How am I going to roleplay in this game? My character is some young married with a kid type with a voice.

What if I wanna roleplay an old man as i'm want to do sometimes?

This whole thing has bummed me out a bit. I feel like Fallout New Vegas got it right by giving us more of a blank slate. I can roleplay just about any kind of character in that game.

Todd advocates all this freedom to play whoever you want to but this has me a lot concerned along with how viable playing a scientist, doctor or pacifist will be.

To be fair you are playing the role of a vetaran/father or mother who lived Pre-war and goes into a vault. That is Roleplaying, you are playing a role. The Courier isn't blank slate at all (not sure why people insist that he/she is). Also isn't there like 50 topics about this already?

Of course NV got it right be giving you a blank slate

If you ignore the entire first few hours of the game where you track down people from your past, or the entire dlc story arch being reliant on the fact that you aren't a blank slate.

You can RP just fine as the player character, but if you want to play a guy who's wandered the wasteland all his life, you're going to have problems, just like every other FO game to date.

I want to RP the witcher 3 as a guy who only defeats enemies with his fists, but I'm not posting on forums about CDR being anti role play; I'm an advlt who realizes I'm not playing the role a role playing game is giving me, and am capable of stomaching the consequences.

Another complainer...

I agree with Akrabra, you're playing as a character who already has a backstory. You're playing what his, or her, role was back before the bombs fell. Fallout 3, you played as a dweller born and raised from a vault, not a traveling merchant or Brotherhood of Steel Knight. Fallout New Vegas, you played as a Mojave courier who was shot in the hood and placed in a shallow grave to be dug up by a robot and resurrected by Doc Mitchell. All Fallout games have a set role. You can always choose to be good, bad, or neutral. Fallout 4 will certainly bring that because Todd said it himself, that you can shoot whoever you want in the face.

Well , RP is limited but is not dead.

If you absolutely refuse to play a predetermined char you will have to wait for alternative start mod, i remember there was one in Fallout 3, you could start as a slaver, talon mercenary, wanderer, etc...

And you know this through your numerous hours of Fallout 4 playtime, yes?

If you want to be old, you can make your wife old too. Calm down.

I had a similar problem with Fallout 3. I have zero interest in being James's offspring. But I find ways to work around it. I start all of my characters with a Vault exit save and go from there. It takes some imagination to pull this off at times, but it can be done.

I'm sure I'll be doing the same thing in Fallout 4.

Lonesome Road deeply implies that your slate is NOT blank. Ulysses made that very clear by talking about you..... at great length.

It's not a completely open ended game, nor is Fallout 3 or NV.

Roleplay will always be within a framework, but that doesn't make it 'anti-roleplay'.

While I certainly can see your (entirely valid) point here, I must somewhat disagree, at least personally.

For one, they didn't explore all of the CharGen options and you may very well be able to make yourself and your partner far older than the game demo suggested. That's just a 'pointing out a thing' sort of deal, though. My point of disagreeance follows:

As much as I have absolutely loved the living hell out of Bethesda's games ever since I started playing them with Morrowind, I've been somewhat bothered by the fact that my character has no voice, and I mean that more figuratively than literally (though this becomes a literal issue when everyone but you has a VA in more modern games). Sure, I've made 101 different characters and some of them I've grown very attached to, but 99.8% of their personality exists only in my head with little I can do to express it in game in a way that feels like the world actually acknowledges my character's given persona.

I has mostly accepted this as simply a fact of the choice: Create a character that's pure roleplay or use a pre-made protagonist that the world recognizes. I saw no middle ground.

Enter Mass Effect.

Mass Effect proved every single preconception I had in this area wrong. If it is indeed handled correctly and with the utmost of grace and innovation on the developers part, you can have both. I've only played two different characters in Mass Effect, one of each gender, because of there being one VA per each, but I don't feel I've missed out on anything by being limited here.

I've grown far fonder of Jim and Enyo Shepard than I ever was with some of my TES and Fallout characters that I sank 300+ hours into apiece, and the reason is simply because their array of pre-voiced responses permitted my character to have an actual two-way conversation with another character. Yes, I know this method takes a bit of your own control away to an extent (you can't play a mute, alter the accent or pitch, etc) but something about this setup made these two characters able to feel far more substantial than many of 100% my own devising.


This will of course be up to preference, and I totally get that FO4 is an open world RPG where as Mass Effect is a 3rd Person Shooter with RPG elements. To me, though, I'm looking forward to it. Assuming the voice actor & actress play their roles well and the dev team have given them good lines and a plentiful amount of them per encounter, I think it'll be great. I fear I may have rambled a bit, but I hope my intended point was clear enough to understand.


