Fallout 4 aims to steal the game of the year title for 2015 with the return to a beloved franchise and the implementation of tons of new features. The long-awaited Bethesda sequel is loaded with content including hundreds of perks and no level cap to mark a clean end to the adventure in the wasteland. The new crafting feature is sure to keep the more creative players busy for hundreds of hours and the series' first attempt at a romance option in the story should help make the main narrative in Fallout 4 even more engaging than usual.
Although Fallout 4 will be the first time the current era of the franchise has attempted to make a romance system work, the development team has explored the idea in the past. America's desert playground, Las Vegas, has a ton of cultural history related to hasty weddings and romances and the team behind New Vegas almost introduced a romance system into that game back in 2010.
Josh Sawyer, Fallout: New Vegas lead designer, talked about the potential for romance in New Vegas in an interview with PCGamer at PAX last weekend. The designer explained that the team wanted to have the protagonist get married after a night of drinking as a side plot, but ultimately decided to cut that story for a number of reasons.
“We actually had some ideas for characters that would… like in one story draft we had, Cass would get drunk with the protagonist and then would wake up with The King having married them at The King’s School of Impersonation.”
“That seemed very Vegas, but we were also like, that’s kind of a complicated series of events, so we decided not to do it. But it’s also in the vein of the Fallout 2 more humorous romance, rather than in-depth and serious. It’ll be interesting to see how Bethesda approaches that in Fallout 4.”
Sawyer is definitely right that introducing romance into a game like Fallout is in-depth and serious. There's a delicate balance between humor and drama and it's crucial that the  romance system matches the tone of the game and doesn't break the immersion. Every other feature in Fallout 4 looks fantastic, so we have faith that Bethesda will deliver on this front as well.
The side story that Sawyer describes for New Vegas sounds like a lot of fun, but we agree that it seems just a touch too silly to fit in with the rest of that game. Fallout definitely has a great sense of humor, but a romance system is a big feature in incorporate just to make a joke about Vegas weddings.
Do you think romance would have felt out of place in Fallout: New Vegas? How do you think it will go in Fallout 4? Let us know in the comments.
Fallout 4 is set to release on November 10, 2015 for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
Source:Â PCGamer