Yes, that's the gist of it academically. We can put it in practice however in the games, where are actions and choices (including at character creation) determine what and who we are. Any person that ever made a character and said, "hey this dude's a farmer, he's not interested in Daedric cults, or dragons, or Ash creatures" has put this into practice.

Do you mean like walking for a few hours from one town to another ~using the map interface?

Merged with post #180, please delete.

I specifically meant, if you don't go through the main quest of x or y title, then it doesn't necessarily have to be your character that fulfilled that lore timeline. It's up to you what you are and who you are and all Beth titles outside of Arena let you do this. If you want this character to fulfill that and this to fulfill something else you can. Conversely you can say none of your characters were this or that. It depends on what you actually made. As an example I'll use Beth's most recent title. I have 80 something characters in Skyrim, but only one ever went through the main quest. Only one was Dragonborn. The rest were either not interested or not powerful enough to care. Schrodinger's cat backs this up logically, while actually making these characters and doing it backs it up in practice.

Their games are designed to be sand-box sims with optional things to do.

I think the Spouse or baby will be fleet command as in Homeworld... As in a cyborg AI hybrid ~Master/Calculator antagonist... or...
maybe just loose aspects from the plot of "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6MlUcmOul8".

I see your cat and raise you Oppenheimer's Dog.

Considering that in each successive game, you are a different person than whomever it was that completed the mainquest in the previous game, the only hard and fast rule is: SOMEONE completed those quests. In skyrim, I don't do the civil war quest, except where its required to progress the mainquest. So, in MY Skyrim, the civil war is still going strong. Now, in TESVI, SOMEONE will have done that, one side or the other will have won, and then THAT will become canon.

In Beth games, it is eminently possible to totally ignore the mainquest, and any other quests you don't want to do, and still put hundreds of hours into the game.

Something else I would point out here though, is Beth sets the guidelines for the story. It is THEIR story, up until you are released from the tutorial, THEN it becomes "Your" story, and you can play it out however you care to, in whatever manner suits your playstyle. No one ever said the game was going to give you total and complete freedom to do whatever you want. If it did, I would want to develop FTL travel, and visit the stars. But then, beth would have to populate a universe for me, well, at least a galaxy, and I don't think I am going to live long enough for them to make THAT game.

So it's like if you are playing with star wars action figures and run out of sith lords, so you take a batman figurine and make batman a sith lord for little while. In other words you can play with a game (or toy) however you want.

Yes, the Courier is a blank slate. Or the closest to a blank slate that Fallout has ever gotten. For the courier very, very little is pre-determined. You had a job in the past as a courier going from the NCR to Nevada, and you made at least a couple trips. Everything else is up to you. Having something that minor predetermined does not detract from roleplaying. Suggesting that any game where you play a role of some sort is a 'role playing game' is just silly. You play as a character in virtually every game that is released. The genre would cease to mean anything.

That said, is Fallout 4 anti-roleplaying? ...maybe, we don't know yet. We know that the character we're being compelled to play is a lot more restrictive than in New Vegas or Fallout 3, but if they provide other avenues to roleplay there's no reason the game couldn't be a fantastic RPG. Will it be? This is Bethesda, so probably not. I love their games, but they don't usually get the 'moral dilemma' system right. You can either by ludicrously, irrationally evil or a saint, with no grey areas. The odds are there will be a good guy, a bad guy, and we're going to be required to side with the good guys whether we want to or not, regardless of what we'd like our character to do.

I'm going to have zero issues with roleplaying any type of character I wish in this game. As for playing an older or younger character no one knows yet if there's an age slider and even if there isn't mods can fix that. So yup zero issues.

Once you leave the Vault, you can mold whoever this Vault Dweller is into whoever you want him to be. Just like Fallout 3.

Who you were is not an indicative of who you will be, or where you are going. Life is fluid and changes and flows. Decisions are made. Pacts are formed. We do something stupid and deal with the setbacks.

Random thought occurred to me while eating icecream...... if Fallout 4 comes into contact with Roleplay, will it mutually annihilate?

No one ever said your family was dead, he said "events transpire and 200 years later you emerge into the wasteland, the sole survivor of vault 111." That could mean there was a malfunction or disaster and the other pods (including your spouse and baby) opened early and everyone had to evacuate with the player's pod assumed destroyed and left behind.

