[Terry]

Ok, now this would pretty much cover all bases required for a tutorial. As for VATS and the Pipboy training could be handled when they slap it on you when you get to the vault and before you get stuffed into the fridge.

[Stefanny Cardona]

Or perhaps we lose consciousness inside the vault, and we then wake up 200 years later inside the chamber with the pipboy already attached.

[Austin Suggs]

That is good, too. Considering we are talking about Vault Tek here, I wouldn't put it past them to gas everyone as they enter the vault.

[Rach B]

One problem, MIT doesn't make much sense seeing as you could easily lower your intelligence making the claim of the PC attending MIT weird. Same could be said for being the the Army (except they pretty much accept anybody in the army, especially during active war). I could see it happening, but they would have to basically say "ignore your stats." Something like this would be really cool, but it would break 'immersion' for what its worth.

[Lil'.KiiDD]

Attending MIT as a test subject?

And you have a pretty strange idea as to what the military's minimum standards are, even during wartime.

[Aliish Sheldonn]

MIT needs athletes as well: http://mitathletics.com/sports/m-footbl/index

[Natasha Callaghan]

Seemed like they reintroduced the draft (or never got rid of it,) based on some dialogue between soldiers in O:A.

Especially with world tensions close to the nukes dropped, you'd probably have to be a dumb, weak, clumsy guy/gal who can't see three feet in front of their face to qualify for being rejected by the military. Basically, having extremely low Intellegence, Strength, Endurance, Agility, and Perception. And considering how FO3's chargen was designed (and assuming they haven't changed it), it's literally impossible to have more than 3 stats being piss-poor without excelling in the other four. And Luck/Charisma would work (the recruiter is either charmed enough to let you pass despite failing, or you manage through sheer dumb luck to pass all the required tests.)

[Tiffany Castillo]

The stat in question here is Intelligence. Just how many of the conversations you referenced sounded like FO3 super mutant conversations? And conscription does not narrow the available pool of candidates, it expands it. WIth a draft they would have even more qualified potential recruits than they would if they didn't have a draft.

If the military needed to suddenly increase in size, the first step would be to activate all the reserve units. If you still didn't have enough troops, recruitment and conscription will continue the expansion, but...

You can only do that so fast. There is a limit on the number of people you can process within a given period of time.

As an example: if you only have 10 training battalions, then you can only have 3000 to 4000 people in training at any one time. If that isn't fast enough, you have to create more training battalions. The only way to do that is to take experienced people out of regular units and train them to become training cadre. This is sometimes referred to training the trainer and it actually takes longer to train a drill sergeant than it does a recruit. But now we have another problem. The people that train the trainers are small in number. There is only enough of them to feed new trainers into the system fast enough to replace trainers that lost through attrition (retirement, transfer, accidental deaths/injuries, etc.) during normal times. You need to increase your people that train the training cadres. You can do this by repurposing one or more training battalions (which will temporarily reduce the number of recruits you train) or take the first few classes from you "drill sergeant school" and use them, which will slow down your expansion of training battalions.

It is basically a numbers game. The military will only be able to absorb X number of recruits in Y number of months and it takes time to increase that. During that time, with a draft, the military can afford to be picky.

Now the picture isn't quite as grim as I painted it. First off, there would be more than 10 training battalions even during a time of relative peace. And many of the reserve units called up in an emergency will be training battalions. But even so, the point holds. The military can only absorb so many people at a time. Even by cutting corners, you can't significantly increase those numbers.

[Nick Tyler]

Well being cyrogenically frozen for 200 years could effect your mental and physical capabilities....just as NV hinted that if you now had low intelligence, well you did just get two bullets to the brain.

That would of course only apply if your set your stats after any pre-war tutorial, unless the game basically ignores your selected intelligence and physically capabiltites until after your thawed.

if there is a pre-war tutorial than you're likely going to be stripped of everything you can pick up it that tutorial, once you go into the deep freeze.

[Jack Moves]

The main reason for suggesting a tutorial in this format is that it would eliminate most of the problems that have been put forward with regards to character creation. At the start of the first scene, we would be viewing an event from a first person perspective at a time before we met our spouse, and therefore before the birth of our child. This would allow us complete freedom to select our gender, race, facial and other physical details, and our name. The interview scenario could still be used, perhaps in a more neutral setting with no bias towards intelligence. Interestingly, we would not be required to know the outcome of said interview, it would simply provide us with a way of beginning the creation process.

With regards to army training, perhaps this could have been in some way compulsory, especially given the fragile state of world affairs in the pre-war era. Again, we do not need to know whether or not our protagonist had a successful army career, but simply that at one point they attended an army training session. This would make sense given the connection to the leaked casting scripts, and also the fact that we will most certainly be engaging in combat throughout the main portion of the game.

Moving on to us meeting our spouse and then the birth of our child, we would end up with a situation that perfectly fits the events shown in the trailer. Our previous choices would have helped determine the appearance of our child, as well as presenting us as either the father or the mother, and our connection to our in-game family will be greatly strengthened. Imagine then the impact of the moment the bomb detonates and our family are killed.

