You are given a backstory, but all the blanks are not filled in. Yes you are a veteran, a spouse, and a parent. It is up to you to decide how your character came to be each of those things. Lets look at veteran and some ways this may have happened to you.

War is coming. You could have enlisted as you felt it was your duty to do so. You could have been drafted. Drafted could be looked at a few ways. You were going to enlist but got called up, you resist the draft and are opposed to violence so you are a conscientious objector. Maybe you worked motor pool, or medical. Maybe you went gung ho and became a Ranger. Or maybe you were a troubled teen and were sentenced to serve in the Army or face jail. I am sure there are other options if you spend some time thinking about it.

Spouse. You were deeply in love so you married. Perhaps you weren't deep in love, but she got pregnant. Maybe it was a spur of the moment choice. You could be happily married, or not happily married. You may have asked for a divorce before the bombs fell.

Parent. You planned it and are happy for it. It was a surprise. You adopted. She had an affair and it isn't yours. You resent the child for any number of reasons. It could be why you feel trapped in the relationship. Maybe you love the child, but not the spouse.

If you are so imaginative that you can come up with grand backstories for your blank slate PC, having a framework for your PC should not limit your imagination, but plant seeds for you to harvest and make a rich story.

Again, where is it stated that we are a war vet?

Fallout 1: You played "The Vault-Dweller", with family and friends back home who all worried about you whilst you wandered across the wasteland searching for a water-chip to bring back and save the Vault. The Overseer personally hand-picks you for this assignment. Throughout the course of the game, your dialogue choices are all presented with various predetermined 'tones of voice' and you are given the option to choose from them. You don't get to decide to not be a Vault-Dweller. You don't get to decide which of your fellow 'Vault Dwellers' are friends or foes. The Overseer will always pick your character, regardless of how awful and unqualifying your stats are for surviving in the wasteland. I still roleplayed, happily.

Fallout 2: You played "The Chosen One", a tribal descendant of "The Vault-Dweller" whose people are dying as disease and famine wreak havoc upon the village of Arroyo. You pass through the Temple of Trials, don the sacred Vault 13 jumpsuit, and set out in search of the Holy 13 in the hopes of saving you tribe. Throughout the course of the game, your dialogue choices are all presented with various predetermined 'tones of voice' and you are given the option to choose from them. You don't get to decide to not be "The Chosen One". You don't get to decide if your Aunt hates you or not, or which fellow tribesmen think your being the Chosen One is a mistake. The Elder will always choose your character, regardless of how impossible it might be to even survive the Temple of Trials, to take on the quest for the Garden of Eden Creation Kit and brave the challenges of the wasteland. I still roleplayed, excessively, without trouble.

Fallout 3: You played "The Lone Wanderer", a young vault-dweller from the mysterious Vault 101 where supposedly no-one enters and no-one leaves. Your father disappears without explanation one day, resulting in the declaration of a state of emergency within the Vault culminating in your being forced to flee for your life. Your ultimate goal is simply to find your father and get some answers, although the story does evolve from there quite expansively. Throughout the course of the game, your dialogue choices are all presented with various predetermined 'tones of voice' and you are given the option to choose from them. You don't get to decide to not be "The Lone Wanderer". You don't get to decide if your father abandons you or whether or not to leave the Vault. Your fellow Vault-Dwellers all have pre-determined relationships and feelings towards you which you can do very little to change. The Overseer will always force your character to flee the vault, regardless of how cooperative you attempt to be or how your friendship with his daughter has played out.It is still entirely possible to roleplay.

Fallout New Vegas: You played "The Courier", also known as "Courier Six", a courier in the employ of the Mojave Express with a mysterious past involving characters whom you cannot remember due to being shot in the head. Throughout the course of the game, your dialogue choices are all presented with various predetermined 'tones of voice' and you are given the option to choose from them. You don't get to decide to not be "The Courier". You don't get to decide if you are the one responsible for the events described later in the Lonesome Road DLC, or why a certain NPC harbors a grudge. Benny will always shoot you in the head, Victor will always pull you out of the ground, and Doc Mitchell will always patch you up. The NPC dialogue... even if you use the Alternate Start: Roleplayers mod... will ALWAYS reflect the events of the past. It is perhaps to date one of the BEST roleplaying experiences since the original Fallout.

It's not the role playing that I have a problem with.

It's not the background story either. FO3 & FONV had a backstory.

