We know it’s hard to accept, but parts of Fallout 4 didn’t turn out exactly the way its creators intended. There are vestigial pieces of content — weapons, locations, characters, art — that show some of the ideas that developer Bethesda Softworks had to cut for some reason or another. A fascinating new video report from Kotaku has surfaced some of that content, piecing together some missions and other more ephemeral ideas showing how much larger and more dense the game could have been.
Some of the items come through in simple concept art, but the video also showed how digging into the game’s files can yield references to new missions, such “20 Leagues Under the Sea,” which would have taken place in an underwater vault. Similarly, some locations in the game might have played larger, more important roles. A raider den called “The Combat Zone,” for example, was originally going to serve as an arena where players could play gladiator for caps, and might have featured a longer storyline that fleshed out a narrative for one of the players’ companion characters.
Of course, Fallout 4 (like its predecessors) has plenty of intentional easter eggs, winky references, and secrets sprinkled throughout the Commonwealth, including transcendentalist raiders at Walden Pond, Nirnroot from the Elder Scrolls series, and, of course, a rogue UFO. Meanwhile, one player has taken to the command line to create his own crazy scenarios … Ok, so he’s really just making the game’s enemies and NPCs fight each other, but it can get pretty epic.
Though it is not in the video, the report added something about a “trash collecting game,” which may have just been too meta for Fallout 4, a game where players spend most of their time going through other people’s garbage.
