Yeah there where other people, also a Nuke went off, they may not have been their very long haha

You're missing the point. Other people were in the Vault too. He explained how you and your family descended into the Vault. But he vaguely explains how you emerge as The Sole Survivor of Vault 111. So what happened to the other people in the Vault? It's speculation but at one point, Vault 111 was populated despite they used cryogenics.

Maybe the baby generator is there to make you more attached for when they die early.

Maybe it's there so everyone will assume he won't die and be 'shocked' when he does

No one knows how it's gonna play out yet

Say I get on a train 111 with my wife and son.

They get off at a stop and the train continues on with me.

There is a train derailment and I'm the only left alive on train 111.

My family is still alive but I'm the sole survivor of the wreck.

My original point

and 200 years later you take get on the return train and your family was just waiting patiently at the platform?

The baby will come back in some shape or form in the post-apocalypse. Believe it!

There is a discussion on this in another thread about the cryogenic pods being taken from Vault 111 possibly by The Institute. I think that could be likely, like your explanation.

I'm betting we the spouse and son will have left the cryo chamber years earlier then you.

Finding out what happened to your spouse and son will be a major quest but not part of the main quest so you can chose to ignore it.

Being reunited with both your spouse and son might make a great story but it would be hard to pull off.

Instead I think the spouse is there to help make you care more about the son and doesn't survive.

A new born does look like a potato and doesn't do much.

You get to chose the appearance of the Lone Survivor and the spouse.

You do interact with the spouse.

The son is going to be a merging of both your appearances and he will have old enough so that you can see both of his parents in his appearance.

The son is the last tie to your life before the bombs fell.

Not a bad way to show pre war life and try to build up a connection to the son.

Maybe Bethesda is getting better at the story telling side.

If the stop they got off at was 20 years before I got off the train then they will be long gone.

I'd have to track them down.

That might explain when the Lone Survivor returns home after exiting the vault and talks to Codsworth, he doesn't ask about the his wife and son.

Or they cut that part out.

Still it might have taken him days to exit the vault so he has dealt with being separated from them.

And if they left 20 years earlier then there is very little he could do to find them at least at first.

Well if the trailer is to be believed, the lone wanderer exits their vault some 200 years later (around the same time frame as the 101 vault dweller in the DC Wasteland in FO3).

Except that they're alone (as traditionally before) AND they look EXACTLY like the protagonist which Todd Howard spent some time customizing in the bathroom scene.

Other strong hints the baby/wife didn't survive:

Howard stated the protagonist was the lone survivor of the vault

Howard explicitly stated that certain events happened in the vault but didn't elaborate on what. But he also said the protagonist emerges 200 years later.

Mr. Handy immediately recognizes the vault dweller as the previous owner of the house it was guarding when it greeted him 200 years later

My guess:

1. Vault 111 was created to study advanced cryogenic effects on humans. Protag and all the other vault dwellers were put into stasis for a long unspecified period of time. Then based on events occurring in the vault, the protag awakens/is awakened. All the other vault dwellers either failed to survive the cryogenic preservation experiment--or ended up killing each other in a resource death match. Regardless, the lone wanderer ends up becoming the lone vault survivor who gets to leave the vault

Or

2. maybe Vault 111 was designed to be an advanced genetic-cryogenic experiment that studied the effects of children aging under cryogenic suspension. This is about the only way that the infant (Shawn?) we saw in the trailer could emerge as a fully grown advlt 200 years after.

But #1 seems the more logical choice though. The protag is identical to the one we saw before the bombs fell.

Thanks, I'll have to look that thread up.

I either expect:

1)The spouse and son are ejected from the vault sooner than you and you have to search for them

2)The spouse and son are killed during the "events that transpire" in the vault so the character can have a generic angsty backstory

3)The spouse dies and the son is ejected early and you have to find him as an advlt

Every option seems boring, generic and overused.

Boring and generic are BGS stories in a nutshell, so you're probably right.

Only other possibility I can come up with is that spouse and son are still stuck in stasis.

Seems reasonable and similar to Fallout 3's main quest in finding Liam Neeson.

Perhaps the cryogenic pods had set times to be opened? Or like where I've theorized somewhere that the pods get hijacked and yours doesn't for some reason, either from The Institute or Super Mutants. All of which are speculation and not confirmed but I feel it's safe to assume that the story would be based on finding your spouse and son.

My only problem with this was that the vaults existed for social experiments and this seem to scientific for them to me, I feel it is more likely the experiment would be to study how someone who was cryogenically stored for 200 years would react to a new world, also some vaults where control groups so it could simply not be an experiment and like vault 13 these guys where meant to survive

This seems reasonable and fits with Vault Tech's social experiments, what happens if you wake up your Cryo people at different times? what would they do? that seems like a vault tech experiment to me

The less of it the better I say.

I don't understand the whole being mad at the family thing, I mean the grieving parent thing is just a new story for Bethesda to use, isn't anyone bored with the whole rebellious adventuring teen model?

Most people prefer characters they can project them self/their character on without hard histories.

In fallout 3 and 4 you're going to have a pretty set in stone history, but in other titles your past has been ambiguous. Even though in 1 and 2 you had an explanation for your origin what actually happened to your character before the start of the actual game was left up to the player.

I would disagree, projecting a background for a character in FO1 was very difficult, as you know, they lived in a whole in the ground, FO2 was easier but FO3 was the easiest you had a few snip-bits of your characters early life but deciding how you would approach situations, Join the bullies, ignore then, hit them kinda helped create a much better connection (for me anyway) I get the impression a lot of people don't like this background because it doesn't fit their present background, playing the heroic adventure seeking teens easy, when you are a adventure seeking teen but I find the whole new parent thing a refreshing take.... maybe I'm getting older?

In FO1 you still don't have a predetermined happening to your character, though, you know you lived underground your whole life, that's it. With FO3 you're told everything that happens to you your entire life, preventing you from coming up with your own character past, to an extent.

I personally don't like FO4's origin because it does FO3's system to an even more extreme extent, as far as I've seen.

I disagree as well.

Fallout 3's story is similar to the original Fallout's story in sense your born in the vault and that's essentially all you know. The difference is that in Fallout 3, you had to find Liam Neeson which then lead to Project Purity and all that jazz. Fallout had you sent out into the wastes to find a water chip to replace the one that broke in the vault. The Vault Dweller returns with the water chip but is exiled and establishes Arroyo. Fallout 2 was with The Chosen One, who is a descendant of The Vault Dweller. He is selected to go and find a GECK for their village, Arroyo. While doing so, there's the whole dilemma with The Enclave and Frank Horrigan.

So far the Fallout games have a "past" if you actually think about it. However, the past is the past, think about the road ahead. The backstories are pretty loose since they don't go through every single day in the life of the protagonist.

I could do with just an exploring advlt. I don't like the family thing because I want to relate to my character and I can't relate to an happily married person with a kid because I don't want to marry and I detest kids. So during all the bits with the family I'll be like "ugh...I don't care...skip..."