He looks around the room quizzically and tells me he hasn’t spent much time here. Howard is calm and collected when he enters the conference room that has been designated for the interviews. When director Todd Howard set it up, he entered the wrong time for the Australian launch, but it still gets the point across – Fallout 4’s release is imminent. A timer in the office ticks down to the launch date, but the time isn’t exactly correct. Almost everyone has their head buried in their computers as they finalize the launch plans for Fallout 4.

The office is abnormally quiet for the number of people who are hard at work. Bethesda Game Studios’ office was moved from the basement to the building’s top floor, its walls littered with beautiful concept art from all of its projects. The T-shirts of the game developers won out. The lobby, which was once a sea shared by business people in suits and game developers in T-shirts, is now a gaming shrine holding an enormous statue of the Panzerhund from Wolfenstein: The New Order, and various life-size statues of characters from Fallout and Elder Scrolls. The enormous success of the studio’s in-house franchises, The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, led to Bethesda taking over the entire building. The floors above it that allowed sunlight were occupied by a wide variety of businesses and Bethesda’s publishing division. The sprawling open-world adventures Bethesda Game Studios is known for were once made in the basement of a fairly ordinary office complex located in Rockville, Md. Just 25 days before Fallout 4 releases, the creators sound off on the lengthy development process as they brace for players to experience their game. The development spanned seven years, delivering successes, failures, and unexpected detours like porting Skyrim to the Xbox One (keep reading).

The team’s plans were impressive, allowing players to build their own weapons and homes, and dictate their own fates in the wasteland through intertwining story arcs and relationships that could end in love or death. Coming off of the success of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Bethesda Game Studios began work on its most ambitious game yet for hardware that didn’t exist.

Size of fallout 4