Do you even listen to the video...? They clearly said he will be your character and you will be in the vault for 200 years. And he knows Codworth...

What others said, the dude and the spawn will be a radioactive combination of burnt smear and ash at best. Their shadow imprinted on the vault door is where they are. The backstory is probably just for feels. Epic fail on that btw, I'm more bummed about my character's lawn.

Nukes in the fallout world are designed mainly to do radiological damage. IIRC, the original Fallout manual says that a 20kt nuke will cause heat and radiation damage up to 40km away, but won't do much more than shatter car windows. Plus, I don't think they were much closer than https://youtu.be/TSxu6tjcFF4?t=107.

Because it's only the shockwave that kills right ? Heat and rads are totally harmless

I'm not sure if it's mentioned in this thread (as I haven't read all of it), but:

I have no objections to a character who already has a predetermined background, provided there is no voice for that character.

The voiceover is what ruined Deus Ex Human Revolution for me. It was immersion-breaking for me, every single time.

You haven't been following the army propaganda from the 1950s. Radiation is the least of your worries in an atomic detonation. If you can't see it, taste it or smell it, it certainly can't hurt you right?

The Lone Wanderer turned out ok.

They say clearly that your pre war char survives and gets lowered into the vault. Then they say events transpire and later you emerge out of vault 111 as the soul survivor after 200 years. This could mean you as a different char ... what the heck do you expect 200 years to mean?

See we don't know. and willy nilly nay sayers of "OH for peat sakes I dont want to be a family man" Are null and void.

We don't know.

Explain how that means your going to be locked into a family man role play that doesnt work with your "[censored] em all teenager you prefer"

Actually ... I hope this game is every thing you hate ... and just gets under your skin so you can't sleep at night ... and never ever be able to play another beth soft game ... to the point its like a scratching in your brain. Hehe ... I like to role play evil ... see how easy that was?

Don't bother. The dude/dudette is clearly trying to get under your skin.

...huh?

Maybe the issue is that I've never, not even in first-person games, considered that I was playing "me". So, in a game where you're playing Adam Jensen, I've got no problem with the fact that Adam Jensen speaks the lines. Of course he does, he's the character you're playing. Just like I was playing Lilith in Borderlands, Duke Nukem in Duke 3D, Booker in Bioshock:Infinite.... of course, that's in games with actually-defined characters. (They have a name, a story, a personality, etc. Geralt in the Witcher, as opposed to "player character" in create-your-own games.)

------

In games with less-defined characters? Yeah, I might give them a name, and pick a skillset / alignment ("this character will be good, try to help people") / playstyle ("my next Skyrim character will be sword-n-board"), but I'm still playing "the character". Not me. Even in first person, it's a playing piece on a board. An avatar that I'm manipulating from outside the game. I'm a visual artist & an engineer. I'm a lousy creative writer. So I create characters visually & mechanically. What they look like, and how they act. I've never written or thought of a convoluted backstory for my characters. They're "the character I'm playing in ." They're defined by the choices the game gives me.

edit: given how often I've seen people complaining about how their gaming was derailed/etc by "ruined immersion", I'm really glad I don't suffer from that malady.

Totally agree with everything you said. The Mass Effect dialogue system was a step backwards plus you never know what the hell your guy is going to say. Your guy being voiced is also a huge deal. It probably won't bother me on my first play through, but I know it will afterwards and it should be something you can turn off. These two things seems like very small details but they are both much bigger parts of the game than they initially appear.

This game looks so [censored] good, I almost couldn't be more hyped right now. But these two things are seemingly giving me nightmares. I keep picturing a terrible future where Fallout is barely an RPG anymore and you're playing as whoever the [censored] they tell you to play as. I'm picturing a game with no real choices and where the ending is predetermined despite what you do (Mass Effect). That's the nightmare scenario. We're not there yet but things like these are a step in that direction.

Since we're talking about things we saw that bothered us. The combat looks much improved but I want this to be an RPG first and a FPS next, not the other way around. We saw a bunch of cool action sequences but I'm afraid that Fallout 3 and NV's combat was so bad mouthed that Bethesda completely went over the top trying to improve in and in the process change the direction of the game more to a FPS than an RPG.

Immortal Companions? Just give us the option. Don't force it on us.

Brotherhood of Steel? Super Mutants? Come on, can we leave these factions out of the game for one? I assume the Enclave will be making an appearance as well?

Hopefully any problems with this game can be fixed by either the modding community or maybe Obsidion if they're allowed to make another Fallout game.

That's how I do it. I'm not the one fighting Alduin, I'm not the one fighting the Enclave, my character(s) are. I'm just the person with the controller steering them to where they want to go. Sometimes I'll restrict certain quests from them depending on the basic personality I've given them, or how I want to play them, but overall, I just control their movements and build their backstory around what the storyline gives me.

You know this makes no sense.

He looks like the character, he knows Godsworth and Godsworth knows him. He left the same vault the character went into. He's the same character. I honestly can't tell if you're trolling or not.

I agree completely that setting a pre-determined history, not only a history but a voice as well, is totally bogus and destroys the character creation freedom that we have come to expect from Bethesda RPGs. Setting a known life before we even start the game almost demands that we play as a certain type of character, especially with those voices, unless we want to imagine the character goes crazy and turns to a totally different type of person(which again forces us to role-play a certain way). Not only that, but in my opinion, making you start out in the pre-war time is a bit of a cheap 'sequel'. Basically, it sounds as if you start out about 200 years after the war, which is roughly the time that Fallout 1 started, so they basically don't have to talk about any of the events that happened after the war, because they haven't happened yet, which also means they don't have discuss which endings of New Vegas or Fallout 3 were the canon endings either(unless they have already done so elsewhere that I am just not aware of). There do seem to be many cool aspects that they are adding to the game, which would appear to make an awesome game, but giving us an almost completely pre-determined character and setting the game before any of the Fallout series even started make your decisions seem completely worthless and pointless.

