Don't know if it's just the threads I've been reading tonight but the mood seems a little low tonight! Cheer up everyone, it's only 143 days until Fallout 4! (Depending on time zones)

One question I was wondering about, how much time do you reckon we'll be spending knocking about before the bombs fall? I know it's not been indicated in any trailer or interview so far, but do you reckon there'll be flashback segments after the prologue or anything during the game?

EDIT: Just some grammar issues

I would put my money on the pre-war part being the tutorial

As much as we saw in the E3 showcase.

I want as little pre-war gameplay as possible.

Not very long, I imagine.....just long enough to get an idea of what you, the PC, are going to lose.

Honestly still eh on the whole pre-war thing but eh

I'm going to start the game and see if I can go outside and run around the neighborhood. Maybe go get a milkshake or something.

I suspect we have seen most of prewar already. We may be treated to some more prewar running and screaming outside the house, but...

Prewar ends with the nuclear detonation and wartime starts. Wartime will only last for a few hours, when it all becomes postwar.

We may be see some wartime footage inside the vault (I really expect this), but after that we will be 200 years in the future.

I doubt you will be able to activate the door to leave. Only during the V-T guy.

This.

Also, I loved the pre-war moments, but it only works as a short sequence (as in character customization and the stat screen and backstory for protagonist). If that is the only time, then it was the perfect amount in my opinion. Of course, I'm not opposed to possible flashbacks that are worked -- tastefully, mind you -- into the storyline. I think the spouse would play a good role in those flashbacks. You get to design them, after all. It would be hard not to be attached to them or feel a bit giddy seeing them again for a short while. (Only if it moved the storyline forward, of course)

sad face

Pretty sure the tutorial will begin in the house, and that once the sirens go off, the only place you'll be able to run is the vault, might even be a semi-locked scene similar to the cart ride in Skyrim. After that possibly more tutorial in the vault itself.... , later, once outside on your own.... Frankly I'm already planning on heading any direction except "back home'.... and I'm sure I'm not alone... Flashbacks would be interesting and may almost be a given, but as noted already , it would likely be related more to your family rather than the landscape, and if you choose to disavow that connection, then it might not ever be seen..

Well the game starts at a pre-war era setting with possibly flashbacks or crazy pre-war hallucination machines further down the line.

I'm not expecting anything outside of the Tutorial segment.

Actually, there should be a whole pre-war segment we haven't seen so far in the trailer or gameplay demo:

Everything in the leaked Kotaku documents has proven true, and we have even seen the Minuteman mission the leaked documents reference during the Microsoft conference. However, we haven't seen the player giving a speech at a podium, before an audience, with a projector going, talking about the war and how the world is in decline. I'm thinking this is the Veteran's Hall we heard the wife refer to in the gameplay demo.

So we could get quite a lengthy pre-war tutorial segment, it at least 4 different locations: Inside the player's house, in the neighborhood running for the vault, the outside of the vault itself, and the Veteran's Hall.

I imagine Bethesda wants to force us to spend enough time pre-war to get attached to our spouse and baby for their storyline purposes.

I cannot see the pre-war segments being a tutorial. A tutorial has to have access and use of weapons. I doubt you do any fighting pre-war.

I'm a little ambivalent of how clean and calm things look when there were supposed to be major resource shortages, martial law and food riots going on.

Well, the player's speech at the Veteran's Hall is supposed to include slides depicting how far down the world has slid to the brink of disaster. And I have to imagine that a husband and wife that are veteran's and living on the East Coast aren't in a fairly secure and well-to-do area. Most of the martial law and food riots are likely to be occurring in poorer communities and places like Canada that has been annexed for a few years, and it's citizens treated like a second-class group.

But it's a balancing act - ideally you show the sugary bubblegum veneer of idealistic 1950s type suburbia, while hinting at its rotten and crumbling core, and the fact the mortar that holds it all together is a decades long resource war.

EDIT: And clearly the protagonist's house has some severe food shortages - did you see the interior of that fridge?! A jar of milk, 3 Nuka Colas, and 2 microwave dinners. Oh, and they have a box of Sugar Bombs. These people are NOT eating well.

Would be nice if it was half the game. But it will only be long enough as a tutorial before the real fun begins.

The intro, and then that's it.

I can't imagine how that'd feel. That prologue looks so peaceful and utopic, then to have it snatched from you in the blink of an eye and finding the world you knew is now gone.

I'm thinking it would be, for me, like the time in Fable 2 I went by the ruins of the shack where my toon and his sister squatted before the events that ended the first part of the game. I found her diary there and read her fear and desperation over whether we would even survive the winter. I think that was the saddest a video game has ever made me.

I'd say character creation and initial introduction in the burbs, rest of the tutorial while finding your way out of vault 111....

[quote name="LateWhiteRabbit" post="24068208" timestamp="1434687058"

EDIT: And clearly the protagonist's house has some severe food shortages - did you see the interior of that fridge?! A jar of milk, 3 Nuka Colas, and 2 microwave dinners. Oh, and they have a box of Sugar Bombs. These people are NOT eating well. [/quote]not realy.

I tend to have just milk juice and drinks in mine. Work means sandwitch or salad somewhere close and Lubbys for dinner. Weekends I get somthing on sat morning If I'm eating at home those 2days.

like every one else I suspect the most we'll see is during the intro and flashbacks. I bet the intro will be rather one linear direction with you heading from the house to the vault. Probably not much room to go off the beaten bath.