I think there's definitely something to the whole pre-war scenes directly relating to our protagonist, one of the things that I haven't seen much debate on is the time since the war. I fully appreciate once we add in the "leaked casting script" the cryogenic idea fits well,

However I think we may all well be over looking what I would argue is the main focal point to the trailer, and that's well the dog and its relationship to the protagonist, am I the only one see's its actions as a dog walking through the remains of its ruined home? Almost as if it survived the blast somehow. To me at least its the scene with cot, the actions imply that the dog was part of that family pre-war its not something I would expect of an animal just searching through a house its never been in before?

Could our time frame not actually be much closer to 2077 than we currently believe?

Well we do not see the dog pre-war, we do see a feeding bowl (dog or cat) which suggests that there was a pre-war pet so in my new spirit of keeping an open mind I'll not immediately slam the idea....maybe the dog is a cyborg with the original dog's brain.

On the time frame however, I doubt they are going to make that major a change and make in effect a prequel due to the Institute and their developments of humanoid robots, androids and maybe Cyborgs much of which appears to have happened post war, I expect the institute to play a major part in the Fallout 4 main story since they are apparently the main reason to base the game in Boston.

I fully expect to see some characters and faction from Fallout 3 in Fallout 4, I also expect a storyline foreshadowing Fallout 5.

So in response to the edit of your original post: I like the idea how you worked it out and it would make you way faster emotionally invested then in the previous Fallout games, however as of now it is impossible to guess what the plot is going to be (unless you believe the leak from a couple of months back). The more I see the intro the more I agree that the family is part of the plot since the dog seems to search and track the member/remains of the family. As to your theory of that the father = the protagonist I'm still not convinced, however after doing a comparison I must say they look strikingly similar.

I'm just getting web page unavailable for your link....is the picture the same as the earlier enhanced comparision picture?

Edit: Okay got it to work and its slightly different, but yeah if its not the same character then he is an android or clone to be that similar.

Ow sorry I did not saw your comparison screen before I posted (which is waaay better than the one I made). I'll delete the link as it is redundant now. Also to OP you should link the image of Helljumper in your original post as it is a very convincing argument to your statement.

The credit goes to Latewhiterabbit for the earlier comparison pic and I've already suggested it should be linked to the OP since it does provide a convincing argument to claim that it is the same character pre and post war. To paint a further comparison to the SETI program its like having convincing photographic evidence of aliens and not including it in your argument for their existence.

Hahaha that got me thinking that the family pre-war could have been abducted by Mothership Zeta and kept in cryostasis all this time, that would really piss of some fans

Maybe only the MC is saved by cyrostasis and when you leave the Vault you can met you now ghoul wife/husband (depending on player choice)......awkward!

Spouse: "You look well"

MC: "You look.........erm"

Sorry for the delay with this guys, been busy sorting out some real world stuff!

All relevant links have now been added to the OP - a special thank you goes out to LateWhiteRabbit for providing the comparison shot.

Someone who is more tech savy than me really needs to take a look at producing an enhanced frame by frame of the part of the trailer with the family on the shaft entrance...

Looking at it again on Youtube and pausing it constantly I've noticed that there are two security personnel with them, they only appear for a second because the civilians are in the middle between them and they dont seem to appear in shot again making them easy to miss in the split second they appear on screen. One is in officer uniform with a lasrifle and one is in T-45d armour (with I think a minigun) which does suggest that they were still evacuating people into Vault 111 when the fairly nearby bomb hits.

Edit: I forgot to mention there is a white coated guy with a clip board as well, its at 2:06 but there is a lot going on in that 1 second, it is just before the shot of the couple facing each other on the shaft entrance just before the flash of the nuclear explosion.

I also notice that it was mentioned in the OP but I literally have only seen it by pausing the trailer constantly and a lot of effort for it to actually appear on screen.

The scene suggests to me that at this stage anyway the main door (at the bottom of the shaft) isn't sealed, which was the opposite of what I thought the trailer was showing, people being abandoned outside the Vault.

From what I can see, they're standing right on top of the closed Vault door when the bomb goes off.

