The story if indeed involving the son etc just sounds pretty hokey to me. I guess we'll see.

If anything I hope it's short lol

most likely trow cry sleep or VR pods. I dont think we going to become a Android or Synthetic.

Could also just be a default feature in some of the software they use for modeling or included it to have something personal that is taken away early on to give a sense of loss. If we remember James from FO3 used the same technology and he didn't last very long in the story ( at least for me).

I myself will loose all faith in bethesda telling a good story if I don't find my baby's bones in the vault. It will just end up being Fallout 3 in reverse otherwise. "Hey saloon guy have you seen my son and wife?" No interest in having that experience again, there's a reason I always go right to the gas station right out of the fault in FO3.

Except that baby model at the beginning will always stay the same, except for skin color. I'll bet my bottom dollar on it.

And it isn't exactly a reverse of the FO3 story - you wouldn't KNOW your son had survived to look for him. If it is the reverse of anything, it is a reverse of Darth Vader / Luke. Maybe Shaun can be saved and become a companion eventually. Or your choices and his result in his death. Could go lots of ways.

But trust me - narratively, there is no reason to give a couple a baby - a NAMED baby - and not do anything with it. Just giving the player a spouse and killing them is enough to give them an emotional loss at the start of the game. The baby would just be redundant for that purpose. The baby, Shaun, is a Chekov's Gun. They mean for you to forget about him until he's sprung on you again for dramatic impact.

I'm sure it's not very much, design wise, to have the baby kind of resemble us during CC. There's only so much you can do with a baby's appearance at that age. It could play even more into the feelings of losing the kid if it kind of resembles you. The fact that they put emphasis and named our character "sole survivor" makes me think we really are the only one surviving out of that vault. And some are saying they may have left early, but that still, to me, takes away from the sole survivor thing. If a train is going crazy and won't stop/bound to crash and someone jumps to live, while someone lives through the crash, they're both surivors of it even if the first person jumped before the crash. So no sole survivor there. Besides, what tangible reason would your spouse have to leave before you woke up?

Being forced to leave maybe?

Without waking you up?

I think most people are 95% certain the spouse really DOES die when the bombs go off. The spouse isn't leaving you before you wake up. (Except by dying.) The baby, Shaun, doesn't know you, and is carried out of the Vault by someone else. Whether it is the Institute, another Vault dweller, etc. who can say?

"Sole Survivor" is just a title. It doesn't have to be literal. The "Lone Wanderer" had lots of companions. "The Chosen One" wasn't REALLY chosen by any mystical force. The "Vault Dweller" ... okay, that's pretty on the nose. My point is, all that matters is that the player and the people who meet him / her THINK they are the sole survivor of the vault. They aren't going to give them a new nickname later if new info comes up.

EDIT: And the title "Sole Survivor" probably isn't referring to Vault 111 ANYWAY, but is reference to the fact that the player is the sole survivor of the Old World before the bombs fell.

If the control panel for your cryopod NOPEs him/her repeatedly, yes.

What father is going to not look for his son and wife first, especially if he didn't find their bodies in the vault. No father I know would go through something like that, not being able to find their kid and just assume their dead and go on their way.

And I hope you're wrong about the narrative impact, because that's some week story telling. "Oh no my son is the bad guy! HOW COULD THIS EVER HAPPEN WHAT WILL I DO!!!"

Here's hoping Bethesda has better writing than that.

Maybe. Perhaps they were chosen, and you weren't chosen, your wife was handcuffed and couldn't help you anyway, and it takes like three hours to thaw a person out even if she could have reached the button on your pod.

It's pretty easy to come up with a scenario where something like this could happen.

Perhaps because they weren't in a position to wake you up for some reason, maybe they didn't know how to use the technology to wake you and just left the vault, maybe they were forced by other people to comply to them and were unable to liberate the other parent. Maybe the cryopod is timed like in Futurama and your only allowed out when time is up? Plenty of things can happen.

Yeah, it can be incredibly honky if done wrong but I think that the potential it there for some pretty powerful stuff. Here's to hoping Bethesda doesn't drop the ball on this one. Either way I agree but it really depends on the context of his situation. 200 odd years into the future, one would make the assumption that their wife/child is basically dead in a post-apocalyptic world where giant radioactive scorpions and massive radiated lizards roam everywhere and anywhere.

