Some design insight into 4.0!

With the recent big Reddit teaser, I finally had the chance to show off a big chunk of my 4.0 work in a public fashion! It really felt like a weight was lifted off my shoulders.

I put a lot of thought into some of the countries being added in this update! Particularly those in the area where "Desert Rangers" used to be. Ill give a brief synopsis of the reasoning behind some of these changes below!

Firstly, the "Desert Rangers" tag was actually a relic of a time when Old World Blues, during pre-production in 2016 actually had a start date of 2265! A start date that early actually had it where it made more sense that the Desert Rangers existed on the tag, since it was several years before the Ranger Unification Act. The Rogue Rangers are a bit of a compromise, existing as Rangers that adamantly defy the unification act, allowing a player to still play that "Independent Ranger" flavor if they wanted!

When I commissioned the art for the Rogue Ranger from Herckeim, I specifically wanted a piece that had the Ranger armor from New Vegas, but specifically with the "Mood" that the Enclave's power armor invoked in X-01. Intimidating, powerful, angry!

Alongside the Rogue Rangers exists four other countries. The Guardians, being one of them, are a country based on two different key sources; the Guardian Brotherhood from Fallout V13, and the actual original Guardians from Wasteland. They exist partly to my own design philosophy of trying to include as much "Fallout" as I can into OWB, as well as to not remove things that players enjoy from OWB - the Guardians effectively being a stand-in for the Steel Rangers.

The Sons of Kaga are a interesting choice for me! I actually included them for two reasons; To fit in with the regions theme of including cut content from different Fallout games, and to fit in with Tim Cain's description of Fred Hatch's original pitch for Fallout 2. In which the Chosen One was to end up in a new location with amnesia. Kaga, a failed chosen one cut from Fallout 2, fit the bill perfectly for both!

The 215th are a group from Van Buren, and are partly a mix of the original Van Buren concept as well as incorporating elements of the Jericho design document into their storytelling, as Jericho was a part of Van Buren we hadn't really reflected too well. TV-Town in particular is a rather wild tag, as it took by far the most amount of effort for me to feasibly write into Old World Blues. It incorporates elements of the Abbey, the EPA's Design Document, Irvine, TV-Town itself as well as a mix of plausibly-inspired-fiction that the writers of Fallout 2 may have used as inspiration for the concept, such as THX-1138, Logan's Run and a few others! ( Tonally, very heavily inspired by Belladonna of Sadness. )

Can't wait for you beans to see more! Its been a blast designing 4.0!