But can you even actually be 'deceptive evil'? I can work around the dialog options, I'm fine with my character saying one thing and me roleplaying it as him lying through his teeth, but if afterwards the game doesn't allow me to act on that lie and instead all I can do is do the good deed my character promised, well...

Ask for more bottle caps?

Yea, even this doesn't work out very well.

True. True. They could've just had our spouse be the one to care for the baby while we watched. While I can easily RP that my character at least gives a damned about his/her son, I imagine not all want to play as that sort of character.


This I agree with. Had it been Nora/Nate telling us to run for the Vault, then we could easily just have our heartless bastard of a character rely on preservation instincts and obey her/him. No matter how you slice it, your character does seem to genuinely care about his/her family.

To be fair, though, couldn't the same be said for the Lone Wanderer? Even if you have him/her be the most selfish, egotistical, psychotic monster ever to roam the Wasteland, the MQ assumes he/she still cares about his/her father enough to go look for him and help his project.

The minute you leave Vault 111, you are free to forget that you even had a family and go do whatever it is you want to do. Just don't do the MQ because it'll assume your deranged and evil character still cares about their infant son.

Even the most deranged and selfish character who cares nothing for their child has at least two options for following the main quest, at least for a time:

1. Morbid curiosity about what they were doing.
2. They took something that was mine. How dare they do that to ME?

Edit:

3. The people responsible regard you as a backup. If whatever they have planned for shaun fails, they will be looking for you.

While you can easily ignore the canned back story (although the game insists on constantly reminding you) but the voiced main character is a big RP killer for me. I would go as far as to say that Fallout 4 is an action/adventure game not a roleplaying game IMO. To be fair its a very good action/adventure game. But the big appeal to me for Bethesda open world games was that they were roleplaying games through and through and in a roleplaying game you have to "voice" your character yourself, or you're not roleplaying your watching, which is what happens in FO4.

Like I said, I can ignore the [censored] backstory and all the preset garbage, and still RP whatever I want like I do with normal games most of the time. But I'm criticizing the game because in the previous ones I didn't have to ignore much stuff to fit my characters it, while in this one I have to ignore practically everything. *My* character(s) (ie. the stuff I wrote for myself in preparation) didn't marry and didn't have a baby, they're aromantic and they hate kids. I give absolutely zero [censored]s about Bethesda's character, I buy their games to play mine.

Ha!! That is awesome

Sounds to me like the game allows a LOT of roleplaying even if it does lead some players into thinking your on rails.

Still four hours of download for me, but the one thing I'm still sketchy on is the protagonist voice. That does seem like a bit of an impediment to roleplaying but not insurmountable. . . . ADDIT: Ah, but only up to a point I guess. Sounds like his Luck/Charisma character started to run out of luck after a while and everything was more and more about combat.

But it's so much better when the game actually supports doing that ~like Planescape; where you could indicate that the PC was lying... And this could have an effect later in the game.

Ugh, I give in. I have to agree with this topic for now. I thought once I arrived at Diamond City I would be able to actually engage with some interesting characters. just so you know, Bethesda, 'yes', 'no', 'maybe' and '____?' do not make an rpg worthy dialogue system.

Hell, I was willing to actively perform the mental gymnastics necessary to fight against Bethesda's insistence on making this a linear action game and come up with my own work around for my character starting out as a seemingly confident, smug, caring military badass. I came up with a way to view the intro that would still allow me to roleplay the egghead sciencey nerd I wanted to. Now it seems that wasn't enough.

A character gets something wrong and I have the chance to inform him of the real facts? Okay, click on that and for some reason call him a [censored] first.

A scientist tells me how amazing it is that some creatures have learned to adapt to radiation. I have the option to be sarcastic, well that's obviously gonna be something like, 'Oh yeah, that's REAL amazing to think about while they're tearing you to pieces'. Click on it. My science nerd character says, 'Woooooow, you're a HUGE NEEEERD!'.

....So I guess I'm playing as your usual generic swaggering videogame [censored].


It's so annoying because I absolutely love everything else about the game but the roleplaying is actively gutted. I'd say so far Mass Effect 3 offered more freedom. It may have been a linear game but at least I got to say more than yes, no, maybe or ask the person to clarify their previous point.

It's...more difficult here, I have to admit. :/ Half the time I feel like I'm playing as Nora, not my own character. Nora with just a customization job, name change and skill selections. I don't really FEEL like this is my own character as I did with the Lone Wanderer and the Courier.

Really hope this doesn't repeat for TES: VI...

nope, not had this problem, this is great for roleplaying and a great RPG as well (they ARE two different things, despite what some on this forum believe)

You ssem to havea very loose definton of what a rpg is...a action game/shooter with some rpg elements is not an rpg.

but it DOES have RPG elements, levels, perks, different equipement, character stats that effect what they can and cannot do. This is not like Mass effect 3 where the only RPG element was the ability tree, which did not effect anything major.

As for Roleplaying, had a great time, i have RPed my character and have not had any kind of snag or issue so far.

Sigh, yeah.

