Chalk it up to yet another in the long, long, long string of Fallout 4 rumors that have come and gone over the years. Turns out that German trademark filing for “Shadow of Boston” you might have heard about was nothing short of a fake. But while this particular unpleasantness is just another in a long string of same, it's also a sign of a much clearer problem.

Thankfully, much of what we knew about Fallout 4 is still quite intact. It is almost certainly an actual thing—there's simply too much cash involved to not be considering how the last rounds of Bethesda titles sold—and better yet, the Boston setting is likely to still be a thing. However, it's the name “Shadow of Boston” that's likely to be out of the picture. That's the mildest sort of bad news here, but things get a little stranger from here.

The bigger problem comes from the fact that we actually have a game that has this many hoaxes. Why do we have this problem? Because of a shocking lack of information about this game coming out in any official capacity. We forget that “Skyrim” came out about three years ago, back in 2011. Its final bit of downloadable content—Dragonborn—came out back in December 2012, though it came out in different times for different platforms. Meanwhile, Fallout: New Vegas first saw life back in October 2010, with its final DLC piece emerging in late September 2011.

The key takeaway here is that it's been nearly two years since the last anything related to either Fallout or Skyrim—not counting, of course, the Elder Scrolls MMO, which has yet to make its appearance on consoles—and there's been no shortage of anticipation ever since. But what there has been a shortage of is official word. While we've heard more than once not to trust anything but the official word, the official word has been largely nonexistent. That's not a good sign, frankly; there have even been petitions circulated to try and get some kind of word out of this project, one that has better than 11,000 signatures to it.

Admittedly, there's good reason to keep this project quiet. It's reasonable enough to think that this is big enough to keep quiet, and as such, Bethesda wants to hold it close to the vest in a bid to drop the bomb all at once. Some believe that the first announcement might well come sooner than might be expected, with the upcoming VGX event on Spike, a move which would mirror earlier Bethesda releases and set up a late 2015 release. Only time will tell if that's the case, of course, but one way or another, something really needs to be said here. So I say, to Bethesda indirectly, spill some beans already. This franchise has entirely too many hoaxes around it to not drop some word