I thought I was crazy for thinking Fallout 4 feels like a perfectly crisp fall day, but that's exactly what Bethesda was aiming for after a 'field trip' to a national park: 'I was like, this is what our world needs to look like'

Fallout 4 is a much more cheerful game than its immediate numbered predecessor. In contrast with the grime, slick gore, and green tint of the Capital Wasteland, the Commonwealth is bright and vibrant—it's the sort of place where you wouldn't mind putting down roots and founding a settlement or ten.

Playing Fallout 4 has always felt like walking around on a perfect November morning to me: Everything's kind of grey and dead, the trees have no leaves, but the sun is out, the sky is blue. It has this sort of crisp, clean sense you only get that time of year. I've wondered if this was just a me thing, but when I asked Bethesda art director Istvan Pely about it in a recent interview, he told me that the autumnal vibe was "completely intentional."

"Very early in the project, I took the art team, the environment art team, on a field trip to a local park," said Pely. "Great Falls Park, it's along the Potomac here in Maryland⁠—actually splits Maryland and DC. It was late fall, so all the leaves were down, all the grass was brown, all the trees looked barren and dead.

"I was like, this is what our world needs to look like. So we did a field trip, and we took a ton of pictures of everything. The way the grass is, the overall palette and things."

Looking at pictures of Great Falls, I can see how the inspiration trickled down into the final game. The picture of Mother Gorge on the Great Falls Wikipedia page looks like it was taken in autumn and has a particular Fallout 4 energy to it.

Pely explained that Fallout 4 has themes of hope and rebuilding, with a lot more vibrancy injected into "the man-made side of things like architecture, buildings, cars, and all the props started being a little bit more colorful," but the team still wanted to preserve a certain mournful, melancholy sense to the environments.

"It was important that the world still felt dead," Pely explained. "It still needs to feel like the dead of winter, there's still no life, man is trying to recover and rebuild, but nature hasn't been able to do that yet. It's not a realism thing, it's a tone thing.

"The world was so devastated, it just decimated nature. And even though hundreds of years have passed, it hasn't bounced back yet. Late fall was our team's inspiration for what the wilderness in the Boston area looked like."

Pely and Bethesda studio design director Emil Pagliarulo also spoke about what it was like to imagine cities they've lived in met with nuclear devastation⁠—apparently it's actually super fun. You can read even more about the making of Fallouts 3, 4, and New Vegas in the latest issue of PC Gamer's print magazine, which celebrates the 10-year anniversary of Fallout 4 and 15th birthday of New Vegas.