The main plot for the story is revealed!

Here is the way I see it happening.

You, your wife and kid all make it into the vault.

Plot happens and your family is cryogenically frozen.

More plot happens and your wife and baby are taken away/ assume you are dead ect.

You wake up alone and wander around then

Plot happens

You find out it is somehow related to the institute.

Plot happens

Your wife/ son end up working for/running/being an android for the institute.

Im pretty sure all of the above happens.

Now for my thoughts:
Im gonna assume your wife ends up somehow in management for the institute and your son ends up being an terrorist/freedom fighter attempting to end the power of the institute.

This will set up the main conflict in the game, do you support your wife for order peace and tyranny or do you support your son for anarchy, war and freedom.

That is actually a fairly compelling storyline really.

I'm not 100%. One would think the son would be the ambitious one.

I see the wife being found hiding Androids on the run or some something. Don't know if that's just me playing into Gender Roles of the woman being the nurturer and the man being the aggressor, but that's more of how I see it if it went that route.

There's also the question of...well...How long have you been alone?

For all we know, we'll find Shaun a grown man, and your wife an old woman.

Or find your wife still young and vibrant, and your son just a kid, give a few years.

Ahhhh, the uncertainty.

You DO know that Shaun is/was just a placeholder name, right? Just as Howard for the main PC?

While I don't really hate the name Shaun, good. I can come up with better names.

Stormegeddon, for instance.

You're getting this from where exactly?

What are you talking about? They said your dad would resemble your pc, of course that includes your race and skin tone. They didn't have to clarify this, it's just common sense.

The baby is male and named Shaun, you can't change those aspects of the baby. You can only change his appearance using the char gen for you and your spouse. Though he will still be male and named Shaun.

Doubt it. The logical place for a baby(and/or spouse) name to be entered would be on the registration form from the vault-tec salesman; the same place where you enter the PC name. Cogsworth says baby name (Shaun) right after you confirm your name and special choice on the form. It seems to me that Shaun is locked in... which makes sense if he shows up as an NPC later on. I think it is far less likely that you encounter your spouse (Nora or whatshisname) later on... my guess is they show up as a skelly on the vault floor with a note somewhere in the vault about the ultimate fate of Shaun and a plea to follow him.

Well if shaun is the villian, imma make my spouse ridiculous looking so my baby villian gives a few laughs before I take him out.

for me i will love to see my wife and baby skeletons inside a cry-pod when i wake up, and i have that moment where u want to take out ur life but choose to go out and explore. And find out, the reason the vault kill all the ppl on the cry-pod was the institute,.

or maybe it could be a mix of FO1&2, where the wife/husband & son left the vault a few years after the bombs fell, discovering that people trying to break into the vault made some of its structure collapse separating the family, the wife/husband & son then manage throughout the years to make a life for themselves, with the wife/husband eventually founding the stadium settlement with the son taking over as the elder years later. then you find him as an old man.

He'd be one heck of an old man. It's been 200 years since the bombs fell.

a hundred and ten or so years after the bombs fell for him to awaken could do the trick.

The context of it makes a difference, though. There are some implications and potential story elements that can be gleaned from a seemingly little statement like that.

The idea of picking between your wife or son is so crazy that I can't help but get excited if that is true. It's tragic as hell for one, 200 years after your normal, go-happy lucky lives as a young couple only to wind up with the world ending and 200 years separating the family. You're child and partner wakes up and the partner unable to awake the player character. Being implied to be a strong, capable individual (the father is said to be in the military, the mother who is a potential player character would likely be as competent.) So they survive long enough for young Shaun to grow up, perhaps to a young advlt with different values than his mother and thus sets against her and you, who awakens and enters as a force for change in the wasteland, will have to decide between design-your-own-waifu or the child in which you have a parental love *and your eyes*

Does anybody know if colour sliders are available in this game? I tend to think it's the staple of Bethesda games at this point but you can never be too sure...

When it comes to the son, I only got two predictions...

He's either gonna be the bad guy, grown up twisted by the harsh reality of the wasteland, or he's gonna be a teenage rabble rouser in need of parental advisory and a companion.

I hope not ,but if a .44 magnum through his head will help.

He'll always be The Shaun to me from now on

-Breaks out the clipboard-

And why do you say this?

The Lone Survivor wakes up after 200 years, right? I'd hate to see what this baby looks like if it's still alive for a teary family reunion after 200 years! It's pretty clear that we won't be leaving the vault with a freshly thawed family in tow, so I doubt that baby Shaun magically survived just to wake up in the same way our character did (and then die anyway, because he'd still be a [censored] baby!). I could see Shaun as some kind of ancient or barely-alive lord-of-something, like Robert House in New Vegas, kept alive in a creepy fashion by machines. But honestly, anything else will make for an absolutely [censored] ridiculous story, which is sadly what I kinda expect...

NPCs have been programmed to say the player's name (was confirmed in one of the very first videos), why would it be different for the baby/wife's name?

They have not. Codsworth's VA voiced about a thousand names. He is the only one who says your name.

Again, that is implying that Shaun wakes up right after the bombs fall, or that he and his non-pc parent isn't frozen in a cyropod for some reason. They both, or at least the child, could've awaken years before either parent and was taken away to be raised by some force, or awakens with the non-pc parent and is whisked away and raised in a hellhole of a society for 30 years or so which gives him some... questionable morals to say the least.

If that's the case, then what a case of extreme waste of time and money.

Agreed. For all we know, they were thawed out 20-50 years before you did so at the worst we'd see Shaun as a middle-aged man in his 50s and Howard/Nora as an elderly man/woman. Or for all we know they were released a bit before you did so when we see them, they're roughly exactly as they were when we last saw them.

Yes, yes it is.

I also feel for the VA.

EDIT:

I wanna expound on my feelings on the topic of Shaun returning later in the game. From my perspective biology is not what makes family, it's the bonds you forge over time. For a child it's the ability to influence it and watch as s/he grows and develops. Seeing what kind of person they are/will be. That's what matters to me. So when this topic comes up I get kinda miffed because in games filial ties are often used when the developer can't form ties organically. It's family. You should care. You're supposed to care. But I don't care. And nothing Bethesda has done so far implies to me that they'll be able to grow a bond organically, that instead they'll just go family = feels route.

Now obviously there will be times when I roll a character with different ideas about family than me and if this is the story it will work perfectly for them, but I would really like the option to just... not care. To just be able to shoot Shaun sans fanfare because they do not see him as family. Just another loopy Wastelander with delusions of grandeur (assuming he's evil). And don't even get me started on the idea of him guilt tripping the PC if he's good because 's/he wasn't there,' like [censored] it was hardly my decision now was it?