Some insanely obsessive persons with a gift for orienteering and triangulation picked apart the three-minute Fallout 4 trailer that dropped Wednesday to determine the location of important fictitious landmarks and happenings within this game, which doesn't even have a release date. And you know what? It looks pretty good to me.
The team, nine Fallout fans in all, show their work in that video (above) and in this series of images on Imgur. I guess I should offer a spoiler alert here? For what exactly, I'm not sure — either the video, the image series, or the game itself — but go no further if you don't yet want to know where the shit goes down — or might — in Fallout 4.
For starters, the team notes that the "Battery Tower" appears in every shot of post-apocalyptic Boston in the trailer. They've pinpointed that to stand on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which has been referred to as "The Institute" in Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. So, that would be a good guess even with nothing to back it up, but here they show how they fixed the tower's location, using its relative position next to other recognizable, real-world landmarks.
So where is Vault 111, to which everyone is running? That, astonishingly, is determined to be Whitney Hill Park in Watertown, west of the city. They even include a shot of a trail in that park that looks, well, pretty much like the one everyone was running in the trailer.
All that's left is the "garage," the roadside station housing the powered armor from this teaser image, and the site of the nuclear blast itself. They figured out both, too, with plenty of justification. If anything, the homework they've done show a Bethesda Softworks team doing it as well as they plotted out the setting for the next entry in this series.
We expect to learn a lot more about Fallout 4 at E3 next week. For more on Boston and Fallout 4, see this comparison of landmarks in the game and in real life.
