![]() I attended Wayland High School, which is located around forty minutes outside of Boston and is surrounded by more trees and boredom than you can ever imagine. This is the true benefit of living in or around Boston and playing Fallout 4: your lines between reality and fiction are blurred slightly enough to where the game itself is far more immersive. The next day, when I rode through Park Street Station on my way to Downtown Crossing, I actually had a bit of trouble ignoring the idea that gangsters with submachine guns might just poke their heads around the corner. After all, this is an area that is particularly near and dear to my heart (in fact, it’s right next to where I saw that insane ADR1FT demonstration on a movie screen at PAX East 2015), so seeing this awesome area in such a decayed state is harrowing. Everything from the small structure containing Park Street’s escalators to the fact that the center platform of this medium-sized T stop is modeled perfectly made for a chilling experience. What you’re tasked with doing from a gameplay perspective isn’t necessarily important in this discussion, as the real star of the show here is the way that the Commonwealth’s architecture models its real-world equivalent so closely. Without spoiling any of the story content in this particular mission, the goal was simple: break into Vault 114, which happens to be located in Park Street Station, which is located around the Boston Common in both real life and in Fallout 4. Never was this more evident than in an early mission that took me through a T station that I’ve passed through hundreds of times. Some of the more minute details that Bethesda has put into the Commonwealth are downright staggering, from the way that MIT’s dome is shaped to the fact that walking along the Freedom Trail actually feels like walking along the Freedom Trail, vibe and all. ![]() Yes, Fallout 4 contains a whole host of things that are not in the current version of Boston, but make no mistake, this definitely feels like an alternate version of the Greater Boston area. When a significant portion of your life is spent in or around a city like Boston, and all of its oddities and charm (namely cigarette-eating homeless men, angry pedestrians and random stray dogs growling outside of sandwich shops), you’re going to know right away whether or not the spirit of your city is captured in a piece of media. I currently live around twenty minutes outside of Boston, with a trek into the city using involving a short bus ride and then a couple stops along the T’s Red Line. Sure, there’s The Last of Us, the aforementioned Tony Hawk’s Underground 2 and Assassin’s Creed III, but no game has truly captured the feeling of exploring this wonderful city and its suburbs, until now. If you live in or around the Boston area, you don’t have the widest selection of titles to choose from to get your homely fix. Gamers who live in Seattle got the chance to experience their hometown in Infamous Second Son, residents of Barcelona got to shred up their sidewalks in Tony Hawk’s Underground 2 and players living in San Francisco witnessed their most notable landmark get destroyed in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. We’ve seen tons of games set in real-world locations, but every once in a while a title comes along that has the one location that you hold near and dear to your heart: your home.
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