Bethesda had already confirmed last month the details regarding Fallout 4 and its new survival mode. Now we’re finally getting information straight from the horse’s mouth regarding the perilous journey players will partake in when exploring the wasteland. Along with an overview of the mode’s design philosophies, there is a breakdown of what exactly will be in the mode. On top of this, Steam users can access the Survival mode beta right now and provide feedback.
What I found most interesting was the comparisons to Dark Souls which Bethesda used as shorthand for how they handled design philosophy for the mode. “…we wanted to force you to make interesting choices. We did that by bringing more contrasting motivations to Fallout 4 using the type of circular systems you might find in a game like Dark Souls” states Bethesda, and ultimately leads to their four design choices: strategy, exploration, resource management, and role playing. These four pillars lead to the game’s more grueling features. We’ve already detailed them before in our prior post, but if you want to hear it straight from Bethesda, click here for the list.
There’s some fleshing out of why decisions were made, such as medicine for radiation leaving players more vulnerable to illness. RadAway becomes a thing used by necessity and not just because you can use it. In fact, most things which are generally helpful may not be as helpful as they were before. Even sleeping in beds can have variation in effectiveness – since sleeping on a real bed is hard to come by, Survival mode will reward players for spending money on renting out a room with a bed, or using their home base. Or even using workshops more often to craft real beds.
Most of the new features sound weirdly appealing, in a masochistic sort of way. I would not be surprised to see features such as fast travel being stripped from Survival mode help showcase the game’s world in a way that wasn’t really processed before. Exploration becomes key and finding somewhere good to sleep becomes rewarding.
There’s no word on when the console versions of Survival mode will come out, but Bethesda is aiming to use the player feedback from the Steam beta to help shape the other versions. So if you have Fallout 4 on Steam, it may be worth jumping into the beta and helping out.
You can find our review of Fallout 4 here, and Fallout 4‘s first piece of downloadable content, Automatron, is now available to download.
Source: Bethesda
