Now that Bethesda has finally announced Fallout 4, all eyes are now on the company's E3 plans and, beyond that, the game's eagerly-awaited release. As it stands right now, however, no one knows when the next entry in the series will hit store shelves, but many people are pinning their hopes on a 2015 release. This is largely just wishful thinking, but even Bethesda's own moves have inadvertently hinted at such a release window.

Shortly after Fallout 4's announcement and accompanying trailer, the official Bethesda Store was updated with a new listing that allowed people to pre-order the game, and that listing featured a "TBA 2015" label. The excitement and speculation may have slowed a bit after that, but the page was soon altered, with the updated version sporting a simple "to be announced." Why change the information on the page unless you wanted to save the news for an upcoming event?

Heading to the pre-order page now makes it very clear that no release date has been announced, with the item description saying "the current estimated ship date is TBA."

And that would be all well and good, and people could possibly move on from their wishful thinking, but today Amazon put up its own listing for the post-apocalyptic title. Meaning the speculation train gets to keep running a bit longer.

Amazon's listing has the PC, PS4, and Xbox One versions of the game up and ready to be used for pre-orders, but unlike Bethesda's store, it features a release date: the often used December 31, 2015 - which is always a placeholder date. That said, the "2015" part of it is the most important aspect, because it serves as even more evidence that Fallout 4 may, in fact, be set to release before the year's end.

For comparison, both Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas launched in the month of October, so it wouldn't be too far out there to believe the upcoming Boston-set game would also release in the same month (to keep the trend going) or at some point in the Fall.

Either way, the best opportunity to learn more about the game, and whatever date planned for it, will definitely be this Sunday, June 14 - the day Bethesda's E3 2015 press conference takes place.

When Fallout 4 does launch, though, it will come to the PC, PS4, and Xbox One. Last-gen players will have to go on without the game, however, as the older older hardware wouldn't be able to handle it.

Source: Amazon