Fallout 4

[Professor Bear]

They had multiple variations on each of the three endings possible for New Vegas, and they were all equally underwhelming - there was never the sense - as there was in Fallout 3 - that your journey had been leading to any of those resolutions.

[Theblazeuk]

I think the major flaw with New Vegas (bugs aside) was that Vegas never felt like a strong enough location to care about. Too few people made it into another ghost town, rather than the shining city of lights in the wasteland that it was supposed to be. I really didn't care who ran it in the end though I enjoyed mucking around in Nevada.

[Goaty]

Wow... Fallout 4 will be 400 hours!

[J.Smith]

Wow... Fallout 4 will be 400 hours!

This is probably true of their other games though, surely? Or at least once all their expansions have been released on top of an already big base game. What I'll be more interested to hear about once it's been out for a while is just how good the content is overall because my experience with Bethesda's own games - Fallout 3 and some of the Elder Scrolls - is that they don't balance the size of their game worlds and the quality scattered throughout them very well at all. There's other problems I've had as well which has led to me losing interest every time but that, I think, is of most importance to get right, which I don't think they have done in the past. But they do keep a close eye on the modding community and, if they're sensible, then they probably know the things that Obsidian did far better in New Vegas than their own Fallout game, so I remain hopeful about this one, even if I won't be pre-ordering it or anything.

What I'll be far more interested in, especially now that they've similarly suggested that their game takes a huge amount of time to get through, is how gamers and journalists will react to the game in the wake of The Witcher 3, which has been praised endlessly for being as high quality a game as it is a stupidly big one, a sentiment I certainly side with from all I've played of it.

[Theblazeuk]

How can you put a time frame on an open world game with active spawns?

If you set off from one corner of the wasteland to the rest and kill everything in your path, there will still be something to kill when you get back to square one.

[Professor Bear]

It's hard to put a clock on how many game hours you'll get from something like this, as I missed a whole bunch of hours of game in my first playthrough of New Vegas, as I wandered into a town where a later part of the story took place and it just skipped the bits I'd missed.  Likewise, if you head due east after leaving Vault 101 in Fallout 3, you can find and open the hidden entrance to the vault where your dad is, skipping roughly half of the main game storyline (no Megaton, GNR, Museums, Monuments, or Rivet City quests).
This will ideally just be a big sandbox, as most fans will play through at least twice anyway, either to mop up trophies, to see what happens if you play as an utter scumbag or as a different gender, or just to try the game with dedicated character builds.

[Link Prime]

to see what happens if you play as an utter scumbag

One imagines this will be your first play-through. 

The ability to ignore / skip huge portions of the game came in very handy for my 'Hardcore Mode' trophy hunt on New Vegas.

[ThryllSeekyr]

The game is now available on Steam, but I won't sparing the money for this just yet.

[Professor Bear]

It's only available to pre-order.

[Greg M.]

Still 69* days till release. Not that I'm counting.

*69, dude!

[Goaty]

That your age?

[Greg M.]

That your age?

Feels like it some days.

[ThryllSeekyr]

Pre-Purchased

[Grugz]

Finally! i'll be able to get this thanks to my wonderful wife! even if I can only  play it at Christmas . the dogs been made to be un killable but I wont be using him that much as my real dog goes nuts at dogs cats horses etc on the telly even virtual ones . I also read that power armour will be customizable? and you can build your own community? I am so  looking forward to this now!

[Goaty]

Not long to waste your life over it...