I'll freely admit it. I wish Bethesda games would stay the same as they were and not become a copy of Mass Effect.

The only way I can see being able to more freely shape a character with preset family connections is for the family to die before we emerge from the vault. I hope they do but I really doubt it. I think they will play a major role in the story and may even be central to the plot.

I don't recall Mass Effect providing a seamless, non-linear world to explore in. My copy must have been defective.

I personally dont recall the settlement building in Mass Effect.

Or the 1950's world of tomorrow, scifi b-movie, world thrown under the nukes.

Maybe we both bought the same defective copy?

^this people were shocked when todd delivered this in interveiw "We want to do more stuff, and I think, if you look at Fallout Shelter, that's an example of us doing something else. So I think going forward there are more things we could do," Howard said."

i seen this coming a mile away there's only so much whining people can take before they move on.

and if fallout 4 reviews poorly i say there's big chance elder scrolls 6 may never happen they will go with new ip

Man, Fallout 3 must have drove you absolutely nuts.

It would be like taking a blank action figure and saying he's now a Sith Lord. Since your character is rather blank at the beginning of a TES. At least from Morrowind on. Arena is rather linear and in Daggerfall you had the "backstory" of being the Emperor's friend, though that was about the extent of it.

Hey, we don't know if Fallout will continue to make fun, non linear worlds. First it's the voice acting, the semi-set protagonist, the dialogue wheel, and the inaccurate paraphrases and before we know it we're playing in closed in levels and romancing everyone we see /tinfoil hat

How is it anti roleplaying to be provided a well developed role so that they can do a deeper story?

I give Bethesda high marks for trying to up their game with a deeper story.

Certainly, it is a lot easier to put in an alternate start mod than to try to make improvements to the main plot line.

If the family dies after the intro and aren't mentioned in the main plot then an alternate start would be perfect, however I feel like the family is going to be integral to the story.

You two are being mean ... you know exactly what she's talking about.

And it seems as though the 2 series share a voice actor/dialogue system in common now.

No, the Courier is not a blank slate at all and the writing in FONV forces you into a very specific role. In addition, the story isn't even interesting except for people who like revenge in a spaghetti Western environment. I like some spaghetti Westerns and grew up with some of them, but I am not interested at all in roleplaying in such an environment when the game claims to be post-apocalyptic (and is not). Even for what you stated, it makes no sense at all as FONV is written for the Courier to be asking NPCs about the NCR, Legion, etc because s/he would have more knowledge about such matters as well as other stuff in the world context than most NPCs (i.e., Couriers are better traveled and more worldly than typical people due to the nature of the job itself).

The most blank slate that FO has ever gotten would probably be FO3 because you can create any type of background personality you want regardless of the intro and tutorial. You could be a person who hates your father or even holds an irrational grudge against your mother for dying while bearing you into the world (such a wonderful world it is, after all). You cannot do such personality/character construction with the Courier in FONV and have it make any sense, nor does it make much sense for the first two games.

Also, roleplaying is defined as "playing a role". No, not every game that has you play some character or characters is roleplaying because many games do not actually give you any details of the role you would be playing (i.e., they are not roleplaying games). Being "Doom Guy" in Doom is not roleplaying. Being Gordon Freeman is not roleplaying since you really do not have much details about him, nor is there any element of his character progression during the game (aside from getting different weapons which hardly counts as character progression). Same with action games like Blood Rayne or fighting games like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Dead or Alive, etc. Same with racing games, puzzle games, etc. Roleplaying games require that you be given a role and follow progression of that role through the game. They may have a fixed character or characters where progress follows one or more story arcs or it may be that you create some type of role from the limited assets offered and progress follows what you do with the character (i.e., BGS games).

All of this is moot for FO4 as BGS has decided to (finally) try adopting modern standards for roleplaying by offering some type of structured background in order to attempt answering criticisms about their writing (as well as trying something new for them, a standard policy for BGS and Todd's team). Whether or not they succeeded in doing this with FO4 won't be known by anyone until the game is out and played for awhile, and even then it will be a largely subjective appraisal.

That's some zeitgeist level of tinfoilery.