Don't get me wrong I love the upgrades like the 3D icons,mini games and a FREAKING SORT BUTTON but the pipboy physically looks fat and clunky and makes the Sole Survivor looks like they have a tumor growing out their forearm. Am I the only one?

Looks no more clunky then previous pip boys in my book.

Nah, the Pip-Boy has always been a clunky, bulky piece of tech, which I kind of like. It's not supposed to look sleek and slim, and this is a world where we didn't develop smart phone technology.

Though I imagine modders are going to have a pain of a time making those Pip-boy variant mods, like the one that makes it a hand held phone device, since it seems like they'd have to redo a lot of animation work for the various functions. Holo-tapes alone.

Couldn't the Sole Survivor just take the phone out and use that instead?

Or did I miss something.

EDIT: Just seen post above!

Ehhhhh, I can't really agree with you OP. I think the new Pip boy looks pretty sharp. The animated 3d icons are aesthetically pleasing to me, especially.

No point in making a new thread for this, but I also get a kick out of Vault Boy blowing his pistols when you score a crit. Makes me grin every time I see it.

Haha, I'd laugh if Beth parodied apple and put a vPhone into the game, for vault phone I guess.

I'm telling you, it'll be a Pipboy Color. Instead of modeling it off of a silly smartphone, they could model it off of one of the old Gameboys!

Oh man. A game-boy styled Pip Boy. If a modder does that, and it works for all the bells and whistles, my hat would be off to them. Because that's ingenious.

I think that's the trade off of things being newer, and more complex. It doesn't make things easy for Modders, but the game isn't designed with the modders in mind, they're just encouraged to do what they do.

I think the new pip-boy looks less bulky. Maybe I should check again, but I'm pretty sure that how I feel about it. F3 & NV had gross pip-boys.

I'll say this about this version of the Pip Boy.
It looks a much more like a piece of military hardware than any previous incarnation.
It's a bit more boxy than the stylish 3000, which had (possibly?) heat sinks that seemed more decorative, than anything. The new Pip Boy seems (to me), like it is ruggedized. it's also more of a classic Army Green and the knobs look much more as a 1950's Army radio's knobs would.

We know that there is a high likely hood that at least the male PC is a veteran.
This just seems to be an extension of that.
If the vault is an enlisted and/or veteran vault, I see the vault's compliment of inventory reflecting that, somewhat.

Cannibal : Obviously with Vault Tec being Vault Tec: THere will be lots of ammunition based weapons with no ammo , or Energy cells but no Energy Weapons or BB Guns and no BB gun ammo. Perhaps the Vault Tec experiment was putting a lot of Veterans together in the same vault and seeing what happens.

It looks reliable and able to take being in a high radiation environment, as well being able to take a heap of abuse. Its also looks no less bulky or ugly than the old ones.

Looks fine to me. But of course it is the best smart watch due to it's power and portability.

I don't remember thinking too much about it when I was watching the E3 vid. I'll have to watch again to see how I feel about it.

Could be anything, really.
But at this point, I am going with Cryonic Stasis as being the experiment.

My thinking with the Pip Boy, and likely other items issued to vault dwellers, is that these are people that are used to using military hardware. It's familiar.

For all we know, they could be a "cleanup contingent" of sorts, who are supposed to be in stasis until the rads have died down.
I know this is all assumption. But it is an idea that I am keen on.

I remember having a discussion on the FO series board about this a few years ago. It would make sense in a culture where the doomsday clock is always at one til, that the armed forces would have some kind of contingency plan where at least a percentage of the military which was still state side has a bunker, waiting out time to return to the surface. The difficulty with it in that conversation, though was the thought that next generations may not be as qualified- or inclined- as their predecessors. Stasis solves this issue, perfectly.
What really has me exited for this sort of thing to play out is that it may mean the DEVs do look at this board, and in the past 7 years have got at least some inspiration from the fan speculation and debating.

