The Art of Fallout 4 Book Review

The Art of Fallout 4 is a good video game art book. It has images from various stages of the design process, but most of it is finalized concept art. There’s some commentary from the developers about why they designed things the way that they did.

0:00 - Introduction
0:32 - Quality of the Physical Book
0:58 - Content
4:33 - Aesthetics
5:27 - Nostalgia
5:50 - Backstage
7:00 - Closing Remarks


QUALITY OF PHYSICAL BOOK
-9x12 inches.
-It has 368 pages, which is pretty thick by video game art book standards.
-The book itself has a nice heft due to its size. The hardcover is decent and the pages are pretty thick.
-The image quality is good.


CONTENT/INNARDS
Variety of images and image types
-The artwork ranges from pre-production sketches all the way to the final 3D models that are used in the game. Some of the images show descriptive notes, but this isn’t very common.
There’s some very rough concept sketches where they don’t spend too much time on any particular idea.
-One page shows various weapon mod variation designs.
-There are some storyboards.
-Even though most of the book is finalized concept art, you can still get a sense that a lot of work went into finalizing the designs.

Organization
-There aren’t really any organizational issues. The chapters of the book are: Pre-production, World (landscapes), Characters, Creatures, Weapons, Vehicles, Set Dressing, and illustration (like the magazines you find).

Is there writing or insight from the artists and developers themselves?
-As near as I can tell, almost all of the writing is from the development staff.

Quality of writing.
-It’s direct and descriptive, and mostly found at the start of chapters to give a generalized overview of how they made their design choices. For example, at the start of the weapons section it says that they needed to create all weapons in a modular fashion to accommodate the weapon modification system in the game, as well as the challenges that posed to the design team.

Does it have what you want it to have?
-Well, it’s like the book version of a Bethesda game in that there is just so much content.
-There isn’t much iterative art or rough sketches, but I can’t really think of anything from the game that isn’t in the book.


AESTHETICS
-There’s nothing jarring. I like that for the most part the images are shown off rather than placed in tiny little boxes like in some art books.
-There are a lot of full pages of art and a lot of them are quite nice and impressive.
-As for the quality of the art, that’s obviously up to personal taste, but I quite like most of the art in this book, especially the illustrations chapter.


NOSTALGIA/AFFINITY EVOKED FOR THE GAME
-Even the chapter headings make me nostalgic.
-Its very cohesively “Fallout.” Even little images remind me of random places I recall visiting in the game.
-I think both the size and quality of the images do more than average to evoke memories of the game.


BACKSTAGE
Additional insights into art assets and art design
-I thought there were a lot of interesting passages that provided insight into the art design and that gave me an increased appreciation for what it takes to make a video game.
-There’s a section that talks about the challenge of creating a vault suit that doesn’t look goofy, and how they did it.
-In another section the developers talk about the challenge of finding the right color palette for the game. They wanted one that imbued a sense of moving forward and hope rather than just despair.
-Some parts talked about how gameplay can influence the art design. For example, it mentions how the vertibird needed to be bulky to accommodate power armored troops actually going inside of it.

Increased appreciation for the game development process
-The section on landscapes gave me an increased appreciation of just how many little landscape features need to be thought of ahead of time. What would a clearing in the woods look like? A stream? A street? The sheer amount of environmental details that needed to be created from scratch is staggering - not to mention all of the random props.


There are 17 book reviews in Season 1 of my series “Mike’s Video Game Art Book Reviews.” I hope you enjoy them!