I am guessing that our spouse and child are not dead. This is solely based on the fact that you not only customize your own appearance but also that of your spouse, and resulting from the two individual faces your child will have a unique appearance. So why would you be able to go through all that trouble of customizing your spouse and subsequently your child if they die within the first hour or so of the game? My hypothesis is that they went into the vault with you and they left the vault before you for some reason, thus they are still alive in wastes or some impact of their existence is left out there for you to find.

well they did the husband and wife thing to provided a unqiue experience to create a chartcher either man our women. i belive the child well play an important roll

I would be surprised if they just killed them off and didn't do anything with them.

It seems like a whole lot of effort to re-tool the partial face copying system (which was deprecated in Skyrim's engine BTW) just to have the one character it's used on die before it's* anything other than a baby. It was only used on JamesDad in FO3.

Not only was it refurbished to use the new face system, but it can now average out between two user-made faces instead of between its preset face and the user-made face.

Mr/Ms* Junior will play a role at least.

* = I'm not entirely convinced it's definitely a boy regardless of PlayerChar gender. "Shaun" is one of those names in modern usage that can go either way now. And one of the wife's lines ("my two most important men" or somesuch) wouldn't work at all if the Husband was the NPC of the couple.

I'm pretty positive that at some point, we will find our child as an advlt and our spouse will either be very old, or already dead. Kind of like Steve Rogers visiting old lady Peggy Carter in Captain America 2. I'll bet they both will have been woken from cryostasis 20-50 years before our character.

Mr. 111's dialogue with Codsworth about others possibly surviving has me thinking that he never saw his family's corpses in the vault. The spouse is probably dead, but I doubt they'd give us a child if it wasn't going to eventually play into the narrative.

You forgot the "I have no clue" option.

Just for you.

I think you're right. If both the wife and child characters weren't important, they wouldn't let you customize the wife. It's likely that the child is going to play into the MQ in a big way, but if the wife wasn't important as well, they probably would have just based the child's appearance off of your own, like they did with James in 3.

As bad as it sounds I honestly hope they are. Nothing seems more boring than a storyline about holding onto the past and seeking out your family in the wasteland. It would also be too similar to FO3 (you go looking for your father).

I hope so, personally.

I'm a family oriented person so I tend to have a spouse and kid in games that I can, like Skyrim

My own opinion is that I don't want to have to have a family in game, but I still think it would be good if some of the story revolves around how they survived the vault. Maybe having them leave years before you and you search them out just to find out they died. I also want this reveal to happen sooner rather than later in the story so that you can move on from that section of the story.

Possibly a better alternative is have their survival predicated upon the player's actions. Thoughts?

The spouse and child are alive. Like others have said, they wouldn't combine the features of the parents, at the start, and just kill off the kid. Maybe the wife/husband is dead, but the kid is certainly alive. Their whole story revolves around the family, I'm 99% sure of that, so whether you want a family or not isn't option, it's apart of the story Beth is trying to tell in F4, whether we like it or not. Can't have your cake and eat it too.

I think just the child ... somehow. The spouse is used for the intro and maybe some photos, or videos you find during the game. They are individually designed just for reference to make the older child later in game.

I wish I knew before we got the game. It'd be a shame to spend 2 hrs on the guy, 2hrs on the lady, then never see one of them again...

But on the other hand, it wouldn't be fun to create my dude, then autogen the lady, and have to spend the rest of the game with Mrs. Preset1 because I didn't know she'd have a role at all until 60 hours in when i start the MQ.

hm...

I hope not

I think they could do so much more with the narrative than just "They died for reasons in the vault"

Would imo have a much larger emotional connection if they have a larger role to play in the story later on.... and I do not mean a cheesy "you have to save one and let the other die" scenario. That would be corny

Thanks! I believe they are alive

Where's the "I don't care option"? I hope I can ignore them as soon as the prologue is finished and never have to think of them again.

I also think they're still alive. They wouldn't have us be able to customize the spouse as well as have the baby share our traits just to wipe them out five minutes in.

I hope they're dead, but I think they're not. It svcks either way though: if they're alive then you spend the game looking for or saving your "beloved" family and if they're dead your character is sure to angst about it to no end.

But if they were alive it doesn't necessarily have to be to save them, it could be that you just want to find them and from there you could choose to kill them.

Think about Mass Effect where you could kill Wrex, it's a pivotal choice where you can really decide what type of character you want to be.

Spouse dead, child likely alive. I believe the spouse is simply there for background purposes, and as much as I'd like for the pc to experience the total loss of his/her family, I do have doubts that Beth would put the time and effort into making the appearance of the child dependent on the looks of the parents, only to kill them off ten minutes later.

No clue, I have seen good posts for having em dead and alive.

Secretly maybe hoping there alive for the comic aspect..

Walks into strip bar....... Honey?? What are you doing here! spouse :No what are you doing here ? Uhh looking for you.... spouse: Ya right wheres your wedding ring..... Uhh wait a minute wheres your wedding ring?

Good times

Seconded

The poll isn't about whether you care or not, it's a matter of what you think will happen, thats why there isn't an option for it. If you don't care you can comment on why not, and if you do you can tell us why you want one outcome. What you think will happen and what you want to happen aren't necessarily the same thing, and the later is an issue either for you to express in the comments or for another separate poll entirely.