They’re about layers of influence running through a world. Real stories are built of actions, and consequences, and reactions. That latter part of the equation is key to any sense of being part of a real story, and therefore fundamental to role-playing. And all the time, the world is reciprocally feeding back to the player Suddenly you have a page upon which the player can write their own story through their own input, the game responding to those actions with spiralling, escalating events that make it feel like the player is having an effect not just upon the immediate situation or target, but upon the wider world. I’ll step out, finish the bear with a single shot, and as I’m looting the scattered Raider corpses, I’ll accidentally discover a new area and a brand new set of side-quests.

I’ll hide, neither faction will see me, and the bear will fight the Raiders until they’re dead and it’s bleeding out. And the explosion will send debris flying toward a previously unnoticed Raider camp.

I’ll retaliate with excessive force, detonating a radroach, but making a big enough noise to attract the attentions of something bigger and nastier. Then you just take away restrictions and see what happens. The trick is to create a set of reactive systems – taking in environment, enemy and friendly AI, and random events – that respond not only to the player’s actions but to each other. At its best, it actually does a rather good impersonation of a human GM, but where GMs deliver the goods by being able to respond to player actions in specific, tailored ways, in Fallout 4, vagueness is the key tool. What Fallout 4 does very, very well is build a world that facilitates meaningful feedback to your moment-to-moment freedom of will, via a rewarding back and forth of (relatively) organic cause and effect.

Fallout 4 building restrictions