It's the voiced protagonist that I have a problem with and I fail to see how they are going to tell a better, more emotional story with the help of voice actors? I had zero problem with a silent protagonist. I could imagine whatever voice I wanted.

Even if we can create an old person in FO4, how would that make sense that they have a baby together? And the voice would be all wrong. There's no way around the fact that I can no longer "be whoever I want to be and do whatever I want" in FO4.

Voiced protagonist(s) just puts too many limitations on the game play, in my opinion.

edited for typos

Oh brother... here we go again.

Though this was probably the first I've seen that just states that Fallout 4 is anti-roleplay. Mind telling me how it's not roleplay?

You play a character who's not you.
You shape the characters story as you play the game.
And you have a direct role in the story's progression.

Not in all Fallout games though. People are confusing Fallout with TES! They have completely different lore, setting, and character creation/development.

Here's what I've done with every Bethesda game I've played:

All of them have had a tutorial quest where you create your face and so forth. Usually, at the end of this section you are given one final time to edit your character before you step out into the real game. I always make a new hard save at that point that I use for all other characters I create while playing the game.

Load that save, edit it the way you want and voila, you have a new blank slate character ready to enter the world and play as you wish.

Why is it that the same suspension of disbelief that you use to enjoy playing a game in the first place is impossible for some to use to create their role play?

By the way, this method eliminates the need for an Alt Start mod as well.

I for one am glad they stopped pretending their games are RPGs. Their gameplay mechanics can only get better when they don't have to stuff the half-assed RPG mechanics of their previous games into them anymore

none of those gave you any personality defining events though, being happily married (the small bit we seen seemed pretty happy) with a kid is a huge flag for someone being a generally nice altruistic person. NV is the only one that really supports your argument, all the others had outside forces act upon your character with no way to control them even if you had controlled the character the entire life and even NV didn't assign you any kind of back-story that would give you any personality traits

FONV gives you a very specific role with no room for leeway (Courier, bent on revenge in a spaghetti Western setting, not post apocalyptic). It's certainly not more freedom than FO4.

However, many roleplaying games give you specific characters or parties to play. This goes back to the beginning of CRPGs such as Ys or Phantasy Star. Voiced characters go back over a decade, at least. BGS is actually way behind as far as offering voiced characters and adding voice for many actions is something that has been modded into their games at least since Oblivion.

Like any RPG focusing a specific character(s) over the past three decades or so, anyone is welcome not to play this specific game or other such products. There are various such RPGs that I don't want to play because of the specific characters, but there are many others I've loved since the beginning of CRPGs. You don't need to play FO4, but it's certainly more open and free for characters than stuff like FONV or various others.

That was never the MO behind the Fallout series. I believe you're mistaking Fallout for 'The Elder Scrolls: With Guns Edition'.

Fallout games have a strong central narrative with a character who, while malleable, has a pre-defined role within the world which they play. Fallout New Vegas was the FIRST of the Fallout games to give you the freedom to choose to play an 'old' person, or one with a mostly-blank background, in the history of the series. And even THEN you still had a background, just one that a mostly-blank character could slip into easily.

Bethesda has chosen to make this game about telling a story, a story which requires certain elements be pre-defined. If you want to mod those things out and change the way they work, they're definitely going to give you the tools to do so. I guarantee you there will be a 'Silence the Protagonist' mod out BEFORE said tools ever make a public debut.

Your complaint is stemmed from the fact that you have mistakenly come to believe that Bethesda has only a single method of storytelling available to them as defined by previous titles. Blank slate characters are good. If that's what you want, you'll surely love the next Elder Scrolls game. Fallout is not a game where you start off as a nameless, faceless prisoner being released into a strange land. You've got a name. You've got a story. And now... hopefully WELL DONE... you've got a voice.