I think Fallout 1 started in 2161 which means it took place 84 years after the Great War.

You're correct, I wasn't thinking clearly...I was thinking more along the lines that it starts before the events of Fallout 3 and New Vegas. Fallout 1 does indeed start only a few decades after the war and Fallout 2 happens just a brief time after that. My thoughts must have been blended together, not enough caffeine this morning, apparently.

There are always a TON of negative people on the forum. The slightest thing will break you people,i mean if you cant use that imagination to over come hurdles. Your imagination is pretty weak. Either way buy the game or not your like 5% of their fanbase and whether you like it or not they will go platinum.

Every game has had a predetermined character. In Fallout 3 you were the son of a scientist, vault-born. In New Vegas you were some shmuck Courier. In Skyrim, and ever Elder Scrolls game, you're a prisoner.

Ultimately once you take control of your character, it's your own and you make it that way. For Fallout 4 purposes, you're a guy who has a family and goes into a vault before waking up 200 years later to find out your family's dead. That's pretty open ended really, and 200 years of cryogenic sleep, and the loss of your family, is more than enough catalyst to turn your character into whatever you want him or her to be - drug addict, mass murderer, whatever.

I'm sorry, I think it's a silly concern.

I feel like absolutely no one read the original post because I have to keep copy-pasting this exact same response to this exact same statement that keeps getting posted on every page.

I don't have a problem with a pre-determined backstory, to a point. The difference between Fallout 3's pre-determined story and 4's story is that most people have a childhood of some sort and parents in some form. It's easy to make almost any character imaginable. Not everyone is a parent with a nice house and children, and some characters just don't work very well unless you really want to stretch it. Sure, both games have a somewhat restricting backstory, but one is easier to work around. One has objectively less details than the other. New Vegas has even less restrictions, allowing me to easily use mods to create literally any character I want (A ghoul, a child, a super mutant, etc). 4's story will be a bit more difficult to create mods like this around, because no matter what, you have a spouse and children that are seemingly important to the main plot, so certain character types can't work.

Some characters literally can't fit this backstory. My teenage baseball player can't work within this backstory without some insane mental gymnastics. I'm not against pre-determiend backstories. I'd be fine if you played as a random person who lived before the war and awoke 200 years later, but forcing to be someone whose at least pretending to be a family man, whose settled down with his own house, has a wife and child is a bit much. It's not that I CAN'T roleplay with this, it's that I'd rather not.

Fallout 1 2 and 3 gave you a basic upbringing and maybe a family member, but your character's personality, lifestyle, and choices are more or less left to the player. In 3 I had to be a Vault Dweller with a scientist dad, but I could be a bully, a geek, a troublemaker, I could choose what my role in the vault was going to be (just for backstory purposes, but more of a choice than what we get in 4). In 4, no matter what I'm a parent who owns a house, has a spouse, and has a child. Also, if the leaked documents are true (and they have been up until this point) and if the dialogue between the husband and wife are to be believed in the demo (talking about the veteran's ball) you're also forced to be a soldier as well, which sharply reduces the type of player you can be to one profession. No more playing a mad scientist, no more characters who grew up in a gang. No matter what your family, lifestyle, and (again if the leaks are true) job are all pre-determined no matter what. Do you see how this can make people a bit disappointed?

For me, a story I can get into > a fully customizable blank slate character that offers little to no impact in the story. Why? Because to make a ton of optional content, you have to sacrifice certain important parts of a story. Why should I customize a character to be homosixual/my own backstory if I can't get into the story of the game?

Listen dude your the one not reading because people have been saying this for a while and a lot of people have offered solutions or to your problem (I am one such person) or explained this per gatherable knowledge. The family can have no impact on the story outside the vault because your the only one that lived, they are dead as a door nail when you leave that vault. Todd Howard himself said this.

What your basically asking for if for there to be no main quest because with any main quest you have to get tied down at least a little. When you are out of the vault go nuts with your character (which you can make look old or young) Bethesda will make a way for you to not mention you ever even had a family, of that i have no doubt because they are so RPG friendly.

To be brutally fair, this was the same company who, in Fallout 3, gave us the option to ask everyone in the Wasteland if they saw our dad. If this game is about trying to find our wife/husband and child, you can expect to see something similar to what was found in Fallout 3. I mean, sure, it was one dialogue option and you could skip it, but it was still there.

Other than that, I agree. Once you exit Vault 111, I'm sure they'll let you go crazy and pretend the tutorial never happened.

Ok is it confirmed somehow that your family is dead then you leave? single survivor is known, however this might well be the single survivor of the event where you and the rest waked up.

Not that other was taken from the vault earlier.
Looking at if from an game-play perceptive it make no sense at all to kill partner and kid in the nuclear explosion. Why create them to kill them 5 minuter later that way?

Now having the killed during the fight to escape the vault would work in generate an hate for the faction who did it. This is an tool other has used, however I say its most probably they was taken earlier and you want to find them, fits well with the Fallout 3 main quest.

Now if they are killed this will make it easier to create good alternative start mods. as they have no future gameplay effect expect some dialogues

Captain Crunch4 is convinced that our family is actually dead. He may be right, but honestly I doubt it. If he thinks this forced backstory wont pop up at all during the main quest, then I honestly don't know what to tell him.