Bethesda has released the first Fallout 4 trailer

After years of noise and feckless speculation, finally some signal: Fallout 4 is happening, says open-world gaming magnate Bethesda Softworks. Insert a tunnel, oncoming train, and someone expounding about the sound of inevitability. Bethesda’s servers appear to have fumbled the news about an hour earlier than expected, briefly lifting a Fallout-themed countdown curtain, due to zero out at 10:00 a.m. ET. At that point, we learned the game was in the offing for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Also: that there’s a dog. Because everybody—hey Fable 2, Call of Duty: Ghosts and Grand Theft Auto V!—has a dog nowadays. And now that the countdown’s complete, we can say it’s definitely happening. See the official trailer above. It’s impossible to say without asking Bethesda, but just watching the trailer, I’d wager Fallout 4‘s still using Bethesda’s Creation engine (created for Skyrim), doubtless souped up, but still looking more like a tricked out, high-resolution version of Fallout 3 than a radical graphical leap (as you’d generally see when this much time’s passed between installments). That could be by design, of course: an attempt to establish visual continuity between 3 and 4. Whatever the case, it still looks terrific.