Exactly. Fallout, you weren't a blank slate. You have some amount of background defined for you. There is no Elder god to move you to another land so you can play a bigger picture. You are not even supposed to be an epic character by the game's design. Just a survivor that was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Fallout 1, You were the chosen one sent out of your vault because you were expendable. Your mission was to find the water chip. Most people don't realize this but this also doubled as population culling as no one expected you to survive. But if you did, it was a benefit either way.
Fallout 2, You were the chosen one sent out of your tribe that were decendents of the vault in the previous game to find the GECK to save your tribe.
Fallout 3, You can't change the background story of your character, and it was in no shape or form ambiguous. A lot of major details were forced onto you. And no one complained about that.
Fallout NV, You are the courier. People claimed him to be a blank slate, when the reality was he wasn't. He had some form of distinguished background. And a few people knew who you were. You're pretty much a nobody in the wasteland till you start going on a wild goose chase for the platinum chip.
Fallout 4, You're married. You have a son. Oh well. THey're probably dead. Except for your son, whom I am sure you have the choice to be twisted and kill the [censored]

Id love to see a competitive multiplayer mode. Id totally be okay with them scraping the Mass Effect radial dialogue and just going with simple cinematic cutscene storytelling. Ya know make it more like Doom. More shooty!

Fun, lets beat this horse some more. It's not close enough to dead

Well, I agree.

and already hate this baby.

You're right.

I've done my share of flogging and will say no more.

Lol roleplay. Bethesda's new casual target demographic doesn't care about roleplay. That's old-timer stuff.

The game was made more like Mass Effect in it's storytelling because that's what the grand majority likes the most out there.

And frankly, it suits Fallout.

Eh, I'd prefer the Beth games to stay the way they are, and leave Doom to Doom, and comp MP to CoD/TF2/etc. Just because you don't believe it to be an "RPG" (whatever that term means in the digital realm, since most RPGs over the past three decades haven't allowed much freedom as people here consider it), doesn't mean that the game needs to be changed into an entirely different style of game.

Yes, looks to me they want to differentiate the series more. Voiced actors might be one, in TES would be far harder as they would need 5 times or more as much voice to do the races.

Elder scroll online does not have an voiced actor, no its an MMO but except for that its comparable to FO4. Big budget game released 1.5 years before fallout 4.

More story based is another, we saw this in Fallout 3 who had fewer quests but often with skill checks and multiple endings than Skyrim who came later.

TES 6 will likely start you as an prisoner again,

This. And many more options not mentioned.

I'd also like to point out, that whatever choices you make for how your character feels about his marriage and family are very likely to have implications later in the game. ie. it's an opportunity for roll playing.

If we had a completely blank slate, we'd all make up backstories that probably wouldnt intersect with game events. So the effect on how you actually play is arguably more limited, not less.

I don't get how people see "being from a vault with a broken water chip" or "being from a tribal village" or "being the son of a vault doctor" or "having a job as a courier" to be the same thing as "being a straight, middle class veteran with a spouse and son they love, a trust in robots, and the trust and foresight to sign up for a vault." You can't tell anything about a person's personality based on their circumstances at birth, you CAN tell plenty from their choices as an advlt. Many of you don't care about completely shaping your character's personality or just want to see a tighter story even if that means control is lessened but some of us liked the way it was before and are very disappointed that they've decided to go in this direction. Games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution or Alpha Protocol are fine but that's not what I want out of a Fallout or TES game

Roleplaying a different backstory is great...when the game doesn't openly contradict you.

When you downplay all the other backgrounds, of course they are going to sound minor.

A better post would have been the tribal son/daughter of the hero from fallout 1 being forced to embark on a coming of age quest, for example.

I do like how you added "trusts robots" to lengthen your ridiculous list of a "lengthy" background.

As if a majority of people have a strong dislike for robots?

You also ommited that part about trusting robots from 3, since you did invite one to your birthday party.

since the trailer was uploaded 2 weeks ago, we have 1 new thread on the exact same topic about every day or every other day in average.

where have you been ? this topic is discussed to death.

And another thing: if a game is giving the protagonist a backstory it doesn't mean it's not a RPG.

witcher has a certain protagonist backstory and they are rpg games

mass effect has a certain protagonist backstory and they are rpg games

baldurs gate has certain protagonists, and are rpg games

Which still says nothing about the character's choices or personality. Write as long of a circumstance as you want but if it doesn't include anything about the player's personality or choices then it's fine by me.

I live in Alaska but it's not where I was born, my parents are divorced, I have two brothers, my mom was a housewife when I was a young child but started her carreer when I got a bit older. Based on this, what is my personality?

I agree that NV got it right with the mostly blank slate and that this game should have followed their example, but the way I see it this is just like every other fallout game. 1, 2, and 3 all had specified backstories. You couldn't play an old man in Fallout 3 either. Plus this game makes the character you play as matter a little bit more with how you actually see yourself as a real person during dialogue.