This is all the more tragic since it breaks Tim Cain's golden rule that Fallout's challenges must be able to be solved by either combat, stealth or diplomacy.

The details make it harder to roleplay my own character of my own design. I feel like that's the miscommunication here. Myself and the people who agreed with my post are trying to create our own characters. Again, from my original post:

Even though Fallout 3 forced you to be a 19 year old and the son of scientist, the tutorial allowed you to determine what type of person you were, what your character’s interests were, what sort of occupation you wanted to have, whether or not you were a violent sociopath.

Nothing about your pre-set backstory determined anything significant about what type of person you had to be.

This allowed me to create a different character each time I played the game. In one playthrough, I was the star athlete of vault 101’s baseball team. My character used a baseball bat to bring justice to the wasteland. In another playthrough I was a mad scientist, an anarchic trouble-maker who, according to my aptitude test, was obsessed with explosives and science.

In Fallout 4, no matter what, I will be a middle-class U.S. soldier with a wife and child whom I apparently love.

OR

I'll be a middle-class lawyer married to a U.S. soldier with a child whom I apparently love.

Sure, I can randomly decide to go insane once I leave the vault, but I can do nothing to change the core aspects of who my character is.

Not only that, but the dialogue is very bland. You never really get a chance to flesh out your character’s personality. At best you can be sarcastic or hostile at times, but it all seems very disjointed and schizophrenic. The issue is made worse with the inclusion of voice-acting, so you can’t pretend your character is delivering his lines in a way that would make sense for the personality you chose for him.

So, I COULD randomly decide to go insane once I leave the vault, but whenever I decide to talk to someone, my character will remain calm and even-toned outside of specific situations.

So yes, previous Fallout games had pre-set backstories as well, and yes, it's POSSIBLE to roleplay if I just close my eyes and pretend, but Fallout 4 makes it much more difficult and gives me much more to work around than previous titles.

For me, the real issue is the awful dialogue. A pre-set character (even voiced - see TW3) can still be role played. But the beyond dumb dialogue, is ruining this game for me.

That's the problem. I don't want to have to spin a predefined journey. I would be playing a Bioware game if that were the case, or the Witcher 3. I'm here to tell MY story. My story of Naval Santiago, the diligent hitman with a formal education in industrial manufacture. Oh, sure, I will incorporate his wife into my story, for sure, but a lot of the nuances I have in mind for the character I feel restricted to be able to express because of the dialogue wheel, the inability to say 'no' without also saying 'never' and a voice actor whom 99% of the time emphasize the wrong part of the response I am trying to give.

What you are saying is retrospect. In some games, like the Wolf Among Us, I will gladly reinterpret my actions in retrospect for my character, because that character is for me to learn and understand, not create. Fallout isn't that, though, nor Bioware. I'm here to tell my story the way I want to. In Fallout and Elder Scrolls, the world reacts to me, not the other way around. That's how it should be and until the dialogue wheel and the dialogue tree are fixed, I'll play New Vegas instead. I'm only just breaking into Fallout through New Vegas after my adventures in Tamriel, but I'll gladly wait a few months until the mentioned mistakes are corrected, either through a mod or through a patch.

What makes it a great RPG? (Honest question; and curious.)

*Also what do you mean about roleplaying and roleplaying [games] being discernibly different.

But does Fallout 4 allow for this as well?

The perk/level system, the amount of customization on armor and weapons for example. The different choices in the game, etc, heck, while the story might not be AMAZING, it is still decent, and does A LOT of a better job at making the "evil" faction grey, something that Obsidian FAILED miserably at (the legion is pure evil, no amount of grey is in that faction, the only possible character that would ever join the legion with any kind of common sense is a maniac)

RPG and Roleplaying have nothing to do with each other, as tehy talk about two very different things. a game being called an RPG is entirely based on mechanics, nothing else, Final fantasy has no real "roleplaying" in it, but it is one of the most famous RPG series of all time, same with monster Hunter, or Kingdom hearts. None of them allow you any kind of ability to "Roleplay" your character, ever, heck, Monster hunter barely has plot at all.

A game supporting "roleplaying" needs none of those mechanics, All it needs is the ability to make choices for the story/character, For example, Mass effect 2 and 3 are not considered full RPGs (no gear outside guns really, abilities points not really mattering where you put them in terms of how effective you are, etc, the main difference between you at level 1 and level 20 in these games is amount of HP for the most part, and a couple abilties), the first one is a RPG only in the loosest definition, but they all allow you to mold Shepard and the story in different ways.

Ah, understood.

*I can't really agree with either, but I understand your reasoning now.

I see the perk/level system, the amount of customization on armor and weapons, as wholly unrelated to Roleplaying; and there are games that have this (to some degree) that are not roleplaying games.

I've never played any of those games, so I wouldn't know.

I disagree on the first part, but the examples do sound like poor RPGs to me.

I would not call any game an RPG ~that lacked those pertinent mechanics; because the player and the game engine must know the characters ~and agree on them. RPGs are less about freedom, and more about when to say,'No'. The mechanics dictate when to say no. If the game doesn't know when to say 'no', it's not roleplaying ~it's daydreaming and empowerment fantasy.