Yes , no doubt about that (except the 'closed vault door' isn't the main Vault door) and its a debate whether anybody would have survived in real life, but as has been said the magic of plot armour could allow the MC to miraculously survive. I'm pretty sure its the same family on the entrance, including the guy who's apparently alive in both pre-war and post war, so how that is achieved is still up for debate for me.

I'm leaning towards the conclusion that the shaft lift door is meant to lower enough to allow easy access to personnel wearing powered armour and maybe it is simply meant to lower into a hangar like structure (like a aircaft lift on an aircraft carrier hangar).....and yes I've nothing to back that up, just a dislike of the idea of a single lift lowering a limited number of people all the way down a shaft and then raising the lift up again while your trying to evacuate hundreds of panicking civilians.

Edit: By the way when I say hangar like structure, I dont mean that it was used by vertibirds, just that it is the closest I can think of for a real life example.

According to http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Vault_112 page, vault 112 was designed to accommodate 85 inhabitants, yet in the actual vault as seen in Fallout 3, there were only 13 tranquility loungers. We are also told that all human inhabitants would have been in the loungers for the duration of the experiment. From this information, we can safely assume that each vault as represented in-game would be scaled down, in a similar way that the "7000" steps were in Skyrim.

If we now take the security guard and scientist above vault 111, and we add in all of the civilians that we can see, we have a total of 10 people. The inner circle of the lift does appear be big enough to accommodate this number of people, which just leaves our soldier in power armor, whose presence would suggest some form of crowd control in the event of the area becoming overrun with desperate civilians. My assumption is that this soldier would be tasked with operating the mechanism to allow the others into the vault. He would then most likely return to the vertibird we saw in the trailer and would be transported to a military bunker.

This would all make sense if we assume that there are 8 cryogenic sleep chambers in the vault. The civilians would all be put into stasis; the scientist, who would likely be named as overseer, would monitor the experiment and annotate his findings; and the security guard would help protect the integrity of the vault in the event of any "incidents."

Second image is now in OP showing family above vault 111.

292,325 Hibakusha survived the Hiroshima blast, and 165,409 Hibakusha survived the Nagasaki blast. Since 1 man survived both you can subtract 1 from that total. The most accurate estimate of deaths from the bombs are about 150000 in Hiroshima, and 75000 in Nagasaki. That means its FAR MORE LIKELY that the family survived than that the family did not. Odds are about 2-1 for survival depending on a number of other factors if you want to use real life numbers.

Problem is those Hibakusha weren't inside the "red zone" of the blast wave. The family in the trailer is.

I believe Bethesda has stated they will never "back-up" on the Fallout timeline, and each Fallout game they produce will be farther into the future. I disagree with the decision, and would love to play a Fallout game set just a decade or two after the Great War, but it is almost certain that FO4 takes place some amount of time after FO3.

I don't see any reason NOT to believe the leaked documents from 6 months ago at this point. It isn't like they come from a Reddit post - they came from Kotaku, who does some amount of due diligence to make sure the things they report from inside game development studios are accurate. Nothing in the documents has been contradicted by the trailer - only confirmed.

The documents mention the player having a wife and infant son. We see both in the trailer. Note the blue color of the crib. The location given in the documents is Boston. Confirmed by the trailer. And most convincing piece of evidence for me that the leaked documents are authentic is the picture of the player in them matches the player we see in the trailer.

It's actually impossible to say if any were, the 1 male who survived both was certainly close to the red zone. It's also impossible to say if the family was or was not, as video games are scaled and thus real life calculations fail to take this into account. There are so many factors we do not know about atomic weapons in fallout, and neutron bombs have a smaller red zone than regular nukes. We also do not know if that nuke was air burst or ground detonation, if it was air burst at what height was it detonated, what was the standard practice for Chinese nuclear detonation in the fallout world? How you detonate a nuke very much depends on your goals, there's way too many factors to decide if they could have survived. Terrain is a major factor in survivability, as are atmospheric conditions. Nothing is as simple as saying it isn't possible, err almost nothing. Likelyhood of surviving a direct impact is pretty much nill, so theres that I guess.

I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying it's highly unlikely.

The concentration of blue in the area of the crib, not just the crib itself but the metal frame holding the rockets, the picture frame, the lampshade, and even the square rug, appears to be a direct reference to the vault 111 jumpsuit that our protagonist will end up wearing. This strengthens even further the possibility that one of the three individuals shown within this "blue zone" will end up as our protagonist. In this context, we can also include the blue dog bowl, as we see the post-war dog with the protagonist at the end of the trailer.