Obviously, something went wrong. It is my hope that this time around, the vault's failure is legitimate, and not a part of the experiment.

Id like the Vault Tec experiments to be a little more strange and bizarre and 'everyone in Cryogenic storage' is a little tame.

My variant on that would be the Reactor has only enough power to keep so many Cryogenic units going. Slowly but surely the rest .. fail. One at a time or in groups. Some people wake up , trying to release others and fail and are left alone and then.. kill themselves. Or the process causes mania and depression in people and then end it.

So when the Sole survivor awakens he actually is the not the one that Vault tec wanted to survive to the end, but his pod was actually built properly whereas the guy meant to live actually died. Thus he IS the Sole Survivor

In a a way its is a variant of the virtual reality Vault tec vault but also not as the people arnt aware they have been asleep.

To date, none of the vaults a protagonist have come from were social experiment vaults.
I like a good strange vault myself. But for the purpose of the home vault, I'm not so sure.
Make no mistake a stasis vault is an experiment, but not a social experiment, rather a practical one.

It could be it is engineered to fail. I don't hold that my opinion is correct. But i hope it is.

As for the type of stasis, I'm going with Cryonic Stasis.
The cells themselves stop, so they do not age. This explains the protagonist looking the same age as pre-war.
But it also means that there is zero biologic function. No brainwaves- no thought, and clinically rather dead until revival.

Anyway, the pip boy looks much more like a piece of military hardware, to me.

The experiment for Vault 101 was that the Overseer had total authority over everything. Not as lethal as some other vaults, but our Overseer was a bit of a tyrant.

Stasis might not be the only part of 111's experiment, but there are too many devious things they could do to narrow it down to just one thing.

haha, I guess you got me there.

It seems so benign to me in comparison.

It is still my hope the the explanation for the vault ending up like it did was "tech raiders" or a systems failure of some type.
But it's true, there could be all kinds of nefarious things going on with the vault.
Could be most people are in stasis, and some scientists are left animated, to conduct experiments.
You do sign your life on the dotted line joining the military- they do own you. Even an inactive reserve status vet can be reactivated.
Who knows for how long in the FO universe, during wartime.

This is actually an incredibly good observation. In it's day, this could have been seen to be a very advanced piece of military kit.

As a guy that used to work on communications "boxes" Looking at this, if the pip-boy were real, and I opened it up, I would expect to find along with the mini CRT, conformally coated NAFI cards- all mounted in a smaller card cage mounted to the eternal chassis with some sort of shock absorbency along the lines of coiled cable. It just looks like military grade ruggedized gear.

Well, actually, Vault 101 was designed to examine the effects of isolation and limited genetic diversity on a population. Vault 13 was a 200-year control population. Maybe Vault 111 is basically just a frozen military base, so an experienced fighting force is at the ready to retake the wasteland once the environment is suitable. Maybe it's like in WALL-E, where the ship is programmed to return to Earth once it can sustain life again; the vault could be programmed to thaw everybody out at the right time; maybe Project Purity made it seem like things are better than they really are, leading to a premature release. The new Pip-Boy might be a military model.

Interestingly, to tie in with the 'old tech' feel, the Pip-Boy is also a nod to the Commodore 64 of yesteryear. It even has the messages "64K RAM SYSTEM" and "38911 BYTES FREE" on the boot-up screen.

I know I know (Vault 101) I recanted above

But I agree that the vault merely being Cryonic Stasis deep freeze for military personnel is definitely enough of a backstory- and plays into our protagonist being (former) military.
Hopefully there are a couple of other vaults in the area for the WTF vaults.

I'm just hoping that none of the inhabitants in said vaults keep shouting "GARY!" this time. Kind of freaked me out the first time round considering that name is, er, significant to me in some way.

BTW, I think you're on the right track with the whole backstory of the vault, although there may be a bit more to it that could come into play later on.

Yea I was thinking the same thing. Meh I probt get use to it after a few 100 hoursof playing.