But he can't play a dude who was a sociopathic feral mutant cannibal from the age of 5! Game ruined!

At one point in time, your character decided to settle down with his/her family. That is a choice made by the character, without you having any say in it. With prison, it is not a choice, however it could be if you want it to. That said, if you play the baby, you have no choices made for you.

As for restrictions on gameplay, what choices to make and what to do in the game world, there are little to none. Here, the voice acting restricts way more than backstory could ever do. Emotions that are not appropriate to what you intended will probably happen, and the seemingly limited conversation options will cause there to be less of a chance that the correct option for your character will be available. Although I do believe that there at times will be more than four conversation options. I actually believe those options to be on par with that of Skyrim, perhaps more.

Seems like they want to try the Bioware style. Eh, it works for a game like Fallout.

We don't even know that the actions towards your child and spouse are even motivated by affection or just playing a role. You could just as easily be playing a con artist that is after a trust fund that your spouse gains access to after he or she has their first child.

If it wasn't for the [censored] voiced character I'd be fine, I always make up my own dialouge anyway to be honest - as long as the gameplay matches.

But now I have no idea what my character is going to say because of Mass Effect and am going to be subjected to some others guys voice that isn't my character.

woo there you ASSUME the character decided to "settle down" You are a con artist your spouse has a large trust fund that is released when the first child is born. Your plan marry this person have a baby with said person trust fund is released and you steal it! but the bombs fall and you plans go out the window, You were never settling down with a family it was all just a means to an end to con your spouse out of thier trust fund.

That is just one way to explain a spouse and child without having to assume it was settling down.

If you can head cannon responses in silent protagonist then you can head cannon responses with a voiced protagonist. Video games have ALWAYS limited you in the responses available to you. if people want to pretend this isn't the case by imagining their own responses then fine but the actual limitations were there and how people reacted to the player was based on the intent the writer had for a given line of dialogue not the intent behind a person's own head canon of a line of dialogue. The game has always reacted based on what choice you made not on what choice you imagined you made. The same is true with a voice actor.

Personally I feel that it's one step forward and one step back from what Fallout 3 did. We have a less restrictive Protagonist in terms of age or personality (Unless Beth gives us the age which is dumb) although we have a more restrictive protagonist in terms of origin (Will Always be married, has a kid, etc). Voiced doesn't help as it leads to less options and it also won't match what I'll say.

Still say New Vegas gave the best Protagonist pre Lonesome Road and even post still isn't completely terrible.

Really, just sitting here and reading these posts I can think of several ways to leverage the existing story for RP purposes. After all, a great deal of fun in RPing is to find unique ways to be different in a set universe, and that often boils down to the situation not being what it appears to be. Character Gay? keeping under cover with a family (common in the 50's, btw). Character psychotic? Sure is if he can keep that cover up.... Character whatever? She sure has everyone fooled...

Why does everyone keep bringin up the gay thing, you had to be straight in all the previous Fallouts - especially Fallout 2.

Chill. All that's defined is that the character has a family and lived in the pre-war era. Just as restrictive as a prisoner caught by stormcloaks who was destined to become the Dragonborn.

I think we can thank the tard COD generation for this..it's what ruined Resident Evil and other great franchises..games become watered and dumbed down,that's why i commend Obsidian for doing what they wanted

I'll be honest, I really don't care so much about backstory as much as I do about being Shoehorned into a Pet build like in New Vegas. But Bethesda has been really good about what build the player chooses, so I'm hopeful.

Forgive me for saying so, but the whole idea of complaining about being married with a kid pre-war and having it ruin your concept seems extremely shortsighted at best, childish at worst. Your life doesn't truly start until you exit the Vault and since your family is about 200 years dead, it seems to me that you could play it out many different ways. Your actions in the game determine what you believe in, what you stand for and although you may have been a steady, stable and caring family man pre-war, realizing after leaving the Vault that everything you knew, believed in or cared for or about is gone can absolutely be a significant life changing event. Let your imagination carry you forward, don't dwell on what was 200 years ago for your character.

So they want to make us more emotional about our character?

They hardly let us hear the female voice and that is the one I am most interested in hearing.

There's nothing saying you can't be a young father, or come from a sorted past though. Also, cryo freeze (possibly) does weird things to a guy/gal.
I believe it was stated that the PC is the sole survivor, so really there would be nothing saying that the process couldn't cause your psyche to give you any number of ticks and so on.

