Fallout 4: An Open Letter to Bethesda

Dear Bethesda,

So Fallout 4 came out this week and I'm pretty excited about it. I'm also starting to hear about a bunch of glitches that reviewers are finding in the game but I expect that at this point. My console peeps are pretty fuming mad for some reason. I wouldn't know, I play on PC. Of course, I've always seen it more as a glass half full kind of situation because the army of modders who love tinkering with your stuff will probably fix it or make things shinier. I'm not here to talk about any of that. I'm just here to talk about the adventure I've had with you so far. I know you have a lot of hardcore fans that have been with you for a while. I'm not one of those. I was a little late to the party. My adventure started on November 11, 2011.

It all started with Skyrim for me and I sunk so many hours into it that I'm pretty sure I've neglected a pretty large chunk of actual responsibilities in my pursuit of completion. Granted, I did play Morrowind and Oblivion but for some reason Skyrim was where it clicked for me. I have the weirdest feeling I'll get some flack for that but I'm alright with it. Skyrim wasn't just a game for me, it opened up a whole section of people that I never would have met without it. I started a blog about it, posted my screenshots and as I got better I actually started meeting people who liked my caps. That was a little weird at first but it turned out pretty awesome.

I met a lot of great people that I'm still friends with to this day thanks to your work and that's just on the Elder Scrolls side (I skipped the MMO because bills and actual responsibilities happened). Fallout was another thing entirely and I fell in love with it immediately. Once again, I was very late to the party because my first game was Fallout 3. Due to sudden and very severe hard drive failure, all of my caps from that are gone. I do have some New Vegas stuff though so there's that.

Whenever I was having a rough time, I would just pop the game on and take some caps. I'd actually play the game every now and again but at some point taking screenshots became my obsession. It sounds silly but that helped me through a lot of crap and the people that I shared my stuff with helped to keep me plugging along. I guess what I'm trying to say is to not underestimate how much your stuff means to people. I'm sure you don't, but I just wanted to throw it out there. There's something to be said about having a good story and an immersive world to sink into every now and again. I was able to live a hundred different lives thanks to your games. A lot of those lives involved taking people's heads off, but I mean we all have our thing, right?

I'll admit that I haven't played everything you've made. I haven't been around since the very beginning and I didn't play retroactively. Maybe that doesn't make me a real fan. Who knows, really. All I know is that the games that I've sunk hundreds of hours into have helped me during some rough patches. So thanks, Bethesda. Thanks for making fun games, thanks for telling fun stories, and thanks for being there for me even if you didn't know you were. Also, thank you to the community at large and to the modders out there who put in so much time and passion into their stuff (even if that time and passion sometimes churned out sexy armor mods by the millions).

Warm Regards,

Julius

P.S. You should probably look at the console versions again real quick. People seem pretty irked.