[Charles Mckinna]

Perhaps at this point we could be given a choice to modify any of our chosen stats, as with previous games, before we venture out into the main game world.

[Monika]

Just had an interesting thought. What if the process I have described were to be reshuffled a little, and our primary stats were actually selected during the MIT interview. If we went down the low intelligence route, we could end the scene with a totally bemused look from the interviewee.

[Michelle Smith]

What if (assuming you take a low intelligence character) MIT is interested in the character because they are a Savant.

Wikipedia quote....

[Nina Mccormick]

1 Again Gametrailers

One of the main tenets of their excitement was the fact it the trailer was in-game and to them, tacitly said this will be indicative of the final product.

Do you have anything to substantiate your claim that people got "slammed" for being so guillabe?

When it comes to in-engine trailers there's a "reservoir of credulity", typically of the belief that it's indicative of the final product.

Jeez, did you see the unfettered excitement over Star Wars: Battlefront graphics?People are guillable enough to believe what never has been or could be, and do it with discombobulating frequency

Killzone 2 is an example of an evident CGI trailer that was never going to be replicated in game, and it still gets crap for "not delivering" graphically.

2 Not at all, there MAY be a paucity of CGI trailers that aren't completely disingenuous (showing something akin to a final product) but there's a superfluity of CGI trailers that don't even look tenuously like their final product, and look more like a high budget animated film

Watch Dogs has a plethora of these trailers as does the Assasin's Creed series, KOTOR has at least one trailer that isn't even close to being indicative of the graphical quality of the final game.

Fallout represents a minority that promulgates a trailer that is in-engine that and does depict the final game.

[Sophie Payne]

Certainly a possibility, and this would make sense in the context of a protagonist with low intelligence. However, I'm not sure how such an idea would be fully implemented. But I do feel that some kind of interview or meeting would definitely work in the tutorial, whether at MIT or another location.

[Lew.p]

The rules were a lot more lenient than you think back then. Of course if they were insane or largely overweight then of course you couldn't fight but they needed soldiers, and they would over look a lot. Especially if the enemy was on American soil like it was pre-Fallout. They needed soldiers and they were gonna get soldiers. Even criminals under certain circumstances.

[Mr. Allen]

How much do we know about the level of activity before the nukes fell? I'm just wondering if our guy would have perhaps been required for active service if there was an ongoing conflict.

[An Lor]

I actually really love this idea, I just hope the spouse part is either completely optional or at least gender and appearance optional.

[Kaley X]

Well we know that the US was occuping Canada and we know that they had used US troops internally to quell dissent, so that is two pretty much permanent needs for manpower and of course there is the war with China http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/China 2066-2077 (and ends with nuclear war). Which we must assume was a constant drain on the US military's numbers.

[Celestine Stardust]

Perhaps there could be some kind of selection process incorporated into the tutorial where we were are asked to describe what kind of person we would go for, and we then utilise part of the character generation tool to choose their race, gender and appearance. We could even have the narrative flow incorporate this by allowing, for example, an adopted child in order to complete the family unit. I think that the idea of having a partner and a child makes for a far greater impact if we then end up losing them in the nuclear blast.

[Betsy Humpledink]

Well maybe our protagonist could have some kind of a specialist role, or circumstances that would exclude him from being enlisted.

[bimsy]

I highly doubt the people making the trailer were trying to perfectly mimic the lethal radius of period-accurate nuclear weapons. They just framed the explosion in such a way that you could fit it in the screen and have a nice, dramatic few seconds before the blast wave hit. It devalues the scene entirely to assume that all that scrambling to get into the shelter didn't even matter because they were safe anyway. And if so, why deceive the audience? Surely it'd better to end the trailer with a teaser indicating that they might've survived if that were so...

[Emily Jones]

I don't think anyone watching the trailer would consider the people above the vault as being safe. They are in the middle of a warzone and are within relatively close proximity to a nuclear blast. So it's not a question of safety at all. The trailer in it's entirety suggests that at least one person survived, but this would clearly have been by the skin of their teeth.

[hannah sillery]

Something to think about, the leaked script (which accurately depicted the man in the trailer) stated that he was, in fact, in the military. And yes, at that time there would be an extreme demand. Something else to point out was that Canada was annexed, and the Great War was a different war from the 'Resource War'. The Great War only lasted a few hours and did involve the use of Nuclear Weapons in a single flash of mutually assured destruction. It followed the Resource War and nobody quite knows why someone somewhere thought it would be a good idea to launch nukes, it just happened.

[Veronica Martinez]

I don't think we actually know much of the internal organisation of the US Military pre war, we know that there is resistance in Canada, we know that there is a fair bit of US Army tech (power armour and weapons) available in the US itself, so we must assume that there was a fairly large military presence in the US. We know that the US was successfully invading China, which in garrison (non Power Armour) troops alone would be a massive undertaking, never mind that it seems the elite units seem to be in the forefront of the Sino-American war (2066-2077).....all in all its likely that the majority of men were probably in the military in some fashion....national guard, reservists, army, navy, air force, coast guard etc.

So in the case of our protagonist he may have been in the military, but not actively serving.