Every other game had backstories that were completely beyond the player's control. You don't control who your father is. You don't control whether you are shot in the head at your job. You don't control who your grandfather is.

You DO control whether you are married, and whether you care about that spouse, and well, whether you care about that son.

In Fallout 4 - you care about that spouse. You care about that son. Your dialogue choices are either "Concerned father and grieving husband" or "Sarcastically concerned father and grieving husband". The most you can do to avoid being this family man is not doing the questline at all. That's ok with you. I get it. You are ok with this game becoming like every other game on the market.

I'm not.

So, perhaps you and I will just have to agree to disagree on this point. I think what they did with the named and voiced protagonist cost us too much in terms of what made Fallout, Fallout.

You seem to be very dedicated to putting words in my mouth as you continue to pass off your opinion as empirical fact. I would ask you to stop, but clearly, any attempt at getting a rational discussion out of this is pointless.

Empathy tends to ruin immersion in a First Person Game. In saying that today's games are too politically correct to be enjoyable deep down.

Look, I get it. You want a character that is fully representative of what you envision. But you don't get to do that in any video game, because the software limits the number of options. In Skyrim, you were in a cart alongside rebels and horsethieves. In New Vegas, you were a courier. In Oblivion, you were in prison.

When you play any of these games, you have to do one of two things; either incorporate your starting point into your character, or ignoring that that ever happened in that particular way. That's how it's always been.

So, if you want to be a homosixual, argue that the Sole Survivor was closeted and had a marriage that worked, but wasn't ultimately what the Sole Survivor needed. Done. Nothing marginalizing about it.

The game doesn't prevent you from playing a strictly homosixual character. The added backstory that comes with it is something you can either deal with or ignore, just like everyone else.

He did have some good points to begin with, but now its mostly just drivel. As i've said before this affects me personally, but i am not making a stink off it. If i were to sit down and cry everytime i read a book, saw a movie or played a game and the protagonist was not homosixual then I would be crying all day. I get that in a game you take more part in the story, but stories are the vision of writers and its their story to write, and we can choose to take part or not. Anyway this should be ready for closing soon! YAY!

Took the words out of my mouth. We get to choose what stories we invite into our lives or not. If a story offends us, we are more than free to simply not interact with that story. I'm offended at GTA's humor, so I simply don't play it. There's literally nothing in the cosmos forcing me to take part in something that offends me. Yet it would be very, VERY wrong for me to say that no on else is allowed to enjoy GTA because I don't.

I also don't sit down and cry whenever I read a book/watch a movie/play a game and the protagonist isn't disabled. I simply don't think it's that big of an issue and, as I said before, if I REALLY wanted to have a story where the protagonist is disabled because I felt like there's not a whole lot of disabled heroes in fiction, then I simply create a story of my own with one in whatever medium I choose. But complaining about it and forcing other people to conform to my beliefs would be VERY stupid and wrong, even if I had a point somewhere in my hypothetical emotional ranting.

Agreed. A lot of straight people won't get it, though because they don't take the time to try to as they are in the majority and don't really care.

I can't say I understand the OP's feelings (being straight), but I can say this: IMHO many people are missing the point of the post.

Of course you can RP your way around things. You can RP that your character is actually the other person's sister/brother, or that Shaun and the Protagonist are actually siblings (although that's harder) or they were stuck in a cover relationship, or anything else you like. The point here isn't even that they shouldn't have to. The point is that they've never had to in any Fallout game before this one.

That's what makes it feel like a step backward (at least I think it is - correct me if I'm wrong. Like I said - I'm straight, so I'm sure I don't really get it). Even as a straight guy, I noticed it immediately when I started the game. For the first time that I can remember in Fallout, the main character has a heterosixual relationship foisted on them. Yeah, you can explain it away in a variety of ways, but you've never had to do that before. That's the point: you have to do RP gymnastics to play something other than a cissixual/hetero-normative or bisixual character. They might not be difficult gymnastics, but it's a tumbling display the series has never needed before. That's the point, not advancing some adjenda or how it is in other games. What matters is that it's never been like this in Fallout, and it's appropriate to call attention to it, if nothing else.

I get the "this is the story the writers wanted to tell" argument (being a writer myself), but this might not have been the game series for that. Even if it was for the first, say, fifteen minutes of the game, how hard could it have possibly been to put a gender slider into both of the possible protagonists? How many more lines of dialogue would have been needed? I'm not a game designer, but I can't help but think it would have been a very minor consideration to create a much more inclusive game that allowed much of the same freedom of earlier installments of the game. Not part of any agenda, just keeping in synch with the previous Fallout games, and keeping the "Open World" concept as open as possible.

We play games for escapism. In Fallout, part of that escapism has always been being able to strongly identify with the character you're playing, and then using that amazing person to do amazing things. Taking away this one thing - no matter how small it might seem to some people - is a big deal. And if you think it's an insignificant change, then... Well, read the first sentence of my post again. Then read it again.

-s20

**edited for a missing "s" that was making me crazy

Thank you so very much.

Bingo. It probably would've been much more simpler had they made Nora either the sister to Nate, or perhaps one of Nate's friends who came to celebrate his return from the War or whatever. Bingo, done. They're siblings/friends. And the whole plot revolves around finding that other sibling/friend who was taken from Vault 111 by the Institute. No baby, nothing like that. A pre-War citizen with a sibling/best friend. All we needed.

For a company whose entire tagline for their games are: "Do what you want, go where you want, be what you want"/"Do whatever you want to do, be whatever you want to be", this was a very odd decision on their part. No matter where I go, no matter what I do, I know deep down that the character I'm playing is a widowed mother/father looking for his/her son.

Yeah, it's not exactly hard to perform mental gymnastics to explain away certain things, but the idea behind the tagline was that WE DIDN'T HAVE TO DO THAT. We're given a blank character, the world the character lives in and are told to do what we will. People who want to roll a gay character could do so without having to perform a feat of mental gymnastics to explain away the wife and son thing.

Not quite getting it are you?

Which would be simple in the context of changing the entirety of the story and require rewritting everything but the beginning.

There being a baby is KIND OF FRIGGING IMPORTANT.

Closed for review.

Wow.... This is staying closed. Some of you really surprised me with your inability to discuss a mature topic.

There's so many off topic comments, and some inappropriate comments suitable for the forum.
If you want to discuss politics and LGBT rights, go do so on a political forum.