Actually there is very much so a restrictive barrier that people blatantly ignore in FO:NV. The courier is a courier, he may have done other stuff but in truth he is a courier but that's not even it though. The courier has amnesia, at no point the game ever decides you get over your amnesia there for who ever you pretend your courier might have been before hand doesn't matter. Your courier is now the hero/villain of new vegas, and no one ever brings up that point when talking about the restrictions of fallout games.

No, the courier is a guy or girl who took a lucrative courier job. He/She could have been anything before that possibly first and last courier mission. And no, my character is whatever I say they are and have whatever I say they have. I don't have to interact with the main quest one bit, and plenty of my characters haven't. It's just like an TES game in that regard. Main Quest stuff is completely optional. Fact is, you can be whatever you want to be before you took that courier mission. Not so in any of the other Fallouts.

So, I was gone for most of the day after I posted and was surprised by how popular this topic got. I'm glad everyone is discussing this, aside from a few people who are being surprisingly rude (but that's the internet I guess). A few points I'd like to mention.

1. I'm ok with a pre-defined backstory, to an extent. I just think the line has to be drawn somewhere. 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.

2. To those saying I'm not a good roleplayer if I can't work around having a family, and to Norgrim, who implied I'm "childish" for not wanting to be a family-man: It's not that I can't work around it, only that I'd rather not have to if given the choice. Someone earlier brought up my teenage baseball-player character, who fights evil with his rusty baseball bat, and claimed he is still a viable character in Fallout 4, meaning he'd be a teenage father fresh out of high school who for some reason has his own house. Again, I could work around that, but it's still a bit of a stretch. My psychotic anarchist cannibal has no choice but to start off as someone who at least pretends to love his family and child. Someone earlier stated "he could be a con artist!", but you're forcing my character to be a subtle and calculating criminal when he would rather set a suburban neighborhood on fire than even pretend to raise a family in one. I honestly don't understand how anyone can say that this forced family doesn't limit opportunities to create our own characters, at least slightly.

3. I have a major concern about the voiced character and the mass effect style dialogue trees. Here's a quote from someone who brought this up earlier:

Obviously this is hyperbole, but it raises an important potential issue. Now I admit I may be acting a bit alarmist here, but it's worth discussing anyway. How will all of the perk-related dialogue fit in to this dialogue system? How do we deal with the fact that we're not seeing the entirety of our dialogue choices, only vague topics? Note, in the demo, when the player chooses the "get food" option, and yet instead of asking for food, the character gives a completely different response than what "get food" would imply. Things like this happen all the time in Bioware games, sometimes forcing me to reload because I viciously insulted a character I thought I was going to be playfully teasing. Having a voiced character also means a forced delivery of each line that may or may not fit your character's personality. This, more than anything, makes me nervous about Fallout 4.

Hopefully I addressed most of the questions people had for me, so let's continue this discussion.

I'll add these points as an edit to my original post, for those who are just joining the conversation

The courier was just one of the odd jobs (quests) you did along with lots of other stuff over time.

How your character ended up on the ship in Morrowind or the wagon in Skyrim is also unknown but require an backstory. Jail in Oblivion is way easier as its easy to end up in jail for some days.

Mine is that I was stealing in the imperial camp while they was fighting the stormclocks. They got angry and found they could brand me a spy.

A guy who did not have a wife and kid? I know i never had any interest in playing a character with that kind of baggage while others sure might, but personally i could not care less about it. Hopefully it is a moot point and it IS simply backstory and i can completely ignore it once leaving the vault (as well as giving the dog a pipe to the face), but i have the bad feeling the kid is going to be all "oh noez i thawed out 20 years earlier and haz amassed raider armeh! EVIIIIIIIL BABBY VILLAIN"

But end of the day if i can ignore it i am totally fine with it.

Pre-defined characters have their pros and cons from where I'm standing. Yes, they're inherently limiting compared to a blank slate. But at the same time they feel more substantial in their world. A blank slate has to be largely colourless by necessity so as to not limit or imply anything meaningful, it's all about your imagination/headcanon. Which isn't bad exactly but when the game gives you all these anodyne as balls dialogue options to a character you see as perennially snarky there's this dissonance.

Now with a pre-defined character you get a similarish issue in that some ideas simply no longer make sense without obscene levels of mental gymnastics/ridiculously cliched headcanon contrivance. But! Once you get to know them/get a vibe for the characteristics they possess that are set in stone it leaves you to fill in all the blanks, you can make completely distinct characters by just weaving around the canon stuff.

Honestly, this is what I prefer. Between a blank slate like Skyrim and a completely already done character like Booker DeWitt a middle-ground approach is my favourite.

You and I both know it's going to be central to the plot, and with the voices character he's probably going to be talking about it constantly.