Please stand by? No thanks! We’re far too impatient for Fallout 4 news to sit on our hands! Time to run the countdown clock early…
Update 2
The site is finally live, and there’s a gorgeous trailer – see it here!
Update 1
It looks like the site is struggling under load, and not much happened at the 3pm BST tickover, except a whole load of these:
Original post
So it turns out, the countdown clock on Bethesda Softworks’ Fallout subsite actually does its countdown based on the local time of the person viewing it, not the time on the server. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?
Well, Fallout fans, it’s true: We discovered that it is possible!
You can wind the clock forward on your own machine – in our case, to 2.59PM BST, just before the 3pm announcement time – to see what happens when the Fallout 4 countdown clock ticks down to zero…
So it turns out you can trick the Fallout 4 countdown clock…
And then, after an initially exciting static fuzz and de-focus of the screen… nothing happens. The countdown comes to an end, the scripts on the site prepare to load whatever the big announcement is, and then it flips to a ‘Please Stand By’ holding page. Looking through the code for the site it appears that whatever it has been hard coded to point to when the timer runs out either doesn’t exist yet, or at least isn’t accessible, until 3pm BST.
So we tricked the countdown clock, we got to our Fallout 4 announcement ahead of time, and the announcement itself wasn’t ready or available for us to view yet. Damn.
Still, it was a nice try, and you never know – whatever’s happening at 3pm BST (hopefully news of Fallout 4) might be available a little earlier with this trick…