Your image has '?w=600' on the end so its not loading correctly, removing it allows it to load.

I think it does show pretty clearly that its the same guy and family at the shaft entrance.

Your explanation is plausable, but of course we have no idea who if anybody is already in the vault at this point and it would take a lot of dedication for the scientist and guard to live out their days in that fashion rather than like other unautomated vaults with their new friends and family.

My first instinct was to dismiss the leaked casting script, but the similarity between the main character in the trailer and the one shown in the trailer, does in my mind give it more credence, along with the game location .

My only caution about it is to remember that it is just a casting script, we know for instance that the MC will not be narrating the beginning of the game and one part of the script includes a narration.

I agree that the actual dialogue listed in the casting script may not be the same in-game. It is common to use rough drafts or custom written dialogue for casting calls. However, they are generally in-character and in-tone.

Casting calls also usually give authentic backgrounds for the character you are casting for, so "You are a pre-war survivor who wakes up in a cryostatis pod and had a wife and kid" is most likely accurate. The specific lines and dialogue exchanges may or may not be what ends up in the final game, however.

EDIT: Lots of speculation that the voice we hear from the protagonist at the end of the trailer is Troy Baker. It does sound like him, and one of his most recent voice projects was for Bethesda on Elder Scrolls Online.

ALSO - just in case anyone isn't clear, it is pretty much confirmed by the leaked script and screenshots from the perk table in the trailer that we will get to play a male OR a female. So don't freak out over that. Presumeably we pick to be the wife or husband.

I did ask that question at some point in one of the threads....since I literally have no actual knowledge of what casting scripts usually contain and have simpy read that it may not be accurate in the details of the actual game.

Link to image has now been fixed, thank you for letting me know!

Also, a very good point. We could then perhaps open up the possibility that there are 10 cryogenic chambers instead of 8, so that all inhabitants are able to enter stasis. I would imagine that the scientist (and possibly the vault security guard) would only do so once their supplies ran out, as is suggested by all of the crates and boxes above ground. The scientist could then conduct ongoing research and gather important data to help facilitate the experiment, until such time as he entered his own cryochamber. As for incentive, his role would greatly improve his chances of surviving armageddon by securing him a place in a vault, and he would eventually be given a second chance to see what comes after. I'm sure that any scientist worth their salt would find it hard to resist such an opportunity.

Looking at my suggestion in the OP, we have a scenario with two survivors at the time of the blast, namely the protagonist and the scientist. We may actually have a third; the soldier in power armor, who would perhaps still manage to complete his given task of activating the lift controls. But due to extreme winds following the nuclear blast, he is unable to climb down into the lift shaft in time before the vault door is sealed, and he is left outside.

As for anybody already being inside the vault, we can actually see everything we would need for the experiment to take place outside of the vault at the time of detonation. This includes the test subjects, two members of vault personnel comprising an armed security guard and a scientist/overseer, and a load of supplies in various crates and boxes. It would appear that the nuclear strikes happened much sooner than anyone had expected. The bombs fell before any of the inhabitants or supplies could be taken into the vault, and so an alternative scenario seems to have arisen. In the example I have given, the scientist/overseer more than likely died of his injuries before he could get into one of the other chambers.

Assuming that your theory proves correct, I think the number of people occupying the vault will depend a lot on the circumstances of the Protagonist's emergence from Cyrostasis, will everybody else be dead in their failed pods, will you be thawed out by the (inbred) descendents of people who were thawed out earlier than the MC, will there be an active vault like 101 with scientists , security, maintenance crew and their families, etc....

If Bethesda's object is simply to get you straight out of the vault I expect the other pods to have failed or been looted by some unknown force you'll encounter in the game. If they want to start us off more gently we may meet some friendly faces who give us our first quests, similar to Goodsprings in NV.

I think that at the moment what happens in the Vault beyond the cyrogenics (if we believe the script) is a mystery, we can probably come up with plausible ideas, but there is no actual data about the interior of the Vault beyond the main door being pressurised and the interior control room being the same as earlier vaults.