Supposedly the nukes used in the great war (by China) were low yield nuclear bombs.

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Nuclear_weapons#cite_ref-0%C2%A0

It seems that someone has already triangulated the position of Vault 111

Saw this when it first went up, and I think they're spot on. But there is additional info in the trailer that I don't think anyone has mentioned yet that could well shed new light on what's going on. Will post it up later today.

The only thing that makes me think we could be playing as the couple in the trailer is the line by the Ink Spots:

"Friends all over know I'm trying,
To forget about how much I care for you"

That line seems to speak of a more personal loss than the Old World Blues that is evoked by a lot of the other songs previous games used.

As for the trailer showing them dying. That can easily be attributed to deliberately showing scenes that have been changed/don't happen as we see (Hell, it could be a nightmare) and won't be in the game as presented, and also just the magic of editing. You see the mushroom cloud and the rushing shockwave, the people put their hands up to shield themselves, and then the footage cuts to black? Your mind fills in the blanks automatically.

Not that I really think we'll play as them, but still.

the vault door is open

http://i.imgur.com/3iJayeN.jpg

First of all that's not the vault door but the elevator leading to it. Secondly we were talking about the vault door being (and staying) closed during the detonation of the atomic blast. I think what is shown in your picture could just be that the elevator collapsed due to the blast or aging, it is not sure if the vault door is closed or open at that stage.

who says all vaults are built the same though ? what if this one points toward the sky ?

I would *really* hate it if it were 'just a nightmare'.

Get invested in this family! Watch them laugh and enjoy life!
Tearfully watch them run for their lives only to get killed anyway!
LOL, J/K, it was only a nightmare, now get up and start shooting Super Mutants!

Because it is shown in the trailer http://i.imgur.com/M9Wt1Xp.jpg and http://i.imgur.com/aUWDyeD.jpg. And we see the protagonist coming out of the elevator shaft http://i.imgur.com/pUUgRD6.jpg and http://i.imgur.com/tnbZzhf.jpg.

Yeah. It'd be a lame copout, and it would annoy me. But probably not as much as if the game tries to pull "You're an android! Dun dun DUNNNNN!!!!" on me.

Actually, it'd be pretty refreshing if they straight up told you you were an android right from the off. Would be much better than having it as a twist.

Yes, the only difference between all previous Bethesda Vault doors is Vault 111 has yellow paint and a pressurised warning written on the outside of the Vault door (which has led to a large amount of speculation, but may simply be a plug door design), the control room inside the Vault appears identical as well, the other difference between Vault 111 and the previous ones, is of course the access shaft rather than cave with a simple wooden door.......those wooden doors always bugged me, are they the original 200 year old nuclear blast proof wooden doors or did some one travel around the US adding wooden doors to vault entrances after the war?

I'm convinced that 111 is an experiment similar to 112, i.e. we'll be seeing cryostasis. The pre-war sequences shown in the trailer could be dreams that are induced by REM when the PC awakes from cryostasis.

For what it's worth, there are still plenty of homes intact/untouched.

We could start in the Institute. For all we know we will be playing an android that thinks it's human because it was given the memories (remember the memory den) of a pre-war soldier who lost his family and was frozen in a vault and blah, blah, blah ...

Anything is possible. We could even be a native wastelander who starts in said memory den reliving the soldiers memories, and those memories could be the games tutorial.

The suggestion that I put forward in this thread is that we may be starting the tutorial at MIT during pre-war. I'm sure that by the time we get into the main-game, the Institute - as it would by then have become - would be a far more sinister and dangerous place. I think many people have misunderstood what I said in the first post (which I have now edited slightly to reflect this)

The main reason for this suggestion is due to the necessary linear nature of whatever tutorial we are given, we most certainly would not have access to the full open-world environment during the tutorial as this would not really make sense. So it's perfectly feasible that it could be inside a building of some kind, and MIT seems like a good possible candidate, although there are others.

Another possibility is that we start off in the protagonist's home town but are unable to leave the immediate area due to strong military presence. This would also give us a relatively small and focused area to work with during the tutorial phase.

or what if for once we had a choice of going to the vault for a prolonged tutorial or ignoring the story and going where we wanted and surviving the bombs falling skipping vault tutorial ?

Then your main character would be a centuries year old ghoul, since you know the game happening centuries after a nuclear war thing.

i want to play as a ghoul ...

I want to play as a Super Mutant.....

It would be like the the low intelligence characters in NV, but pretty much everybody in the game would shot at you on sight.