Ive been trying for two days to try to get some character or personality out of this lump we're forced to call our character. But a predefined background, a blandly voiced character that limits dialogue choices, and no dialogue changes related to perks or SPECIAL... There's absolutely nothing that can be done. We're not controlling a character. We're controlling some kind of obtrusive entity, prancing around the wastes.

I thought roleplaying was removed due to complaints? Was sad to see it go but maybe its better this way if we play the game the same way so we can share in the experience which is better for social media than make our own characters?

It's only a predetermined background of you let it be.

FO3 was the same way where you actually played as a kid and then left in search of your dad.

Forget all that. Pretend your an assassin and you need to find the baby as he some type of world destroyer...or savior...sent from the future.
Or the kid is baby superman and you were sent to save it or kill it...whatever.

Role-playing is actually pretty easy in Bethesda games as very little is forced on you. You set your own limitations, parameters, RP rules, story...whatever.

It all works.

It's in your head, man. You can still roleplay.

no need to eat or drink either. lame.

-so much for hardcoe.

I don't think Bethesda ever claimed this game would be 'hardcoe'. You were misinformed, if you came into this expecting a survival simulation.

Good post. I had to "forget" all about the Amulet in Oblivion and all about Dad in Fallout 3 just in order to play however I want to. I see Bethesda as a sandbox game company and as such I don′t want their games to be linear. If that means I have to ignore seemingly important stuff, then so be it

Based on your opinion, OP, any TES game starting from Morrowind (not so much, but still) has not supported roleplaying, and your character has allways been the chosen one. Especially in Skyrim.

This. The character has a military background, but there is absolutely no description of what that background was: Was the person an officer, enlisted, NCO? Were they a combatant? Support? Command? Intelligence? Special Ops? For all we know, he could have been a desk jockey somewhere with a uniform and was charismatic enough to gain a good civvy job after his service.

Bethesda in the past has created a general mold for the character, but the fine sculpting of everything from their physical appearance to their personality traits is still completely up to the player.

How do I get the prancing skill?

i agree

roleplay is not set by defined parameters.

whereby the protagonist has to be silent etc. etc.

best roleplayers adapt real easy. i have no problems roleplaying in this game.

Skills were removed from the game......

cant wait for the basic needs type mods and eating and drinking animations, i like they added animation for using stimpacks, im not into rolplaying but i do like to make my character eat drink and sleep but only if it has the animations to go with it. only gonna be possible with mods

Your ability to roleplay is only limited by your imagination and ability to ignore dialog. If you can't ignore the dialog then pretty much any modern rpg is un RPable for you. As for me, I have tons of ideas already.

regarding eating food and stuff, I've already found cooking and eating food to be more of a necessity and more conveniant means to restoring health than relying just on stimpacks.

Actually you can roleplay.

The problem is how scarce good roleplaying possibilities are given by the game.

I currently had one in more than 15 hours gameplay, but then the game give me a lots of possibilities to solve the problem (if you savescummed, cause dialogues are easely locked in this game...).

But it only happened once to me.

"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role-playing is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKQ9--_ZgB4"

m pretty sure that is an oxymoron.

First things first, I know previous Fallout games have had pre-set characters as well. In the first game, you’re a vault-dweller chosen by the overseer to venture into the wasteland and replace your vault’s water supply.

In the second game, you’re a descendent of that character, and the “chosen one” of a tribe he created.

The third game goes a step further, making your character the young, vault-raised child of a scientist.

You could say each of these backstories were restrictive in their own way, but each of them were vague enough to create almost any personality or lifestyle you wanted.

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.

Contrast this with Fallout 4. We know we’re a war veteran. We know we have a spouse and a son, we know we care about our spouse and son, we know we’re responsible enough and financially stable enough to have a middle-class suburban home.

This already says more about me than I would like.

Within the opening scene of the game, core aspects of my personality and lifestyle have already been chosen for me.

Sure, the idea of a family man looking for his loved ones in a brave new world is an interesting idea.

For the first few playthroughs.

Fallout 4’s character doesn’t seem to leave room for many other personality-types, and I feel like the one we’re given will grow stale in subsequent playthroughs.

In 3, I could make it clear through dialogue that I didn’t care about my father or his quest. To be fair that mindset would lock me out of the main questline, but at least it was an option. I didn’t have any responsibilities forced upon me, I didn’t have a job picked for me, I wasn’t forced to be married and have a family of my own. I was, more or less, left to my own devices the moment I left the vault.

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. 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 from what I’ve seen 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.

Edit: Oh, and OF COURSE we can just "pretend", but you can do that in literally ANY game ever. When I was a kid I used to "roleplay" in Jak and Daxter. That doesn't mean that Jak and Daxter was a game that supported roleplay.

Fallout 5 will be a shooter maybe with stats but nothing more.

Whilst I agree roleplaying in these games is almost entirely up in your head, what I'm disappointed in is the lack of features that give you the opportunity to use your character's personality/choices to impact the world. Most annoyingly is the absence of any skill/SPECIAL related dialogue options. I loved roleplaying a neutral, diplomatic wanderer in New Vegas, and the dialogue options during quests often gave you the opportunity to do so. Really dislike the dumbed down dialogue wheel.

Obviously the lack of hardcoe mode is also disappointing, though doubtless one of the first things modders will address.

Those who say the Sol Survivor cannot be role played, have never held a stick and said this is a sword, and that wooden beam is the Black Knight.

Oh god, I had completely forgotten all the complaints about the character being 19 right after FO3's launch. Im sure that just like it did that time, this time all of this voiced protagonist/married protag hate will dissapate significantly. Although i suspect a lot of people are going to stubbornly hold on to their dislike of the voiced protagonist feature.

Voices aren't a problem to me.

Lack of interractive dialogs are.

My opinion is that we're getting the same amount of dialog as we were before. here me out for a moment. Consider what the results were of our dialog choices in the past. Sure, we could some times have 4-7 choices or even more, but we usually only received 2 or 3 max responses to our choices. So while we had more un voiced prompts, they seldom changed dialog.

When I read the topic, I thought the OP going somewhere else with this. I had to abandon RPing for a different reason. If my happened, I would not be doing ANY side missions. I would make a b-line through the main plot until I solved it (and I would kill any man woman child robot animal that got in my way). My conversation would be "Do you know about ..." and if not, I would walk passed them.

Sadly I know this is agame, and I am supposed to enjoy the journey, so I am listening to people whine about raiders or how they want a bed!

I disagree for many reasons:

-Before the game recognized our character better and we were often given specific dialogs possibilities about our specials and perks. Now there is Charisme and maybe one perk recognized.

-Even with the same response at the end (which your are unaware of so it does break your roleplay anyway) you were able to make your character feel anyway you wanted him to.

-And last argument: the game writers were mostly lazy, as there is in Fallout 4 one well written dialog/quest, so it prooves it is possible, just that they did not care to do that most of the time.