Now, the issue of the Player Character in mods, however.. well, that's another argument entirely, and one which a voiced PC makes a bit.. trying.

In the witcher games you play as a male mutant with a predetermined appearence, name, voice and even background. It's still considered an RPG.

Complaining having a predetermined char in Bethesda game is perfectly normal, but complaining about people complaining about having a predetermined char in Bethesda game is not.

They released Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Skyrim and only in Fallout 3 your char background was predetermined, it is somewhat unusual for them, the only background you knew about your char is that he was put in prison.

Why do they insist on telling a story in Fallout game is beyond me, writing is Bethesda's weakest trait.

You the only guy that answered me like an advlt. You get a cookie.

Hmm, they fell further down the forum than I expected....

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1521196-the-implications-of-a-pre-determined-character/

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1522160-the-implications-of-a-pre-determined-character-part-2/

I'd thought that I remembered more, but it turns out that I was thinking about smaller parts of a few of the larger "dumbed down", "Fallout 4 svcks", and "why am I forced to be hetero" threads.

I was being sarcastic.

The OP touted NV as allowing you to be a blank slate, but conveniently ignored all the reasons as to why that isn't true.

If you can ignore every single dlc pushing you to not be a blank slate, surely one should be capable of ignoring whatever anti-RP mumbo jumbo you claim is in FO4.

So wait can I not play as a grief-stricken father who totes a nuclear plasma sniper while collecting everything thats not nailed down and he spout exposition about how the deathclaws have wings breath fire and can fly and they came from somewhere far far away from here where strange cat people walk in the snow and guards speak of arrows in there knees?

Game is built for the masses now. And will go further down that avenue just like ES in any future games. They don't really need to court the old-school or New Vegas type fans now that the company and brand names are so popular. They don't really need that support anymore. It always go down the same way when franchises get big enough, so there is no point fighting it. biatchin about it on the other hand, can make ya feel a bit better about it all.

its not anti-roleplay, it just may or may not be very pro-creating-your-own-role (we won't know for sure until we play). i would say that's pretty bad for a beth game as well, but this would still facilitates roleplay, as long as you wanna roleplay the family man and off-shoots of that character

Wow, that's a very intense conclusion to jump to. The game has not even been released yet, you have not experienced it. And the story/background so far is not so different from the other Fallout games in the sense of a partially pre-determined backstory.

So you judge the game because you want to roleplay, not to actually play the game and experience it for what it is? I love the game how it is, based on known knowledge that has been presented, not for someone I want to pretend to be.

I've only played Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim and Fallout New Vegas (I know it wasn't made by Bethesda) and I was completely fine with who my character was. I mainly judged the game by how it played, not by character background. I like Fallout much more than TES though.

I think they have okay stories, nothing bad nothing perfect. They have been working on Fallout 4 for 7 years while I think Fallout 3 was 3 years but still, maybe Fallout 4 will have a better story than you think. The game isn't out yet so misjudge the game this soon.

if fallout 4 is anti rp then what is tes they give more back storey than fallout 4 is

and that is exactly the problem with this protagonist

in all other bethesda games you start out with a empty character background , free for you to fill in however you wanted

awhy the bloody change in the end it will pissoff more people than they can imagine

bethesda games always been about to do whatever you want , to go whereever you want and to be whatever you want , within the game limits of course , they basicly taking this away by forcing us to play with a voiced protagonist many people will have problems with connecting and immerse themselves with

Perhaps they got tired of people constantly saying how terrible their story is (kind of required, since you can't do a very strong story when the main character is a blank), and wanted to try something different?

OP have you even played FO1, FO2 or FO3? You're not exactly a blank slate there either.

I will admit however that being a spouse and parent can be a pretty deep background to start from. Once we're out of the vault will it make sense for us to play our favorite psycho killer or lady's man or wasteland [censored]? Probably not. But I guess you'll have to find a way to justify it if that's the way you want to play.

Honestly I'm more concerned with the fact that my psycho killer, lady's man, benevolent leader, charitable healer, silent sniper, etc. and etc. will be using the EXACT SAME VOICE!

BTW, where is everyone getting the idea that the PC is some war vet?

i dont think its that hard for a good writer to make a good story with a blank slate, give the player a reason to start (revenge is always a good motivator, maybe have a merchant caravan come through looking for hirelings, just something to get a person moving) and then build around what a person would do from there, as long as the setting is good itd offer plenty of ways to write out a good story. i could probably ask a dungeon master friend of mine to make a good blank slate story (although i understand how it would be harder to do on consoles with limited resources)