Sure, you'd look for them. But you wouldn't find them in any cryopods. You'd probably find records in the Vault that indicated they were never checked in. You'd notice you were the only one alive in the Vault. You'd find charred skeletons (unidentifiable after 200 years) on the spot you last saw them. You return home to find your intelligent robot butler is surprised, but happy to see you. He informs you that he hasn't seen your spouse or child since you all ran out together. At the same time, you learn it's been 200 years. You move past denial and into anger. And so goes the grieving process. You'd have no reason after all that to think there is any possibility they live.

I just remembered this, He sends Dogmeat to sniff out the crib in hopes of tracking down his son. Now, I know that in the game having Dogmeat is optional but this could suggest that the Father is interested in looking for his family on the off-chance they're alive. Plus in a new world he has no stake in, it's only natural for him to desperately seek out the only remnants of his old life, even if the possibility of them being alive is near zero.

Some parents would travel to Sheol and back for their children, and I'd assume the SS is no exception.

Whatever they do I'm sure we'll all end up liking it anyway.

this all sounds so boring and cliche. I'm glad there will be tons of other stuff to do besides the MQ. I just wanna put c4 in Shauns crib and walk out whispering "this couldn't be a life for you". Boom

Every story when written down to its essentials sounds "boring and cliche". It's how it's written, and the scenes we'll experience it in, that will make the story come alive.

Yeah we'll see. I'm hoping we're all wrong and it's something different entirely. The "XXXXX person got out of the vault and I have to go find them" thing was done. Maybe we think they're dead but later on find out they aren't but THEN it becomes "gotta find XXXXX" I'd just hope they have more imagination than that

Maybe we don't know they're our son till much later after meeting him. So we don't even go looking for him, we just stumble across him and don't even know it's him.

But what father, if they don't find a body, would NOT look for their son? In real life there's people who's children have gone missing and they're still reeling from it decades later

Maybe evidence inside suggests everyone got wiped out and you just assume, plus you have other more immediate needs like finding food and a place to live. Then a bunch of other things happen and you get roped into doing stuff for a bunch of people and others dike you around making things even harder...until it's not really all revolving around "finding the son".

Well I hope it's not that predictable as it's literally one of the first plots people came up with after the E3 reveal. That would be pretty weak. But it's all speculation until the 10th

It would just be a waste of the baby and how he takes on features of the two parents is all. Might as well use him somehow. Can't see any harm in making him one of the quests.

Wow! A lot of people have some interesting theories. I can't say that I'm surprised though considering the plethora of ways Bethesda could handle your family's survival or lack thereof. Personally I think that to have both your spouse and child killed off at the start would also kill a lot of interesting storyline possibilities, so I'd say it's at least somewhat more likely that at least one of them survives, and if only one of them, then probably the child.

However it's also entirely possible that Bethesda just really wanted to shock your system early on by killing them both off and provide a more dramatic transition between the way life used to be, and the horrific unfairness it has become.

An additional small note I'd like to add is that I hope that the baby's hair color changes with you and your spouses hair color as well. In games where I get to choose the physical appearance of my characters, I usually go with a deep red hair color. I plan on doing the same for both the male and female parents for looks alone, however it occurred to me that since red hair is a recessive gene, that if I make both parent's hair red, then the child will have a 100% chance of also having red hair.

Unless of course the male protagonist isn't the real father...

However in all seriousness, I doubt Bethesda would overlook something like that, despite the potentially hilarious roleplaying possibilities it might add.

Android Shawn
The Institute wanted the purest DNA, for it's newest project. The object of the project is to essentially digitize the DNA. Based on DNA modeling, a digital representation can be made of the subject- at any age in their projected natural life cycle. And what's more pure than the DNA of a pre war, new born babe, frozen in time, deep within a vault.

Duplication comes online. The initial builds are modeled as the progression of the child's life would. Different stages of development- a build for each one.
Some years after the project is complete, the young advlt build has a chance encounter with a man in a Vault Jump suit.