stuff because I want to make this' which means that when you're scavenging anything that fulfills the requirement gets flagged in the world. When you connect stuff to the computer terminal you have a lot of control and sort of fine tuning. If you've got something that plays music, you can actually define how it's playing music."

It sounds like a whole lot of content (a surprising amount of content, honestly) but one has to wonder how much of it is travel time or reused quests. If that number is low, then 400 hours remains an impressive number just the same. Perhaps the crafting system is much more robust than we gave it credit for initially, and it's really one of the largest parts of the game. You can't discredit the ability to go and visit other bases and customizing your own bases, either -- a feature that's been sorely needed in the Fallout universe for quite some time. Customization is king, after all.

Fallout 4 seems poised to take scraps of what made each of the game's iterations shine and implement them in different ways. And the addition of the Fallout Shelter app that made an enormous splash after it released directly after the Bethesda showcase has helped turn the spotlight on the upcoming November 10 release as well, as the game will launch on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC. Those who preorder the game on PlayStation 4 will receive a special theme for their trouble, as well.